[In the following review, Olson presents several objections to MacKinnon's arguments in Only Words but concludes that the book will “almost certainly reconfigure the national debate over pornography, harassment, free speech, and equality.”]

Presented originally as the Christian Gauss Memorial Lectures in Criticism, Catharine MacKinnon's Only Words endeavors to reconfigure the legal treatment of harassment and pornography by developing the thesis that “the law of equality and the law of freedom of speech are on a collision course in this country” (71). The book consists of three interrelated chapters. The first, “Defamation and Discrimination,” focuses upon the commonplace legal argument that in the United States pornography is protected as free speech, stressing that in this country “pornography falls presumptively into the legal category ‘speech’ at the outset through being rendered in terms of ‘content’, ‘message’, ‘emotion’, what it ‘says’, its ‘viewpoint’, its ‘ideas’” (10). She endeavors to shift the focus of the argument from what pornography says to what it does as an inherently discriminatory activity in that pornography. From this perspective pornography refers to “graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words” which are produced for profit and which result in demonstrable harm to women (22). In chapter two, “Racial and Sexual Harassment,” she emphasizes that “if ever words have been understood as acts, it has been when they are sexual harassment. … Only words—yet they have not been seen as conveying ideas, although, like all social practices, they do” (45). She amplifies, harassment “has been legally understood in terms of what it does: discriminate on the basis of sex. … When threatening, severe, or pervasive enough, it works to exclude and segregate and denigrate and subordinate and dehumanize, violating human dignity and denying equality of opportunity” (46). In chapter three, “Equality and Speech,” MacKinnon juxtaposes the commonplace treatment of pornography as speech with the legal treatment of sexual and racial harassment as discriminatory deeds to support the book's thesis.

The most fundamental rhetorical strategy of the book, juxtaposing legal treatment of pornography with that of harassment, is clever in that MacKinnon places pornography in a context that emphasizes its role in reproducing unequal relations between the sexes. In the cases of both harassment and pornography (as she defines it) “social inequality is substantially created and enforced—that is, done—through words and images” (13). She stresses, “at stake in constructing pornography as ‘speech’ is gaining constitutional protection for doing what pornography does: subordinating women through sex” (29). She adds, “discrimination does not divide into acts on one side and speech on the other. Speech acts. It makes no sense from the action side either. Acts speak” (30). At the same time, this strategy is highly risky in a fundamentally patriarchal society in that once the connection between pornography and harassment has been established, the argumentation by comparison could cut the other way by providing a rationale for legally treating racial and sexual harassment as protected free speech, though it appears that this mode of comparison is already underway: “Equality-promoting provisions on hate crimes, campus harassment, and pornography … tend to be attacked and defended solely in terms of the damage they do, or do not do, to speech” (73). She endeavors to overcome this liability by mentioning at the outset of chapter two that “until recently, sexual harassment has never been imagined to raise expressive concerns, although all sexual harassment is words, pictures, meaningful acts and gestures” (45).

MacKinnon's position appears to be that both free speech and equality should be upheld in sanctioning communicative deeds that violate either of these vital elements of the U.S. Constitution. One part of the Constitution should not be evoked to condone the violation of another part: “there never has been a fair fight in the United States between equality and speech as two constitutional values, equality supporting a statute or practice, speech challenging it. Courts have balanced statutory equality interests against the constitutional speech protection. Equality always won these fights until pornography, statutorily framed as sex inequality, lost to the First Amendment, and now equality is losing to speech-based attacks on hate provisions as well” (85).

Another fundamental rhetorical strategy, in evidence in the quotation stressing that “speech acts” and that “acts speak,” emphasizes the actual experiences that go into these communicative deeds, as when MacKinnon writes: “This process of empowerment of the perpetrator and traumatization of the victim occurs not because of the content of the words in the usual sense but because of the experiences they embody and convey” (59). In the chapter on pornography, she frequently stresses that both the production and the consumption of such materials entails the performance of activities: “To express eroticism is to engage in eroticism, making to perform a sex act. To say it is to do it, and to do it is to say it” (33). This strategy is essential to making it possible to treat both harassment and pornography under equality provisions of the Constitution, since more than speech is entailed inherently in both activities: social relationships are defined as unequal through the experience of both pornography and harassment. She draws upon speech act theory to support her position that both pornography and harassment should be understood as acts, not merely ideas.

Another rhetorical strategy in MacKinnon's argumentation that merits mention is her use of analogies between the graphic subordination of women and the graphic subordination of African Americans, children, and Jews, as well as gays and lesbians. She affirms, “only for pornography are women killed to make a sex movie, and it is not the idea of a sex killing that kills them” (15). Later she argues that lynching, a form of sexualized aggression in that it usually entails castration, “expresses a clear point of view. Photographs were sometimes taken of the body and sold, to extend its message and the pleasure of viewing it. More discussion. Are these acts inexpressive and contentless? Are the pictures protected expression? Is a Black man's death made unreal by being photographed the way women's subordination is? … Does the lynching itself raise speech issues, since it is animated by a racist ideology?” (34). To undermine the first amendment protection of pornography, she also affirms, “We are told by the Supreme Court that we cannot restrict speech because of what it says, but all restricted expression says something. Most recently, we have been told that obscenity and child pornography are content that can be regulated” (23). MacKinnon contends, “women's reaction to the presentation of other women being sexually abused in pornography, and the reaction of Jews living in Skokie to having Nazis march through their town, are routinely trivialized in the United States as ‘being offended’” (104-5). This rhetorical strategy is powerful in that it calls upon readers to seek consistency in the treatment of various classes of individuals within the U.S. Less frequently, MacKinnon draws upon legal treatment of depictions of gay and lesbian sexuality (74), even though discrimination laws on a national scale through agencies such as the EEOC do not extend to same-sexuality and this area of the law does not lend such ready support to her case. According to Richard Mohr, author of Gays/Justice, the Supreme Court has only once in its history made a decision favorable to the gay and lesbian community (in 1962 concerning a postal worker's refusal to deliver a newspaper conveying gay content). Of course, the decision on Amendment 2 in Colorado would raise this figure to two favorable decisions in the history of the Supreme Court. Even the EEOC has been found guilty of firing an employee, John F. Singer, because he was gay (Mohr, 154). To MacKinnon's credit, she mentions “that judicially eliminating grievance procedures that recognize racist or homophobic vilification as barriers to education officially denies students equality in education” (74).

Several objections may be raised in response to MacKinnon's argument. First, she depicts women as lacking agency throughout her accounts of them in this book. In this respect, she may contribute to reproducing an unfortunate stereotype of women as passive even as she endeavors to overcome discriminatory practices against women. Second, her use of terms like “victim” oversimplifies the range and complexity of women's diverse experiences of the issues raised by the production and consumption of pornography. Some may, for instance, prefer the terms “survivor” or “warrior” as a matter of personal empowerment and self-definition, despite the fact that the legal system appears to require the presentation of self as a “victim” as a condition for accessing its remedies. Still other women appear to consider the production and consumption of pornography as an aspect of personal choice and sexual liberation. Third, her position on the distinction, if any, between “pornography” and “erotica” is not clear or explicit (though I recognize that she has commented on her position concerning this issue in Rape and Society). Fourth, she omits some commonplace uses of pornography and erotica: some people consider the use of such materials as one responsible way of dealing with the misfortune of sexually transmittable illness. Yet MacKinnon makes no mention of AIDS or its ramifications for the debate, despite the fact that these lectures occurred more than a decade into the pandemic. Fifth, even though I recognize that MacKinnon is not responsible for the political appropriations and uses of her argument by other segments of the society, if her position is accepted by the legal communities, then this new understanding of pornography would almost certainly be selectively and most strenuously enforced against minority communities, as is currently the case with several other laws concerning the expression of sexuality. Despite these objections, MacKinnon's central argument about the role of pornography in the narrow sense she defines it—the mass production for profit of graphic, sexually explicit materials enacting and perpetuating discrimination through words and images, and resulting in actionable harms—merits the serious attention of communication scholars, because it is compelling. Only Words, like MacKinnon's earlier scholarship on the Sexual Harassment of Working Women, will almost certainly reconfigure the national debate over pornography, harassment, free speech, and equality. It merits careful study by scholars in rhetoric, communication, free speech, women's studies, and law—in fact, by anyone wishing to participate in the political and legal process as an informed citizen.