It is that joyous time of year when I and my colleagues on the J. Gordon Coogler Committee confer the Coogler laurels upon the author of that degenerate literary work that we adjudge the Worst Book of the Year. Generally the award is conferred a couple of months into the new year, for in this era of widespread higher education a stupendous number of very bad books are published. Reading them all takes a vast amount of time. In fact, reading merely one or two can be time-consuming. Some are sleep-inducing (particularly those written by the so-called professoriate) and others can leave the reader nauseated (I have in mind the dreadful stuff written by that ghastly lit set babied and cosseted at one of the Republic's idiotic writers workshops; think of Robert Coover, author of The Public Burning and Coogler laureate for 1977).

This year our job was easy. Another feminist law school prof has heaved up a semi-literate tract, and all the judges rushed to it. Years of reading bad books suggested that she would turn out true drivel, drivel beyond anything any other university professor might exhale. Surely her scholarly efforts would be a mess upon the page.

We have not been disappointed. Professor Catharine MacKinnon, the screaming jewel of the University of Michigan Law School, has won the 1993 Coogler Award for the Worst Book of the Year. Her book is Only Words, another feminist sally into misandry. Now there is a word we in the age of feminist rant rarely see. It means the hatred of men.

Only Words's argumentation is specious and sophomoric. Its data are dubious when not errantly bogus. Its prose is what we have come to expect from the modern law school. And its theses are nonsensical and often mischievous to the Bill of Rights, the rule of law, and a happy sex life. This is such a dreadful book that I shall not be surprised if it also wins a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

La MacKinnon believes that words are deeds. Bad words are the same as bad deeds. Ipso facto, bad words should be treated as bad deeds, which is to say punishable by law. The First Amendment shall be abbreviated.

But a word is not a deed. To enter into debate with such a fraud is to enter into her fantasyland. If a bad word is a bad deed, then a good word is a good deed, so the honored axiom that “actions speak louder than words” is extinct. No longer do we need to help an old lady across the street. Now it is sufficient to sit by the curb uttering pious thoughts as the poor lady inches her way through the traffic.

Professor MacKinnon is very much opposed to rape, which she believes makes her unique. She is also opposed to pornography, another position she assumes to be controversial. Yet she comes from the same philosophical tradition that has allowed pornography to become such a widespread nuisance, and inasmuch as pornography might encourage rape she comes from the philosophical tradition that allowed the increased incidence of rape. The tradition teaches that words have no general meaning. Thus, thirty-five years ago, when the barriers against pornography withered, sophists very much like MacKinnon were arguing that the word “obscenity” had no common meaning, that what was pornography for thee was literature for me, that some dirty-necked sexual deviant scribbling about excrement played the same role as Shakespeare writing The Merry Wives of Windsor. In fact, it is la MacKinnon's philosophical tradition that lectures us against the existence of sexual deviants.

One of the problems with denying the general meaning of words is that bullies can then dominate discourse. They will tell us what are good and usable words and what are the words that will land us in court. MacKinnon is, aside from being a faulty thinker and preposterous writer, a bully. She would eagerly have writers jailed for writing what she says is pornography. That is clear from her stupid book. As for what she might adjudge pornography, it might be anything. She has already accused the man who reviewed her book unfavorably in the Nation of raping her by his review. She and her boyfriend have publicly threatened the reviewer, the boyfriend writing, “If there is ever anything I can do to hurt your career, I will do it.” Let us hope la MacKinnon accepts her Coogler award for the Worst Book of the Year as a compliment. I do not want my career cut short.