I read Only Words with horrified amazement—at the thing against which Professor MacKinnon rails, and at the manner of her railing. I knew in outline of the American culture of pornography, and was familiar from her other writings with Miss MacKinnon's hate-intoxicated style. But never had I guessed at the relation between them—the magnetic force with which pornography grips the feminist imagination, and the reckless obsession that results from this. Here, in 150 relentless pages, are the two most degrading of present-day America's sins against the spirit: pornography and misandry. Miss MacKinnon's diatribe is a vivid instance of what she condemns, a dirtying of life and love that deploys all the dehumanizing tricks of the pornographer, blocking out the soul with the hate-filled image of the body. I fully agree with her that pornography should be banned; and there is no better candidate for the bonfire than this book.

It would never have occurred to earlier generations of Americans that the Constitution could be used to forbid the expression of opinions judged “offensive” by a self-chosen elite, or to permit the propagation of material that is offensive to everyone. It went without saying that the First Amendment exists in order to protect free discussion of matters of public concern, not to permit the wholesale distribution of pornographic images which contribute to the free discussion of nothing. Yet today the United States is perhaps the only country in the civilized world where quite reasonable opinions about matters of the greatest importance—such as race and sexuality—cannot be expressed without risk of legal or disciplinary action. And it is one of the few countries where access to pornography of a kind that beggars all description, save that bestowed on it by Miss MacKinnon, is regarded as a constitutional “right.”

Various factors have contributed to the rise of pornocracy in America. One is the effect of liberal activism on the judicial process. It is now widely supposed that the Constitution does not mean what the Founding Fathers intended it to mean, still less what the reasonable citizen would understand it to mean. The Constitution means what the liberal jurists decide—which is to say, whatever offers the greatest offense to the moral majority. It is vain to show that pornography is not speech in the sense intended by the First Amendment, vain to show that it is intrinsically degrading and pleases precisely because it degrades, vain to show that neither the Founders nor their successors would have had the slightest desire to permit it, vain to show that the law depends upon a tacit respect for decency which, if too much provoked, will bring about the end of constitutional government. The liberal establishment has decided that pornography is so offensive to the conservative conscience that it must at all costs be protected by law. Pornography has therefore been defined as “speech” for the purpose of the First Amendment, just as words used to express conservative opinions have been defined as “discrimination” for the purpose of the Fourteenth.

Pornography would never have enjoyed the protection of the law, however, without the influence of another force: the sexual liberation of the Sixties, which entirely changed the language in which our most important experiences are discussed. We no longer “make love”: instead we “have sex,” and the idiom is already pornographic, a deliberate denial of the personal bond and a focusing on the body and its functions. Sexual behavior is described with a medicinal explicitness that removes the air of shame and mystery. Reduced to a bodily sensation, desire is emancipated from morality, and placed on display in the supermarket of pleasure. Pornography merely reinforces the view of sexual love that is now official. It is a direct avenue to the common goal: namely, the avoidance of love.

In a pornocracy everything disappears that makes it possible for women to trust men, or for men to leave the sexual playground. With the abolition of shame, modesty, hesitation, and innocence there is no longer the necessary barrier between the sexes. That which should be breached by love is first eaten away by curiosity. Sexual desire was once a maturing force, which lifted the adolescent from the world of self-centered pleasure and prepared him for a true commitment. Now it scarcely deserves the name “desire,” being a routine in which the other need be no more than a partner. The individual is no longer the object of desire; for desire has been generalized, and redefined as a bodily function. Pornography displays this transformation; but it is endorsed by almost every self-appointed “sexologist” in America, from Alfred Kinsey to Richard Posner.

It is hardly surprising that women should be enraged by pornography. For the reduction of sex to a commodity jeopardizes everything that gives a woman confidence in her sexual feelings: love, commitment, marriage, and an enduring father to her children. The intemperate fury of the American feminist conveys the heartbroken recognition that those things are no longer available except on temporary loan to the very attractive. The result is a hatred of men that knows no bounds, together with an urgent desire to warn against the common enemy. To this end activists such as Karen Hall, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine MacKinnon are at work on every campus, instilling into the minds of young women the thought that men are rapists, that a sexual advance is the first step toward a violation, and that women are at best the “survivors” of an encounter which they will certainly not enjoy. That which to an outside observer might appear comic—the code being enforced at Antioch College, for instance—is in reality a tragedy of the highest order. For it shows how far the trust between man and woman has been destroyed, and how difficult it will be for the next generation to achieve the only known form of human happiness.

Whether Hell knows a fury greater than Catharine MacKinnon I cannot say. But Only Words surely goes as far in the direction of inciting hatred toward its target as is legally possible. Spitting out obscenities, and crowding her pages with pornographic descriptions of men at work, she implies that only a thin veil of prohibition arrests my desire to rape, torture, humiliate, and dismember the next woman who catches my eye. Her frequent descriptions of the sexual act are as impersonal, violent, and reifying as the pornography she condemns, and the assumption throughout is that there is not a man on earth who would really trouble himself to gain a woman's consent, did not the law require it. The last time I encountered group libel of this kind was in a recent showing in Poland of the film Jew Süss, made at Goebbels's instigation in order to fan the flames of anti-Semitism. All I can say is that Jew Süss was mild by comparison.

The book has other weaknesses, besides its moral depravity. The first is Miss MacKinnon's assumption that only women are victims of pornography: yet men too are victims when, as she puts it in a rare moment of poetry, “that which should be given is stolen and sold.” Her ideologically motivated bias leads to a nonsensical definition of pornography—a definition that is none the better for having been worked out in conjunction with Andrea Dworkin and passed through the Illinois legislature (though not through the Supreme Court). According to Miss MacKinnon, pornography consists in “graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words.” It says a lot about America that a high-ranking academic jurist can propose a law that forbids the degradation of women while allowing that of men. Does she really imagine that there is no pornography in which men are bound and humiliated, whether by other men or by punitive females? It could be that images of the sexual degradation of men have a certain appeal for her. Nevertheless, it shows intellectual as well as moral blindness not to recognize that they are part of the phenomenon that she seeks to outlaw.

The second weakness is revealed most clearly in the last of the three essays in the book, devoted to the concept of free speech. It is permissible not to mention Spinoza, Locke, Mill, Stephen, and Berlin, but surely not to write as though they had never existed. Miss MacKinnon seems not to have thought about this issue until her encounter with pornography. She writes as though nobody had ever argued that freedom of speech does not include the freedom to shout “fire” in a crowded theater, and as though the attempt had never been made to distinguish the legitimate expression of unpopular views from the seditious fanning of emotion. This suggests a cavernous ignorance not only of philosophical literature, but also of English common law.

Through the dim fog of her discussion I came to see that she is not really interested in freedom at all, except insofar as it is the enemy of the chimerical sexual equality that she desires. The age-old conflict between freedom and equality (between the First and the Fourteenth Amendments) erupts into her prose with all the more vigor in that she is not truly aware of it. All she can see is the need to remove speech from the dominant sex, so that the victim can be heard: “the less speech you have, the more the speech of those who have it keeps you unequal; the more the speech of the dominant is protected, the more dominant they become and the less the subordinated are heard from.” Here you have it in a nutshell: the old marxisant excuse for oppressing the class enemy. For Miss MacKinnon the relation between man and woman is one of war. Love, courtship, and marriage are at best the ideology of male domination; the reality is rape. The battle against pornography is not fought in order to restore the bond between woman and man: after all, “bond” means bondage. The battle is against men as such, and if the moral order is destroyed in the course of it, so much the worse for the moral order. As she inimitably expresses the point: “How many women's bodies have to stack up here even to register against male profit and pleasure presented as First Amendment principle?”

If the battle against pornography is fought with prose like that, then it is already lost.