An individual's treatment and alternatives in life may depend as much on the reputation of the group to which that person belongs as on their own merit.
Catharine MacKinnonSo the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.
Catharine MacKinnonTo be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status.
Catharine MacKinnonFeminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.
Catharine MacKinnonMarxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It's been hard to say why. What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival. They produce self-loathing to the point of extinction of self, and it is respect for self that makes resistance conceivable.
Catharine MacKinnon