Caroline Norma
In a speech at Oxford University in November 2022 Catharine MacKinnon suggested that transgenderism was compatible with opposition to female sexual exploitation. MacKinnon has led radical feminist theorising and legal action against prostitution and pornography over the past forty years. She has recently redirected her writing and speaking efforts toward the promotion of transgenderism. But, as someone committed to the cause of prostituted women, is she right to do so?
In her Oxford speech, MacKinnon denied that ‘women’s oppression is defined by what defines women’ if ‘sexed biology’ is how women are defined. This understanding of women’s oppression as linked to sexed biology, she implied, was a story confected merely for the purpose of transphobic exclusion. It contrives, in other words, to define women for exclusionary rather than liberatory purposes. ‘Sexed biology’ is a concocted standard for recognising women’s oppression, she said, because it involves ‘qualities chosen so that whatever is considered definitive of sex is not only physical but cannot be physically changed into’. Her suggestion was that gender-critical feminists acting in bad faith had arbitrarily chosen qualities specific to women as those defining of who is oppressed as one.
But is it really gender-critical feminists who have chosen these qualities? Andrea Dworkin perhaps wouldn’t think so. Dworkin was a prostitution survivor and feminist writer who worked closely with MacKinnon against the American pornography industry before her death in 2005. Her writing across volumes makes the point that physical integrity as a standard of human dignity is denied to women because male society defines sexual penetration as a violation. It does this, Dworkin explains in her 1987 book Intercourse, through promoting ‘hate for women’s genitals, a hate for women’s bodies, a hate for the insides of women touched in fucking’. As a result, women are denied human dignity on the logic that penetration violates physical integrity, and, because they are the ones sexually penetrated, by definition women have no dignity.
As to how this hate is promoted, MacKinnon thought the problem went beyond ‘only words’. More than misogynistic propaganda, hateful sex acts done systematically and relentlessly against women were key. Prostitution and pornography enabled these acts on a global scale to the point where women were literally made into ‘prostitutes’. That is, defined by the sexual violation. MacKinnon wrote in 1993 that ‘women are prostituted precisely in order to be degraded and subjected to cruel and brutal treatment without human limits’, and, crucially, ‘it is the opportunity to do this that is acquired when women are bought and sold for sex’. The hateful sex acts of prostitution create penetration as female violation, in other words, and so women as a whole are turned into a population absent of human dignity.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that women and girls are overwhelmingly the ones bought and sold for sex as ‘prostitutes’. Nor is it any coincidence that the sex trade exploits physical characteristics specific to their half of the population. But MacKinnon now downplays the role of these sex acts in women’s oppression. She instead thinks the problem arises in a sphere separate from biology, off in a realm of meanings and projections:
‘We are placed on the bottom of the gender hierarchy by the misogynistic meanings that male dominant societies create, project onto us, attribute to us, which, in my observation and analysis, center on women’s sexuality. This has nothing whatsoever to do with biology…’
It is difficult to see how ‘misogynistic meanings that male dominant societies create’ come about without practices like prostitution turning women, as ‘prostitutes’, into violable beings. MacKinnon’s polite failure to mention the heinous and unrelenting sex acts that buyers ‘project’ onto women leaves the mechanism by which ‘women’s sexuality’ comes to reflect misogynistic meaning shrouded in mystery. Reports of the behaviour of sex buyers leave no room for such uncertainty. In one Australian case from 2022, for example, a journalist reported that:
‘Asian women in…illegal brothels were ‘being bought to perform rape, and rape was being specified in the text, and the messaging that I saw on the phones, ‘I want to rape you’. You know, ‘How much for a rape?’…Unprotected sex was always being asked for. And that was being granted by the controller of the phone … so, they had no choice.’
In organising this kind of treatment of women, prostitution is a practice crucial to the creation of sexual penetration as a violation, and women as naturally violable and absent of human dignity. On the basis of this understanding, the radical feminist movement has been committed to the cause of prostituted women for decades. It is, in fact, a politic recognisable precisely for this commitment. Women like Dworkin as a survivor of prostitution have been valued within the movement as offering important insight into women’s oppression. Today women like her are leaders of radical feminist action worldwide, and their theorising of prostitution and pornography continues to drive the direction of the radical feminist cause. But MacKinnon now seems to abandon this project, and prostituted women. She seeks to newly persuade them of their unique physical characteristics as incidental to the political system that organises their (our) oppression.
Will prostituted women be able to reconcile this new view with their experience of the world? Along with the world’s population of child brides suffering fistulas, and legions of genitally mutilated, they live short, miserable lives because of uses made of their vaginas. Before mainstream use of penicillin from the end of the Second World War, women in Japan’s sex industry infected with venereal disease were ‘dumped and left to die’ in locked hospitals, or allowed to leave red-light districts only after becoming too sick to continue receiving customers. Even today, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the vagina to the operation of the global prostitution industry, as indicated by the title of Sheila Jeffreys’s 2009 book The Industrial Vagina.
Selling access to vaginas and women’s bodies is, of course, how pimps and traffickers make a living, and so much of their time is spent trying to keep women within the sex industry for this purpose. While outright violence is used to stop women from leaving prostitution, more common is debt. One way of manufacturing this debt is to schedule plastic surgery and breast implants for women after they enter the industry to stay ‘attractive’ and keep clients returning. As described by Jeffreys in Beauty and Misogyny, the plastic surgery and sex industries operate hand-in-glove to indenture women to pimps. (Inexplicably, MacKinnon suggests radical feminists have not critiqued breast augmentation, but Jeffreys does so at length, and with reference to its links to the sex industry.) As a result, places like Seoul’s biggest red-light district are crowded with clinics offering cosmetic procedures, and these clinics liaise directly with club owners and pimps to arrange appointments. The daily insults and rude scrutiny women endure from sex buyers make them only too willing to take these up.
MacKinnon is likely to know of this link between the sex and plastic surgery industries, but she downplays its significance when she suggests that prostituted women have something in common with ‘trans people’. She claims that ‘The fact that many trans people have had to resort to prostitution to support themselves and to fund their transition evidences their commonality with the rest of women’. But this attempt to team ‘trans people’ with prostituted women misunderstands why women are in the sex industry. A proportion of the globe’s female population is prostituted whether they like it or not, and plastic surgery is a modern means of securing the numbers. While plastic surgery is used as part of a strategy to keep women in the sex industry, for ‘trans people’, on the other hand, as MacKinnon herself describes, this link is at the level of the individual who must ‘resort to prostitution to support themselves and fund their transition’. Different from women, the sex industry operates regardless of their individual exploitation. For women, conversely, it operates as essential to their individual exploitation.
Far from recognising the experience of prostituted women as fundamentally unlike that of ‘trans people’, MacKinnon thinks observing this fact does trans people harm. It apparently pushes ‘trans women in particular into the arms of the pro-prostitution lobby’. For MacKinnon, ‘trans women’ cannot autonomously wage anti-prostitution activism; they must join with gender-critical feminists to do so. These feminists must, further, recognise them as women if they are to not become outright reactionaries who defect to the side that defends pimps and johns. ‘Trans people’ cannot countenance the gender-critical viewpoint of feminists in the struggle against prostitution, even though feminists committed to the anti-prostitution cause can put differences aside to work with Christian groups among others. But, for ‘trans people’, this kind of collaboration is apparently untenable to the point where they must become proponents of prostitution. Gender-critical feminists are held hostage: either they agree that ‘trans women’ are women or they will side against them with pimps and johns.
MacKinnon’s extraordinary loyalty to a group so hostile to a core radical feminist principle contrasts with her easy dismissal of prostitution survivors among the ‘feminist transphobes’ she opposes. She offers no sympathy to survivors like Rachel Moran and others who are losing employment for refusing to include ‘trans people’ in the definition of woman. That prostitution survivors themselves are objecting to the demands of transgenderism seems not to strike MacKinnon as requiring any thoughtful or respectful response.
These survivors know that, in truth, even prominent ‘trans people’ evince no concern for prostituted women. They tend not to support radical feminist calls for crackdowns on pimps and sex buyers, and some outright suggest support for transgender rights must entail support for ‘sex work’. Nonetheless, MacKinnon condescends to warn that ‘not all who purport to be trans online in vituperative defense of prostitution, an industry largely dominated by organized crime as the destination of sex trafficking, are, actually, trans’. Her suggestion seems to be that sex industry advocacy is incompatible with an individual being ‘trans’. Individual ‘trans’ people are certainly exploited in prostitution, and maybe this makes them disinclined to defend it, but so too are young gay men, and probably in higher numbers. But MacKinnon has never been moved to team gay men with prostituted women, nor suggest gay male proponents of the sex industry are not likely gay. On the other hand, it would be quite reasonable to suggest that any radical feminist proponent of the sex industry is not really a radical feminist because their politic, as explained, has opposition to prostitution at its theoretical and activist heart. In the absence of any similar ironclad political commitment proclaimed by the ‘trans’ movement, therefore, there seems to be no reason to move the goalposts of radical feminist allyship.
Among the many mean names MacKinnon called gender-critical feminists at Oxford University, one in particular showed disregard for prostituted women. She called the gender-critical movement a ‘feminism of female body parts’. This phrase really jars with testimony by survivors that they experience prostitution as an attack upon their ‘body parts’. Australian survivor Rose Hunter in her memoir Body Shell Girl writes in poetic form of ‘Leaning back, back/into a place where I didn’t have a body/(therefore nothing was happening to it)/I was just a mind of pop songs or reciting things’. This need to not ‘have a body’ is so essential to women’s experience of prostitution that they disassociate, drink, self-harm, and take drugs rather than succumb to the mental insanity that violation of ‘female body parts’ brings. MacKinnon used to understand this key feature of women’s oppression when she noted in 1989 that the patriarchal ‘fixation on dismembered body parts (the breast man, the leg man)…evokes fetishism’. Vietnamese women even earlier understood it, and unfortunately not in the form of ‘meanings and projections’. An American marine returnee of the Vietnam War testified in 1971 that
‘I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the Lt. said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.’
Even if gender-critical feminists insist upon the female body as an integral whole, and even if MacKinnon intended the label ‘feminism of female body parts’ derisively, maybe the slogan should be worn by gender-critical feminists as a badge of pride. From the perspective of survivors among our number, after all, it is surely harms sustained to female body parts in prostitution that motivates some of their commitment to woman as a sex-based category. Without a doubt, their abusers targeted some of their body parts over others, and, without fail, these abusers would all have chosen the same parts to target.
This specific horror of women’s sex-based oppression surely cannot be too much emphasised by gender-critical feminists. In fact, for the gender-critical cause, its recall, repetition, and re-telling could be a way of agitating sex-class consciousness and so advance its project of women’s liberation. In other words, the slogan could promote solidarity through awareness of common experiences of male sexuality. Even further than this, pride in sex-class membership on the basis of this commonality, which is proudly exclusive, could newly drive a ‘feminism of female body parts’ that had front-of-mind the struggle of prostitution survivors to protect and restore the integrity of sexed biology that we need to politically prevail.
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