The Radical Feminist Analysis of Sex: Rich and MacKinnon

Posted: Wed, Apr 8, 2026

Today

  • Use failures of Brownmiller’s account of rape to motivate the radical feminist analysis of sex
  • Put together the analysis: Rich + MacKinnon
  • Two contentious questions for discussion: Pornography’s role in this, the possibility of good heterosexual sex

Brownmiller, again

“Violence, not sex” analysis: Rape = “violence against women” through penetration.

  • Gets around the line-drawing: Rape and sex are mutually exclusive.
  • Gets around the victim-blaming: What you are wearing/doing/saying/etc. is irrelevant.
  • Gets an explanation for both the pervasiveness and under-reporting: Rape is a mass bioweapon of intimidation that men (as a group, not as individuals) use to put women (as a group, not as individuals) in their place.

(My reading of) MacKinnon’s critique:

  • Rape is sexual.
    • To the perpetrator: Not the same as beating.
    • To the survivor: Not the same as being beaten.
  • “Normal” heterosexual sex involves an incredible amount of force.
    • To the perpetrator: Rape is “rough sex” because rape is rough sex.
    • To the survivor: Rough sex is rape because rape is rough sex.
  • Critiques rape as bad by defending sex as good.

Better? Rape = Nonconsensual sex.

  • Still critiques rape as bad by defending sex as good: Sex can never itself be wrongful; only nonconsent is.
  • Loses all benefits of the “violence, not sex” analysis: “But assault that is consented to is still assault; rape consented to is intercourse.”

The deeper problem: Rape is “regulated” (“FMMS-II,” p. 651) and legalized, not forbidden. The only type of rape that actually gets taken seriously does crucial ideological work—rape of white women by strangers (i.e., Black men).

  • Rape is not exceptional to a benign “normal” sexuality; it is normal indeed.
    • “Rape is defined [by law] according to what men think violates women, and that is the same as what they think of as the sine qua non of sex. What women experience as degrading and defiling when we are raped includes as much that is distinctive to us as is our experience of sex.”
    • “Most rapes, as women live them, will not be seen to violate women until sex and violence are confronted as mutually definitive. It is not only men convicted of rape who believe that the only thing they did different from what men do all the time is get caught.”
  • So far, rape has been conceived as an inequality between women and men (for Brownmiller, a biological inequality); sexuality has not been itself thought to be unequal or unjust.
    • “Having sex” does not have the same meaning for men and women. Men gain something by having sex; women lose something by having sex. This is because sex is something men do to women.
    • Rape needs to be redefined as what rape means to women on women’s terms.
    • The point is to consider sexuality as a political institution and subject it to political critique.
    • Sexuality is not to be taken for granted: What’s sexual may not involve sex per se (e.g., non-genital body parts, power/violence), whereas sex need not be sexual (e.g., the lesbian sex that “doesn’t count”).

To me, this is the chief radical feminist complaint against the Barnard sex conference: If sexual desires are themselves political rather than merely personal or biological, then we need to ask if there is a sexuality innocuous enough to make genuinely liberatory sexual pleasure possible under patriarchy.

  • Is sex liberatory? Is sex a mechanism of patriarchy?
  • Is more sex more liberatory?

MacKinnon:

If being for another is the whole of women’s sexual construction, it can be no more escaped by separatism, men’s temporary concrete absence, than eliminated or qualified by permissiveness, which, in this context, looks like women emulating male roles. As Susan Sontag said: “The question is: what sexuality are women to be liberated to enjoy? Merely to remove the onus placed upon the sexual expressiveness of women is a hollow victory if the sexuality they become freer to enjoy remains the old one that converts women into objects . . .If beingfor another is the whole of women’s sexual construction, it can be no more escaped by separatism, men’s temporary concrete absence, than eliminated or qualified by permissiveness, which, in this context, looks like women emulating male roles. As Susan Sontag said: “The question is: what sexu- ality are women to be liberated to enjoy? Merely to remove the onus placed upon the sexual expressiveness of women is a hollow victory if the sexuality they become freer to enjoy remains the old one that converts women into objects …. This already ‘freer’ sexuality mostly reflects a spurious idea of freedom: the right of each person, briefly, to exploit and dehumanize someone else.” (“FMMS-I,” pp. 533–34)

For sex to be liberatory, it has to become a qualitatively different kind of sex.

Nava:

I found MacKinnon’s argument convincing but it’s troubling because her theory tells you that you can’t trust your own sense of desire. . . . If what feels like mutual desire and choice is always already shaped by domination, then there isn’t a clear way to differentiate between what’s imposed and what’s chosen. Someone could argue that that’s the point, and that domination is just that pervasive but if every possible experience can be explained in the same way, then you can’t really push back against it. Being placed in a position where her idea explains everything, we’re left with no ground to stand on.

The radical feminist analysis of sex

Rich’s insight: If so much effort and so many carrots and stick are needed to make our society heterosexual, this suggests that heterosexuality is not so natural (which is why homosexuality needs to be so carefully guarded against).

  • This turns the table: To Rich, the interesting question to ask is not why queer people are queer but why straight people are straight.
  • The answer is precisely the social pressures against homosexuality: Your survival depends on it, and this helps to keep the social relations between the sexes in place.
  • Women’s compulsory heterosexuality is a mechanism deployed by patriarchy to keep women available for exploitation by men; misogyny and homophobia are not two separate issues.

MacKinnon’s insight: The duality of ‘sex’ as meaning both gender and sexuality.

  • Canonically, gender and sexuality are two distinct stories: You get a gender first, and then you get a sexuality depending on who you are attracted to.
  • MacKinnon wants to reverse this: Sexuality precedes and determines gender.

MacKinnon’s analysis: Sexuality is the eroticization of dominance and submission, which creates the gender division as we know it.

Eroticization of dominance and submission
⇓
(Hetero)sexual objectification: men (who dominate), women (who submit/are dominated)
⇓
Gender: men (who “fuck”), women (who are “rapable” and “fucked”)

Key claims:

  • Masculinity is dominance eroticized, and femininity submission eroticized.
    • So you feel most feminine when you feel most desirable to men.
  • Men and women are then created through heterosexuality in the model of masculinity/eroticized dominance and femininity/eroticized submission.
    • Women are those who are eroticized as sexually usable to men.
    • “To be rapable, a position which is social, not biological, defines what a woman is” (“FMMS-II,” p. 651).
    • “Man fucks woman; subject verb object” (“FMMS-I,” p. 541).
    • “Women should not be exempt on the basis of mere biology for behavior that would be actionable if done by men. For example, if a woman professor or corporate executive sexually harasses male students or workplace subordinates, she should not escape liability because she is a woman. She has succeeded to the forms of power which traditionally have been the province of men, and has attained the protection and legitimacy of such a male-defined position. She derives the power to insist from those structures that traditionally have sanctioned men’s demands. She has also succeeded to that aspect of sex role that has been peculiarly male cultural behavior: the imposition of unwanted sex upon the less powerful. . . . If nothing else, such an argument should demonstrate that the determinants of sexual behavior are not so much biological as deeply social. The rarity of such instances demonstrates how deep the social determinants go. But the woman who functions socially as if she were a man should be viewed by the law according to the social power she wields, regardless of body” (SHWW, pp. 202–3, my emphasis).
  • Sex is a question of politics: Sexual liberation is not about having more sex or even having more consensual sex.
    • Abolish sweatshops; don’t make them more consensual.
    • Heterosexual love also functions to control women? Domestic abuse cases.
  • The role of pornography: For MacKinnon, pornography is a primary social mechanism of (hetero)sexual objectification.
    • Pornography socially defines what sex is and what acceptable sex is; it does not merely “depict” imageries “offensive” to women (Eva).

The porn problem:

  • Rubin: Against sex negativity ⇒ sex positivity ⇒ porn positivity.
  • Wittig: This does not change what sexuality is.