JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN
185
"bourgeois hypocrisy," to be overridden when, in Dworkin's words, "We're
talking about the oppression of a class of people"), does not shy away in the
least from condemnations of political opponents as enemies. In
Feminism
Unmodified. Discourses on Life and
Law,
MacKinnon sees the First Amend–
ment as the self-interested expression of "white men from the point of view
of their own social position. Some of them owned slaves; most of them
owned women." The First Amendment was written to guarantee their
freedom to perpetuate such ownership. Dubious as legal scholarship, this is
impossible as political history. It cannot explain why there should have been
any debate about the passage of the First Amendment at all, unless
MacKinnon further assumes that some of the writers and amenders of the
Constitution didn't know their own true interests and hence failed to push
unambiguously for a measure that was to their "sex-class" advantage.
MacKinnon's approach to feminist discourse is relentlessly exclusionary.
There is "the feminist theory of power" and "the feminist theory of knowl–
edge" - no room for debate; one need only separate the correct from the
incorrect. Her work aims at closure, not conversation, and its political impli–
cations are deeply troubling. By spreading oppression, victimization and
patriarchal horror around so universally and uniformly, women emerge as
"abject victims," not historic agents. Finally, MacKinnon's totalizing rhetoric
blurs the distinction between being raped at gunpoint in a dark alley and
confronting, for example, ambiguous evidentiary rules or habitual patterns of
academic departmental behavior that have unintentional sexist outcomes. All
women are raped: the women in the alley, the corporate female manager,
the homemaker, the superstar. "Women are raped by guns, age, white
supremacy, the state - only derivatively by the penis," she writes in an ear–
lier text, and that view is further elaborated in
Feminism Unmodified.
When
she isn't separating the sheep from the goats, MacKinnon's prose is turgid,
sinking under the weight of its own ponderousness. Thus: "Objectivity is the
epistemological stance ofwhich objectification is the social process, of which
male dominance is the politics, the acted-out social practice. That is, to look at
the world objectively is to objectify it." You figure it out. On one point,
MacKinnon and I do agree: ideas matter, and that is why hers are so trou-
lfug.
Another writer is Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, whose latest work is
Decep–
tive Distinctions.
As
in her earlier work,
Woman's Place,
published in 1971,
Epstein laments the fact that women were a resource not being properly
exploited to the wider benefit of society as a whole. Epstein believes in
'reality' and criticizes claims that differences between males and females
other than utterly trivial ones exist or, if they do exist, that they matter. For
Epstein the body, that extraordinary container for identity and being, is seen
as "raw physiology."
Her treatment of embodiment positions Epstein squarely on the so-
