Tuesday, August 12, 2008

False Liberations

In this protection racket of tolerance, everybody's sexual bottom line is rhetorically defended as freedom of expression, which has the political genius of making everybody potentially complicit through the stirring between their legs. But anyone with an ounce of political realism knows that the promise is illusory: sexual freedom is not and will not be equally deilvered, no matter how many women are sacrificed on its altar. And anyone with an ounce of political analysis should know that freedom before equality, freedom before justice, will only further liberate the power of the powerful and will never free what is most in need of expression.


Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified. Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA: 1987) p. 15. This problem is actually quite general, I think; in any context freedom in the absence of justice will be more power and protection to the powerful in their actions against the relatively powerless.