SOURCE: Sennett, Richard. “The New Censorship.” Contemporary Sociology 23, no. 4 (July 1994): 487-91.

In the following review, Sennett notes that while Only Words is MacKinnon's weakest work, it owes its popularity “to the assimilation of feminism into a rhetoric of aggression, sexual repression, and community building which marked the mythology of the American frontier.”

By any measure, the United States is a violent society, marked by high rates of murder, assault, child abuse, and rape. Women suffer disproportionately from this violence. Gendered violence has thus prompted new thinking and writing about pornography, but the renewed interest in pornography's social consequences has created new confusions. Traditional, right-wing advocates of censorship have been joined by people seeking to lighten the burden of gendered violence through forbidding its representation. And old dilemmas about the very act of representing the forbidden, once framed in aesthetic terms, have reappeared as political and social issues, which...