SOURCE: Fraiman, Susan. “Catharine MacKinnon and the Feminist Porn Debates.” American Quarterly 47, no. 4 (December 1995): 743-49.

In the following review, Fraiman summarizes the debate among feminists regarding pornography and highlights the strengths of MacKinnon's arguments in Only Words.

Those of us in academe all know by know that sexuality is constructed. We also know that it may feel rather unreconstructed, even untheorizable. In spite of our training, sexuality may nevertheless seem to us irrational, unmediated, and very personal. Sometimes it seems downright natural. As Catharine MacKinnon observes, “Because of its location in intimacy, harassment that is sexual peculiarly leaves nothing between you and it: it begins in your family, your primary connections, those through which the self is developed” (60). There is, of course, another sense in which sexuality does not begin in the family as much as in the courtroom, medical treatise, or literary text, but it is equally...