SOURCE: Olson, Lester. Review of Only Words, by Catharine A. MacKinnon. Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 4 (November 1996): 433-35.

In the following review, Olson presents several objections to MacKinnon's arguments in Only Words but concludes that the book will “almost certainly reconfigure the national debate over pornography, harassment, free speech, and equality.”

Presented originally as the Christian Gauss Memorial Lectures in Criticism, Catharine MacKinnon's Only Words endeavors to reconfigure the legal treatment of harassment and pornography by developing the thesis that “the law of equality and the law of freedom of speech are on a collision course in this country” (71). The book consists of three interrelated chapters. The first, “Defamation and Discrimination,” focuses upon the commonplace legal argument that in the United States pornography is protected as free speech, stressing that in this country “pornography falls presumptively into the legal category ‘speech’ at the outset through being rendered in...