Only Words

Los Angeles Times

This little book might as well come with a fuse and matches, lighting a fire as it does under the complacent acceptance of pornography and inequality, racial and sexual, in this country.
— Susan Salter Reynolds

San Francisco Chronicle

In Only Words, [MacKinnon] presents the most lucid and concise presentation of her argument that porn is more than just words...Her argument is making significant legal inroads and, to understand where she would like to take us, Only Words provides a clear road map.

London Review of Books

MacKinnon's book is an eloquent plea to Americans to move beyond what she sees as the prejudiced limitations of current doctrine, in particular of current liberal doctrine.
— Bernard Williams

Toronto Globe & Mail

Only Words is a deftly crafted indictment of an absolutist free-speech doctrine that is applied hypocritically and inconsistently to protect pornography and other acts of inequality.
— Amy Willard Cross

California Lawyer

In Only Words...Catharine MacKinnon makes a compelling, lucid and concise argument for reframing the debate [over limiting pornography].
— Nina Schuyler

Quarterly Journal of Speech

[This book] will almost certainly reconfigure the national debate over pornography, harassment, free speech, and equality. It merits careful study by scholars in rhetoric, communication, free speech, women's studies, and law—in fact, by anyone wishing to participate in the political and legal process as an informed citizen.
— Lester Olson

Michigan Law Review

Only words, yet look at the responses, look at the rage directed toward the professor. These responses and the anger and fear that lurk within them have in a sense become part of the text of Only Words; to read them is to read a part of what MacKinnon aimed to show...MacKinnon's words have engendered real abuse, directed at her as a woman. In short, she has proved her point.
— David C. Dinielli

American Bookman

In this thoroughly documented work, MacKinnon traces America's obsession with expressive freedom to the trauma of the McCarthy era...An entertaining read as well as a challenge to take another look at what constitutes freedom of expression.

Los Angeles Times

This little book might as well come with a fuse and matches, lighting a fire as it does under the complacent acceptance of pornography and inequality, racial and sexual, in this country.
— Susan Salter Reynolds

Toronto Globe & Mail

Only Words is a deftly crafted indictment of an absolutist free-speech doctrine that is applied hypocritically and inconsistently to protect pornography and other acts of inequality.
— Amy Willard Cross

Michigan Law Review

Only words, yet look at the responses, look at the rage directed toward the professor. These responses and the anger and fear that lurk within them have in a sense become part of the text of Only Words; to read them is to read a part of what MacKinnon aimed to show...MacKinnon's words have engendered real abuse, directed at her as a woman. In short, she has proved her point.
— David C. Dinielli

London Review of Books

MacKinnon's book is an eloquent plea to Americans to move beyond what she sees as the prejudiced limitations of current doctrine, in particular of current liberal doctrine.
— Bernard Williams

Quarterly Journal of Speech

[This book] will almost certainly reconfigure the national debate over pornography, harassment, free speech, and equality. It merits careful study by scholars in rhetoric, communication, free speech, women's studies, and law--in fact, by anyone wishing to participate in the political and legal process as an informed citizen.
— Lester Olson

San Francisco Chronicle

In Only Words, [MacKinnon] presents the most lucid and concise presentation of her argument that porn is more than just words...Her argument is making significant legal inroads and, to understand where she would like to take us, Only Words provides a clear road map.

California Lawyer

In Only Words...Catharine MacKinnon makes a compelling, lucid and concise argument for reframing the debate [over limiting pornography].
— Nina Schuyler

American Bookman

In this thoroughly documented work, MacKinnon traces America's obsession with expressive freedom to the trauma of the McCarthy era...An entertaining read as well as a challenge to take another look at what constitutes freedom of expression.

Publishers Weekly

In her most cogent and accessible book to date, feminist legal scholar MacKinnon lashes ``absolutists'' who maintain that all forms of expression, including pornography and hate propaganda, should be constitutionally protected. MacKinnon counters that pornography and hate messages ``do the same thing: enact the abuse.'' Porn, she argues, subordinates and degrades women and incites sexual harassers, wife beaters, child molesters, rapists and clients of prostitutes. MacKinnon, a Univeristy of Michigan law professor, believes that we need to balance First Amendment concerns for free speech with Fourteenth Amendment protection of equality. She advocates ``a new model for freedom of expression . . . in which free speech does not most readily protect the activities of Nazis, Klansmen, and pornorgraphers, while doing nothing for their victims.'' And she hails two recent decisions by Canada's Supreme Court which bolster the rights of persons harmed by pornography or hate propaganda. (Sept.)

Library Journal

MacKinnon, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and the author of numerous works (e.g., Toward a Feminist Theory of the State , LJ 8/89), is one of the nation's foremost proponents of feminist legal theory. Her latest work, a collection of three essays, is a polemic against pornography and its protection under the First Amendment. The first essay presents a highly emotional attack against pornography that would have benefited from a definition of terms and fewer unsubstantiated assertions and assumptions. The other two essays compare and equate pornography and sexual harassment with racial discrimination and abuse; they are more reasoned and provide cogent material for discussion of gendered aspects of the legal system. This book will create controversy among legal scholars and feminists. Recommended for both legal libraries and women's studies collections.-- Sharon Firestone, Coll . of Law Lib . , Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Kirkus Reviews

Three passionate, intellectually fascinating essays, each arguing an aspect of the case that sexual words and pictures may by their nature be bannable, even though they may also be Constitutionally protected speech—by University of Michigan law professor and noted feminist legal scholar MacKinnon (Feminism Unmodified, 1987, etc). In "Defamation and Discrimination," MacKinnon argues that "pornography is sex" and that American law irrationally treats it as a possible cause of individual injury—that is, purely as a matter of true or false content—rather than as a sui generis act of "sex discrimination based on conditions of sexual inequality"; and she holds that, like other kinds of action speech (saying "You're fired," advertising "for whites only"), pornography should be banned. In "Racial and Sexual Harassment," MacKinnon declares that "if ever words have been understood as acts, it has been when they are sexual harassment" in the workplace, but she regrets that, recently, courts have weakened this confluence by overturning universities' restraints of racial and sexual speech on campus and by dismissing a sexual-harassment complaint made by a female shipyard worker because the harassment consisted in having been shown pornography, which is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. In "Equality and Speech," MacKinnon makes explicit many of the contradictions she's been suggesting in the earlier essays; she argues that "the law of equality and the law of freedom of speech are on a collision course in this country" and must be meshed—for example, by considering "group defamation" as "the verbal form inequality [or group discrimination] takes." AlthoughMacKinnon's passionate conviction sometimes causes her ideas to elide and her logic to blur, the ideas are original and gripping, her references are wide-ranging, her legal logic is provocative—and her latest is must reading for anyone interested in either fairness or free speech.