Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, Catharine A. MacKinnon

(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006), 432 pp., $35.00 cloth.

In April 2006, Catharine MacKinnon was

interviewed about her new book, Are Wom-

en Human?, for BBC Radio 4’s ‘‘Woman’s

Hour.’’ The presenter, Jenni Murray, had

one main question that she repeated

throughout the short interview to the ex-

clusion of any discussion of MacKinnon’s

arguments: Wasn’t the book’s title simply

too controversial to be taken seriously?

Though frustrating, Murray’s unwilling-

ness to engage with the arguments of Are

Women Human? was strangely appro-

priate. A recurring theme of MacKinnon’s

book is that it is extremely difficult to get

violence against women taken seriously.

MacKinnon’s fundamental claim is that

the violence and abuse routinely inflicted

on women by men is not treated with the

same seriousness accorded to a human

rights violation, or torture, or terrorism,

or a war crime, or a crime against human-

ity, or an atrocity, despite resembling each

of these things closely at least and precisely

at most. Thus MacKinnon asks ‘‘why the

torture of women by men is not seen as tor-

ture’’ (p. 21); why violence against women

within the borders of a state is not seen as a

human rights violation; why the mass rape

of Bosnian and Croatian women by Serbs is

not seen as an act of genocide against those

ethnic groups as such; why the mass rape of

women in general in peacetime is not seen

as an act of genocide against women as

such; why, ‘‘women not being considered a

people, there is as yet no international law

against destroying the group women as

such’’ (p. 230); why the terror imposed by

the violence of male dominance is not seen

as the sort of terrorism against which a gov-

ernment might see fit to wage war; why

atrocities against women ‘‘do not count as

war crimes unless a war among men is going

on at the same time’’ (p. 261); and why, when

approximately 3,000 women are killed by

recent books on ethics and international affairs 261

men in the United States each year, we re-

fer to that state of affairs as ‘‘peacetime’’.

MacKinnon describes the extent and na-

ture of violence against women in the con-

text of the national and international legal

frameworks that do a better or (more usu-

ally) worse job of countering it. Both the

facts and the arguments are hard-hitting.

MacKinnon’s writing is astonishingly

powerful, combining a compelling air of

authority and outrage with a sense of de-

spair at the enormity of women’s domina-

tion by men. It is hard to disagree with

her central thesis that much violence

against women has the severity of a human

rights violation. Moreover, MacKinnon

provides a compelling critique of the doc-

trine that only states can violate interna-

tional law, and that only transborder

atrocities merit international intervention.

Are Women Human? contains philo-

sophical discussion as well as applied polit-

ical and legal argument. One such

discussion concerns the concepts of uni-

versality and difference and engages with

debates on multiculturalism. In the con-

text of a critique of postmodernism,

MacKinnon argues against both relativism

and essentialism. Against relativism, she

notes that many multicultural defences, or

‘‘defences of local differences,’’ are in fact

‘‘often simply a defence of male power in

its local guise’’ (p. 53). Criticizing these

multicultural differences does not imply

cultural imperialism, for sex equality has

not been achieved in any known culture.

As she puts it, ‘‘Feminism does not assume

that ‘other’ cultures are to be measured

against the validity of their own, because

feminism does not assume that any cul-

ture, including their own, is valid. How

could we?’’ (p. 53). And yet, MacKinnon

emphasizes, criticizing cultures from the

universal standpoint of women’s equality

does not entail some form of essentialism.

(The charge of essentialism, she claims, is

really an accusation of racism in disguise.)

For MacKinnon, feminism cannot be es-

sentialist because it is based on a rejection

of the idea that ‘‘woman’’ is a presocial or

biologically determined category. What it

asserts, rather, is that despite women’s di-

versity, ‘‘commonalities’’ remain (p. 53).

MacKinnon thus directly repudiates multi-

culturalists who claim that equality requires

group rights that entrench gender hier-

archy, a move that places her (in this re-

spect) alongside comprehensive liberal

theorists such as Susan Moller Okin and

Brian Barry. At the same time, she is em-

phatic in her criticisms of the conceptual

underpinnings of liberal equality: based on

the idea that equality requires sameness, she

argues, liberal equality cannot deal with the

fundamental ‘‘difference’’ of sex. Instead,

equality must be understood as the absence

of hierarchy, an understanding that necessa-

rily requires making normative judgments

about particular social structures and prac-

tices. Are Women Human? thus criticizes

both sides of the multicultural debate: mul-

ticulturalists for failing to challenge

sex domination, universalists for failing to

challenge their own philosophical premises.

As a whole, the fact that the book is a

collection of discrete pieces, many of

which were created for specific audiences,

is both a strength and a weakness. It is a

strength if the book is read as a historical

record of MacKinnon’s engagement with

various actual political and legal struggles.

One can imagine MacKinnon’s voice in

the courtrooms, parliamentary commit-

tees, and conferences where many of the

chapters originated. Were any of these

audiences able to remain complacent after

hearing her speak? Did any object, or de-

fend themselves? Indeed, if the book is to

262 recent books on ethics and international affairs

be understood in this way, it would have

been illuminating if some of the chapters

were accompanied with a note on the re-

sponses of their audiences. For example,

what did the Swedish parliamentary com-

mittee do when told, ‘‘The Swedish law of

pornography, with respect, is the wrong

law. . . . You have a law against sexual vio-

lence in pornography, and you are sur-

rounded by sexual violence in pornography.

Nothing is done about it’’ (p. 102)?

Reading the book in this way mitigates the

problem that arises when the book is ap-

proached, instead, as a unified work: there is

a considerable amount of repetition. Viewed

as a complete work, the book would have

benefited from being reedited as such, with

unnecessary repetition removed, to help the

reader identify each new argument as it is pre-

sented and give each its deserved attention.

These comments notwithstanding, Are

Women Human? is a book that deserves

to be widely read. It contains important

empirical and legal analysis of particular

conflicts, most notably what MacKinnon

insists must be described as the Serbian

genocide of the early 1990s. It develops

MacKinnon’s own feminist philosophy,

building on the approach developed in

her earlier works and demonstrating how

feminism should respond to international

issues. And it engages directly with con-

temporary debates about culture, global

justice, human rights, international law,

and the demands of equality. As such, it

challenges those from a variety of dis-

ciplines to answer her question: ‘‘When will

women be human? When?’’ (p. 43).

—CLARE CHAMBERS

University of Cambridge

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