Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (review)

MacKinnon no longer has a "known location," because in the wake of her decade's work with Bosnian women, there are Bosnian men who want her dead in the street. That, beyond the unimpeachable chop required to look into this abyss, tells just how dangerous it is to deal with human rights now. Especially for acolytes of the philosophical and cultural imagination, this tour of the real is essential reading. It helps our imaginations become responsible to the conditions of this life, without which fidelity our imaginings and enactments will have only regrettable meaning. This book substantiates three main points: (1) rape is not new as a genocidal practice, though in Bosnia and Rwanda it grew clearer that the practice is not epiphenomenal; (2) the law and our will as nations to enforce it are the context in which we now define and defend humanity as humanity; (3) pornography's protection as free speech is a loophole in the law, which renders women, under the law, less than human. Pornography is cogently demonstrated here to consist of prostitution and of trafficking in human lives, which are activities not of pleasure/art, but of hedonism/domination. The making of pornographic films in Bosnian camps where thousands of Muslim women were raped to death—films that were subsequently marketed—is one example of the inexorability and circularity of this link. The purpose of rape in genocide is the destruction of peoples, their lack of humanity demonstrated through the abuse and destruction of their women. But atrocity is not a monstrous exception: MacKinnon's every page reminds readers that atrocity is a monstrous extension of the shapes of desire present in legitimate culture. Regarding discourse about Bosnia, she writes: "In the West, the sexual atrocities in this conflict have been discussed largely as rape or as genocide, not as what they are, which is rape as genocide, rape directed toward women because they are Muslim or Croatian." And she adds, warning her opponents not to argue with her about semantics: "It is as if people cannot think more than one thought at once." As the Rwandan genocide spreads to Chad, one reads MacKinnon to understand just what is meant now by "ethnic cleansing." I confess that I could take about five pages of this book at a time. But those hard small doses are good medicine, meant to help us live in an eros of pleasure with each other and not the hedon of sex by command and at each other's will.