A Feminist Agenda for Gay Men (Or: Catharine MacKinnon and the Invention of a Sex-Based Hope)

In this Article, I concentrate on two main themes: (1) I use the work of Professor MacKinnon and her colleague Andrea Dworkin to critique the destructive role of pornography in gay men’s lives, and (2) I use this theory to expose the dangerousness of the poststructuralist theoretical project generally named “queer theory” when it is offered as an explanation of our lives and as a tool for “liberation.” I aim to show just exactly what its engagement with reality on a contingency basis only (making it an antithesis of feminism) costs. Of course, queer theory and queer legal theory are not monoliths. Not all work identifying with queer theory or as queer aligns itself with heterosexual male supremacy in the ways I critique in this essay. However, much of, if not most of, queer theory and queer legal theory shares the characteristics I critique below. Engaging both pornography and queer theory simultaneously as I do here makes sense, since queer theory emerged, as Professor Janet Halley has said, principally as a line of defense against Professor MacKinnon’s recognition of pornography as a violation of civil and human rights.4 Professor Halley’s supposition about the nexus of queer theory and pornography in legal theory echoes, as do many of her primary points, the work of Judith Butler. Butler claimed, as Halley would go on to do, that feminist critique of pornography is itself an act of sex discrimination — a practice of sexual subordination — problematically entrenching gender norms. In this upside-down postmodern thinking, pornography is a/the solution to the problem of gender, not a primary engine of the gender binarism that enslaves us. The gay liberation alternative to queer theory’s madness is Professor MacKinnon’s feminism — which is to say: sex equality feminism: FEMINISM UNMODIFIED. It is, in my view, essential that the gay agenda be a feminist agenda. Professor MacKinnon’s feminism made it possible for survivors of pornography to be heard. Her work made it possible for pornography’s potent male supremacy to be challenged, even by gay men. It made it possible for me to say what it is necessary to say in this context as a gay man for gay men.