Are Women Human?

And Other International Dialogues

Catharine A. MacKinnon

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780674417878
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

More than half a century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defined what a human being is and is entitled to, Catharine MacKinnon asks: Are women human yet? If women were regarded as human, would they be sold into sexual slavery worldwide; veiled, silenced, and imprisoned in homes; bred, and worked as menials for little or no pay; stoned for sex outside marriage or burned within it; mutilated genitally, impoverished economically, and mired in illiteracy--all as a matter of course and without effective recourse?The cutting edge is where law and culture hurts, which is where MacKinnon operates in these essays on the transnational status and treatment of women. Taking her gendered critique of the state to the international plane, ranging widely intellectually and concretely, she exposes the consequences and significance of the systematic maltreatment of women and its systemic condonation. And she points toward fresh ways--social, legal, and political--of targeting its toxic orthodoxies.MacKinnon takes us inside the workings of nation-states, where the oppression of women defines community life and distributes power in society and government. She takes us to Bosnia-Herzogovina for a harrowing look at how the wholesale rape and murder of women and girls there was an act of genocide, not a side effect of war. She takes us into the heart of the international law of conflict to ask--and reveal--why the international community can rally against terrorists' violence, but not against violence against women. A critique of the transnational status quo that also envisions the transforming possibilities of human rights, this bracing book makes us look as never before at an ongoing war too long undeclared.

part one

theory and reality

1

On Torture

Torture is widely recognized as a fundamental violation of human rights.¹ Inequality on the basis of sex is also widely condemned, and sex equality affirmed as a basic human rights value and legal guarantee in many nations and internationally.² So why is torture on the basis of sex—for example, in the form of rape, battering, and pornography—not seen as a violation of human rights?³ When women are abused, human rights are violated; anything less implicitly assumes women are not human. When torture is sex-based, human rights standards should be recognized as violated, just as much as when the torture is based on anything else.

Internationally, torture has a recognized profile.⁴ It usually begins with abduction, detention, imprisonment, and enforced isolation, progresses through extreme physical and mental abuse, and may end in death. The torturer has absolute power, which torture victims believe in absolutely and utterly. Life and death turn on his whim. Victims are beaten, raped, shocked with electricity, nearly drowned, tied, hung, burned, deprived of sleep, food, and human contact. The atrocities are limited only by the torturer’s taste and imagination and any value the victim may be seen to have alive or unmarked. Verbal abuse and humiliation, making the victim feel worthless and hopeless, are integral to the torture having its intended effect. Often torture victims are selected and tortured in particular ways because they are members of a social group, for example, Jews in 1977 Argentina.⁵ Torturers also exploit human relationships to inflict mental suffering; a man will be forced to watch his wife being raped, for example. Victims are forced to drink their own urine, to eat their own excrement. Sometimes drugs are forcibly administered that alter personalities and make bodily or mental control or even self-recognition impossible. Torture is often designed as a slow process toward an excruciating death. Even when one survives, events move and escalate toward death, which is sometimes wished for to escape the agony. One is aware that one could be killed at any point. Many are.

This speech was given at an international conference on human rights on November 10, 1990, in Banff, Alberta, Canada. It was originally published as “On Torture: A Feminist Perspective on Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twenty-first Century: A Global Challenge 21 (Kathleen E. Mahoney and Paul Mahoney, eds., 1993).

What torture does to a human being is internationally recognized. Its purpose is to break people. People change under such extreme pressure, studied under the rubrics of brainwashing, post-traumatic stress, and the Stockholm syndrome. Long-term consequences include dissociation, which promotes survival but can be hard to reverse. What one learns being tortured, and what is necessary to survive it, can make living later unbearable, producing suicide even after many years. The generally recognized purpose of torture is to control, intimidate, or eliminate those who insult or challenge or are seen to undermine the powers that be, typically a regime or a cadre seeking to become a regime. Torture is thus seen as political, although it often seems that its political overlay is a facilitating pretext for the pure exercise of sadism, a politics of itself.

When these things happen, human rights are deemed violated. It is acknowledged that atrocities are committed.⁶ While there is no ultimate answer to the question “Why do they do it?” and in the context of torture little agonizing over the question, nothing stops the practice from being identified and universally opposed as a crime jus cogens.

With this framework in mind, consider the following accounts:

“Linda Lovelace” was the name I bore during the two and one half year period of imprisonment beginning in 1971. Linda “Lovelace” was coerced through physical, mental and sexual torture and abuse, often at gunpoint and through threats on her life to perform sex acts, including forced fellatio and bestiality so that pornographic films could be made of her.⁷

Ms. “Lovelace” then describes encountering Chuck Traynor, a pimp, as follows:

[W]hen in response to his suggestions I let him know I would not become involved in prostitution in any way and told him I intended to leave he beat me up physically and the constant mental abuse began. I literally became a prisoner, I was not allowed out of his sight, not even to use the bathroom, where he watched me through a hole in the door. He slept on top of me at night, he listened in on my telephone calls with a .45 automatic eight shot pointed at me. I was beaten physically and suffered mental abuse each and every day thereafter. He undermined my ties with other people and forced me to marry him on advice from his lawyer. My initiation into prostitution was a gang rape by five men, arranged by Mr. Traynor. It was the turning point in my life. He threatened to shoot me with the pistol if I didn’t go through with it. I had never experienced anal sex before and it ripped me apart. They treated me like an inflatable plastic doll, picking me up and moving me here and there. They spread my legs this way and that, shoving their things at me and into me, they were playing musical chairs with parts of my body. I have never been so frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life. I felt like garbage. I engaged in sex acts for pornography against my will to avoid being killed. Mr. Traynor coerced me into pornography by threatening my life first with a .45 automatic eight shot and later with an M 16 semi-automatic machine gun which became his favorite toy. I was brutally beaten whenever I showed any signs of resistance or lack of enthusiasm for the freaky sex he required me to act like I enjoyed. The lives of my family were threatened. Each day I was raped, beaten, kicked, punched, smacked, choked, degraded or yelled at by Mr. Traynor. Sometimes all of these. He consistently belittled and humiliated me. I believed Mr. Traynor would have killed me and others if I did not do what he demanded of me. I didn’t doubt he would shoot me. I made myself go numb as if my body belonged to someone else … Simple survival took everything I had. I managed to escape on three separate occasions. The first and second time I was caught and suffered a brutal beating and an awful sexual abuse as punishment. The third time I was at my parents’ home and Mr. Traynor threatened to kill my parents and my nephew if I did not leave immediately with him. The physical effects of this are still with me. During my imprisonment my breasts were injected with silicone which has since broken up and has been dangerous and painful. All of the surface veins of my right leg were destroyed because I used it to protect myself from the beatings. My doctor told me that because of the abuse, it was unsafe for me to have another child so I had an abortion when I wanted to have the child. It took a long time to even begin to deal with the mental effects. A person can’t be held prisoner for two and one half years and the next day trust society, trust the people who have put me there and just go on with the life that you once thought was yours.⁸

Now consider this account:

My name is Jayne Stamen. At one time I thought there was no one who could help me to get away from my husband. There wasn’t a day that went by I didn’t think was my last as he totally lost control. He slept with a gun beside him every night as he promised he would kill me and then shoot himself if I didn’t submit to his obsession of slavery and bondage and beatings during sex. I was raped 11 times between March ’84 and November ’86. I had four broken hands during my marriage, caused by my husband. I was put into the hospital in traction for two weeks due to a beating by him. I walked with a walker several months after that. When I was raped by Jerry, I was always tied to my bed. Tied where my legs were spread apart. He tied me with nylon cords and extension cords. I even got tied up while I was sleeping at times. He would then penetrate me with objects such as his rifle or a long necked wine decanter or twelve inch artificial rubber penises. He would shave all of the hair off my private area as he said he wanted to “screw a baby’s cunt.” He would slap me while I was tied, call me all sorts of horrible names. I broke my arm on two occasions trying to get away from him. When he would watch porno movies on our VCR, he would tell me to do exactly what the women in the movies had done to the men. I would tell him to forget it and then he would continue to slap me around until he’d get so angry that I was afraid he’d beat me so hard he’d kill me. At times he’d grab a large knife he kept in the drawer beside our bed and he’d hold it to my face or breasts and tell me to do as he said or he’d cut me up. If I didn’t act like I was enjoying pleasing him he’d threaten me again and then replay the scene he wanted acted out from the movies. I had no place to run as I never had any money of my own. He cut off the phone which was my only contact with the outside world. He would make me visit him when he finished his mailman routine and give him a blow job on the public street while people were passing by. I really wanted to die.⁹

Now consider this composite account of the systematic violation of a woman named Burnham by a man named Beglin, her husband: Beglin was watching an X-rated movie on cable television in the family room. He entered the bedroom, threw her on the bed, and bound her. He ripped off her clothing and began taking photos of her. He then sexually assaulted her. Crisis center workers and an emergency room doctor testified that her wrists and ankles were marked from being tied to the bed by ropes. He forced her sixty-eight different times to have sex with neighbors and strangers while he took photographs. She was forced through assault and holding their child hostage to stand on the corner and invite men in for sex and to have sex with the dog. He beat her so that she was nearly killed. She testified to episodes of torture with a battery-charged cattle prod and an electric eggbeater. She was asked about photographs in an album showing her smiling during the sexual encounters. She said that her husband threatened her with violence if she didn’t smile while these photographs were taken.¹⁰

In the accounts by these women, all the same things happen that happen in Amnesty International reports and accounts of torture—except they happen in homes in Nebraska or in pornography studios in Los Angeles rather than prison cells in Chile or detention centers in Turkey. But the social and legal responses to the experiences are not the same at all. Torture is not considered personal. Torture is not attributed to one sick individual at a time and dismissed as exceptional, or if it is, that maneuver is dismissed as a cover-up by the human rights community. Torture victims are not generally asked how many were there with them, as if it is not important if it happened only to you or you and a few others like you. With torture, an increase is not dismissed as just an increase in reporting, as if a constant level of such abuse is acceptable. Billions of dollars are not made selling as entertainment pictures of what is regarded as torture, nor is torture as such generally regarded as sexual entertainment. Never is a victim of torture asked, didn’t you really want it?

A simple double standard is at work here. What fundamentally distinguishes torture, understood in human rights terms, from the events these women have described is that torture is done to men as well as to women. Or, more precisely, when what usually happens to women as these women have described it happens to men, which it sometimes does, women’s experience is the template for it, so those men, too, are ignored as women are. When the abuse is sexual or intimate, especially when it is sexual and inflicted by an intimate, it is gendered, hence not considered a human rights violation. Torture is regarded as politically motivated; states are generally required to be involved in it. What needs asking is why the torture of women by men is not seen as torture, specifically why it is not seen as political, and just what the involvement of the state in it is.

Women are half the human race. To put the individual accounts in context, all around the world, women are battered, raped, sexually abused as children, prostituted, and increasingly live pornographic lives in contexts saturated more or less with pornography.¹¹ Women do two-thirds of the world’s work, earn one-tenth of the world’s income, and own less than one-hundredth of the world’s property.¹² Women are more likely to be property than to own any. Women have not even been allowed to vote until very recently and still are not in some countries. Women’s reproductive capacities are systematically exploited. While the rate and intensity of these atrocities and violations vary across cultures, they are never equal or substantially reversed on the basis of sex. All this is done to women as women by men as men.

Data contextualizes this, and a few selected examples show it with more texture. In the United States, 44 percent of all women at one time or another are victims of rape or attempted rape; for women of color, the rates are higher.¹³ In 1988, 31 percent of murdered women were killed by husbands or boyfriends.¹⁴ In egalitarian Sweden, one woman is battered to death every week to ten days.¹⁵ Dramatic increases in the rate of reported rape are debated there; the debate is over whether the increases are “real” or “merely” reflect an increase in reporting. Where women are chattel or have only recently even legally emerged from the condition of being chattel, as is the situation in Japan, what can rape mean? If a woman exists to be sexually used, to what sexual use of her is the right man not entitled? Sweden, the United States, and Japan are all saturated with pornography. In the United States, women disappear on a daily basis—from their homes, from supermarket parking lots. Sometimes they are found in ditches or floating down rivers. Sometimes we dig up their bones along with those of ten or fifteen other women ten or fifteen years later. Serial rapists and serial murderers, who are almost always men, target women almost exclusively.

Why isn’t this political? The abuse is neither random nor individual. The fact that you may know your assailant does not mean that your membership in a group chosen for violation is irrelevant to your abuse. It is still systematic and group-based. It defines the quality of community life and is defined by the distribution of power in society. It would seem that something is not considered political if it is done to women by men, especially if it is considered to be sex. Then it is not considered political becau...