Customer Reviews

Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (Yale Fastback Series)

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This is the book that changed the law, folks. It is proof that feminist legal theory and philosophy has important practical implications. By a copy and send it to your favorite jurist today!

Ms. MacKinnon is a bright gal, no doubt about it. But being bright doesn't preclude being misguided.

A rant dressed up as legal theory, she leaps constantly from the subjective to the general. The most imporatnt character in this book is the author and, in a hundred different ways, she lets the reader know as much over and over again.

It's lucky that women's studies departments exist because, if her works in general and this one in particular were subjected to a (dare I say it?) less hysterical discipline, MacKinnon would be publishing her theories as hand-stapled screeds and distributing them on the subway.

Read Germaine Greer -- a feminist who makes all MacKinnon's basic points but doesn't leap to quite so many stretched conclusions. Greer also likes sex (or did once) while MacKinnon seems to regard the procreative act as foreplay for the real business of complaining about it later.

If you are looking for a boring theoretical discussion of the subject of sexual harassment, this dated book is for you.

As the eighties anti-porn feminist era comes to a close, MacKinnon tries to get one last gasp out of the THomas Hill debates. Living in a privileged Ivory Tower existence MacKinnon deems to analyze the working world and tries to make everything out to be harrassment, even rape.

At least Andrea Dworkin is a good writer. MacKinnon is a dinosaur. If you want good feminist writing read either Susie Bright or Rene Denfeld or even Naomi Wolf. Leave is this book in history's pile.