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Description
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 Women 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 exclusion of any discussion of MacKinnon's arguments: Wasn't the book's title simply too controversial to be taken seriously?
Though frustrating, Murray's unwillingness to engage with the arguments of Are Women Human? was strangely appropriate. 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 humanity, or an atrocity, despite resembling each of these things closely at least and precisely at most. Thus MacKinnon asks "why... |
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