No means no is fine but a number of women aren’t in a position to say no, says Catharine MacKinnon

Catharine MacKinnon is a feminist pioneer, lawyer, activist and academic. For over four decades, she has been a force for equality and justice — from defining the offence of sexual harassment, to seeing rape as a genocidal weapon, recognising the harms of prostitution and pornography, and showing how power distorts sexual relations between men and women. Her new book Butterfly Politics is built on the idea that seemingly small interventions can eventually produce cataclysmic changes, as the women’s movement has.MacKinnon spoke to Amulya Gopalakrishnan in Delhi.
One of the tornados we’re seeing today is against sexual harassment — and as the person who first got it recognised as illegal, what do you make of this moment?
We’re seeing that cataclysm, and it’s been building all along. It’s about creating a perception that public disclosure will be heard, that women’s voices will be listened to. It’s partly that we are the backlash to Trump — that his open misogyny and white supremacist appeals were ultimately rewarded awakened a lot of people. Women like Ashley Judd made it possible for other women to speak about their experiences. That has set off this chain reaction, this butterfly effect that is bringing out all the pain, violation, hurt, anger and humiliation.
How does one sustain this change?
What we are seeing is white male money deserting white men in droves. We have never seen this in the history of the world. This is what we call ‘voluntary compliance’ in my field. It’s what happens when people take discrimination seriously, they comply with the law against discrimination. We created the context in which that happened. But them deciding that they’re pulling their money, their books, their movies, support, TV shows, careers and jobs, that’s them.
Sexual harassment really turns all the work that women do into a form of prostitution. All the way from the sexual harassment of white, high-class women, to prostitution itself, it’s all the same continuum, they’re all practices of sex inequality.
Our rape laws now place greater emphasis on the idea of consent, as a test for rape. But you have said that consent is intrinsically an unequal concept — could you elaborate?
People are trying to figure out a way to make the legal system responsive to realities of women’s sexual abuse. They’ve latched on to consent as if it’s a lifeline when, in fact, it’s a noose around their necks. Consent puts the woman on trial. The idea is that sex is something that men actively initiate and women passively submit to. So what’s the difference between that and rape? The answer is supposed to be consent. But the model of consent is the unequal idea of sex as something that men do to women. So the whole rape charge turns into ‘is she someone who would have submitted to this, or let him think she was’? Did she resist enough to communicate to him she didn’t want it, or communicate to us that we believe she didn’t want it?
All this “no means no” business, it’s an improvement on “no means yes” but that’s about all it is. There are many women who aren’t in a position to say no, and are not believed when they do report it — so it’s completely about her, when it should be about him.
What is the point of a trial then, some might ask?
The point of a trial is that the prosecution has to prove force. But force, under my rewrite, is not just physical force but other forms of hierarchy deployed in the interaction which make rape possible.
You’ve said that prostitution cannot be anything but enslavement. It isn’t ‘sex work’.
With prostitution, sexual access is forced economically. So economics is a form of force in sex, it is not a form of consent. Nobody disagrees with the fact that most people who are in prostitution are there for economic reasons: what she is doing is having sex with someone she would not otherwise have sex with; indeed about 8,000 someones a year, on average. And sex doesn’t have to be intimate to be free and chosen, but if it is being coerced by the need to survive and to feed your children, well, that is coerced sex.
People think that prostitution can only be fully criminalised or fully legalised. The Nordic model, which we are promoting, is neither. It’s a law that responds to the inequality in the situation, so the buyers and sellers (pimps and traffickers) are criminalised, and the sold are decriminalised.
There’s a lot of focus in India now on legal uniformity in family law, especially when it comes to practices like triple talaq. Where do you stand on the idea of a feminist civil code?
It’s very complicated. I am for women having real rights, including in divorce, but I am not for imposing dominant standards on subordinated communities in the name of rights for women. It’s not the way to do it.