It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes a small group of privileged women who align themselves with systems that oppress other women.
Catharine Mackinnon highlights the complicity of a minority of elite women who, by supporting patriarchal structures, gain power and privilege at the expense of the majority of women. This statement underscores the idea that not all women are united in the struggle for gender equality, as some may choose to elevate their status by aligning with oppressive forces, thus perpetuating the very systems that undermine women's rights.
In practice
This quote can be used in a women's rights seminar to discuss the complexities of female empowerment.
Stopped as attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequaltiy between men and women.
So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.
Feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.
Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.
An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.
Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed. But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing.
Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable.
We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.
I was born of heterosexual parents. I was taught by heterosexual teachers in a fiercely heterosexual society. Television ads and newspaper ads β fiercely heterosexual. A society that puts down homosexuality. And why am I a homosexual if I'm affected by role models? I should have been a heterosexual. And no offense meant, but if teachers are going to affect you as role models, there'd be a lot of nuns running around the streets today.
Cruelty is, in theory, a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, but it may be interpreted so as to become absurd.
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