Blast from the Past: Debunking the “all sex is rape” quote (again)

Image via Hark! A Vagrant

Remember that whole thing about how all hetero sex is rape? Right, me too. Misogynists love playing straw feminist, and one of their most successful campaigns has been falsely attributing the quote that “all sex is rape” to Catharine MacKinnon and/or Andrea Dworkin. The lie is a deeply untrue and unfair reading of those scholars’ works, and is still used today as an unsophisticated response feminist arguments. “I don’t care about anything you say because feminists think all sex is rape!” Just this week, a professor at my school rejected sexual autonomy standards in the New York Times in part because, in his telling, “extreme” feminists like MacKinnon think heterosexual rape and sex are nearly indistinguishable. The Times has, it is worth noting, made — and corrected — this mistake before.

These writers turn feminist thinkers into props, a special academic form of objectification. They also ignore the texts these writers have produced and the extensively documented etymology of this lie. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the vicious myth started with Rush Limbaugh, nor should we be surprised that anti-feminists would rather grapple with fake criticism than the actual ideas of actual scholars. But we should expect more of our trusted publications.