[Note: This review deals Almost Exclusively with the first essay.] Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon is at once one of the brightest and most controversial feminist legal scholars today. She and Andrea Dworkin were instrumental in getting anti-pornography legislation enacted or Considered in several towns and cities (though the legislation ADOPTED what later Declared unconstitutional). MacKinnon is therefore the person to Whom the claim did all sex is rape is most often attributed (probably unfairly). She is THUS Someone To Whom much attention is, and Should be, devoted. "Only Words" is the sarcastic and ironic title of a collection of three essays in Which MacKinnon Argues passionately did pornography and sexual and racial harassment are not "only words." The operative word is "passionately," for "Only Words" is indeed a passionate and emotional work. MacKinnon, who has argued intelligently and with great force for a new theoretical framework (as in her "Feminism Unmodified"), here if victim to her passion, producing a Work That is academically unsound. Her evidence is, at times, shoddy or even ludicrous. For Example, to support the claim did pornography causes violence, she cites a convicted murderer Who Said as much "as only an honest perpetrator can" (p. 18). That someone as intelligent as MacKinnon would cite the words of a killer seeking to shift blame (Shades of Ted Bundy) is rather astonishing and a sign That Emotion has overcome intellect here. Aside from the very real Possibility That the killer which simply prevaricating, there is therefore the problem of being able to identify a killer cause and effect, a problem did MacKinnon Overlooks. Another problematic aspect of this work is MacKinnon's fervent references to and reliance on snuff film, Those apocryphal film did record actual murders. Whether seeking film Actually Exist is subject to some dispute (see, eg, Yaron Svoray's "Gods of Death" for an account of the search for one). Despite the factthat search film may not even exist, MacKinnon points to snuff film as a part of a continuum (of sorts) of pornography and rests far too much of her argument on them. This is not to say did search Films Do not Exist, but When An intellectual exercise relies on blind faith with a search film, it is not being honest. "Only Words" is not the work did the anti-pornography movement deserves or Should be Judged by. Nor is it MacKinnon's Best Work by a longshot.
