SOURCE: Kimball, Roger. “Sex in the Twilight Zone: Catharine MacKinnon's Crusade.” New Criterion 12, no. 2 (October 1993): 11-16.

In the following essay, Kimball summarizes MacKinnon's case against pornography, describing her arguments as obsessive and extreme as well as concluding that MacKinnon exhibits a reductive view of human behavior.

Speaking about pornography is not like anything else. It is crazier. … It makes grown men cry and smart people stupid.

—Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified

Every idea is an incitement.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

The demand for excessive freedom is a curious thing. Beginning in wholesale rebellion against restraint, it soon sets about erecting its own restraints—often harsher and more irrational than those it intended to replace. What was meant to shatter the bonds of convention and establish liberty ends up forging a new set of tyrannous conventions, all the more noxious for being imposed in the name of freedom.

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