SOURCE: McCabe, David. “Is Pornography ‘Free Speech’?” Commonweal 121, no. 3 (11 February 1994): 22-3.

In the following review, McCabe contends that, although there are some weaknesses in MacKinnon's reasoning in Only Words, the work is “on the whole quite persuasive in arguing that we need to rethink our approach to the pornography debate.”

In case you haven't noticed, the old battle between pornography and community standards of decency is over; decency lost. While it is true that the Supreme Court has devised an elaborate (and largely irrelevant) test for obscenity, for the most part pornography seems to be here to stay. To no one is this fact more disturbing than University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon, the intellectual leader of what has come to be called the feminist critique of pornography. What distinguishes this critique from earlier “standards of decency” arguments is its insistence that pornography be banned because it...