SOURCE: Golding, Sue. “Devils and Deep Blue Seas.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 305 (3 June 1994): 45.

In the following review, Golding explores MacKinnon's concept of free speech as presented in Only Words, focusing on the question of speech versus action as it relates to pornography.

Catharine MacKinnon is a woman who knows evil when she sees it. Her mission (and ours, should we choose to accept it) is to search out and destroy this evil; to go where no man has gone before and snuff it out at its root.

She calls this evil: pornography; though at times she interchanges it with the words “men” or “them” or “penis” or “liberals” or “postmodernists” or “violence against women” or “sexual abuse” or simply “rape”. With all the innocence of a courtroom lawyer but—oddly enough, and despite her years of legal training—without the air-tight logic of one, she pretends not...