Daily Inspiration Quote by Catharine MacKinnon

MacKinnon turns the free-speech debate inside out by treating slurs not as “bad ideas” to be countered, but as social weapons whose force depends on inequality. The line’s cleverness is its conditional grammar: “in a society in which equality is a fact.” She’s not describing the world; she’s describing the missing precondition that makes our arguments about speech feel abstract. If equality were structurally real, the language of racial or sexual domination wouldn’t merely be discouraged or “politically incorrect” - it would lose semantic traction. The insult would fail like a punch thrown in zero gravity.

The subtext is blunt: humiliation is not primarily a linguistic phenomenon, it’s a power relation. A slur lands because it rides on credible threats - exclusion, violence, economic penalty, social disbelief - that have been historically organized along race and sex. MacKinnon’s wager is that meaning is partially external to the speaker’s intent; it’s produced by a culture that has already assigned status. That’s why she frames these terms as “assault”: not metaphor, but a claim about how speech can function materially in unequal conditions.

Context matters. MacKinnon emerged from feminist legal battles over sexual harassment and pornography, arguing that law often treats harm as individual offense while ignoring systemic subordination. This sentence is a provocation aimed at liberal comfort: if you insist on defending hateful speech as harmless “words,” you’re also quietly admitting the hierarchy that makes those words intelligible as humiliation. Her ideal endpoint isn’t censorship as a virtue; it’s the withering away of domination’s vocabulary because its social backing collapses.