Justice & Law Quote by Catharine MacKinnon

MacKinnon is twisting the knife where polite liberalism most wants a bandage. By ventriloquizing rapists in prison - “the dumbest thing that ever happened” - she forces readers to sit with a chilling premise: that sexual violence isn’t an alien pathology but an intensification of norms many men are taught to treat as ordinary. The line’s power comes from its deliberate proximity to blasphemy. It doesn’t flatter “good guys.” It destabilizes the comforting boundary between “rape” and “sex” by asking how often consent is assumed, worn down, coerced, or ignored, then retroactively renamed.

The subtext is prosecutorial: the carceral system becomes a mirror, not a moral solution. “The only difference is they got caught” isn’t primarily a claim about individual guilt; it’s an indictment of a culture that normalizes entitlement while treating punishment as the main ethical sorting mechanism. She’s pointing at the continuum - from harassment to pressure to assault - and suggesting the legal category “rape” is too narrow to capture how common coercive dynamics are, especially when women’s reluctance is socially scripted as part of the game.

Context matters: MacKinnon’s work in the 1970s-90s argued that law often reflects male power rather than restrains it, and that “consent” can be compromised by inequality. The final hedge - “It may also be true” - is rhetorical judo. It pretends modesty while daring the reader to deny it, because denial requires defending the everyday behaviors she’s quietly putting on trial.