Love & Passion Quote by Catharine MacKinnon

MacKinnon’s line is designed to detonate the cozy liberal fiction that “consent” is a clean, binary switch. By calling it “politically” rape, she signals she’s not making a narrow criminal-law claim about force or a courtroom burden of proof. She’s naming a structural reality: sex can be formally agreed to and still experienced as coercive when the conditions around it are saturated with inequality, fear, dependence, or social punishment for saying no.

The bluntness is the point. “I call it rape” is a rhetorical seizure of the term’s moral gravity, an attempt to drag private experience into public accounting. The subtext is that women’s “yes” is often negotiated under unequal stakes: job security, reputational risk, physical safety, emotional retaliation. “Feels violated” is doing heavy work too. MacKinnon elevates subjective aftermath as evidence of harm, implicitly challenging institutions that treat women’s interior reality as unreliable unless it is paired with visible injuries or perfect resistance.

Context matters: MacKinnon’s broader project (from sexual harassment doctrine to critiques of pornography) argues that liberal categories like choice and neutrality can mask domination. This quote compresses that argument into one incendiary sentence, and it invites the predictable backlash: that it collapses distinctions, that it substitutes feeling for fact, that it risks expanding “rape” until it loses specificity. MacKinnon courts that risk because provocation is part of the strategy. She’s forcing a reckoning with how often “consensual sex” functions as a legal alibi for power.