'Sexual harassment is sexual slavery'

Rajashri Dasgupta / Jan 30, 2009, 00:00 IST

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Catharine A MacKinnon pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and created ordinances recognising pornography as a civil rights violation.

Catharine A MacKinnon, professor of law, specialises in sex equality issues under international and constitutional law. She pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and created ordinances recognising pornography as a civil rights violation. Her scholarly works include Women Lives, Men's Laws and Are Women Human? She spoke to Rajashri Dasgupta:
How did you develop the concept of sexual harassment?
I created the legal framework for sexual harassment in 1972, a concept that did not exist before. Based on what women said to me, i created a legal concept for that reality and established it in law.
Sexual harassment is being forced to have sexual interaction that you don't want to have. It's in an environment where a woman is always being sexually aggressed against and has to tolerate that, or she has no job. This is discrimination on the basis of sex, a violation of equality rights. The Supreme Court of India has accepted this.

You also developed the notion of quid pro quo.
It's another form of sexual harassment when you are forced to trade explicit sexual favours for job benefits. When nothing is done about sexual harassment, it turns every job for women into prostitution.
How do you equate an act of discrimination against women to selling sex?
Because to survive women have to deliver sexually. Sexual harassment is a higher class level of the prostitution problem male domination, female subordination, and the dynamics is sexual. If you are a woman you have to deliver sex to men, or they do not allow you to survive. This is sexual slavery.

This is a position where women are seen as perpetually helpless and powerless and men the relentless predator.
The reality is whether it is sexual harassment at work, or selling sex, it is the same problem. It is sex-based inequality at different levels of society. It takes different forms at different class settings. Women are not being allowed to survive, to do anything except use their sex.
You also created a law against pornography.
Pornography is an arm of prostitution. To make pornography out of women is to make a prostitute out of them. The structure of the pornography industry is exploitative, a form of trafficking, engaged in organised crime where pimps are making money. And just as Andrea Dworkin and i created the idea of criminalising the demand for prostitution, we created the idea of having civil remedy against pornography.
How does the remedy operate?
We want to create a law that allows women to sue pornographers for the money they make by coercing them into pornography. But this was found a violation of freedom of speech in the US and it does not exist there but it could here. If women could prove that they were assaulted because of pornography, which also happens, they could get rehabilitation and compensation.

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