Are Women Human? and other international dialogues

Are Women Human? and other international dialogues By Catharine A. MacKinnon BOOK INFO Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues Catharine A. MacKinnon Belknap Press, 2006.

Reviewed by Carol Anne Douglas

Do women have human rights? First, states and international bodies-that is, in most cases, men-would have to see women as human, which they don't now seem to do. In Are Women Human! radical feminist theorist Catharine A. MacKinnon suggests that since states have failed to recognize women's equality, women should perhaps have recourse to international human rights laws. This book is a new collection of MacKinnon 's speeches and essays, with thought-provoking introductory and concluding chapters. MacKinnon has written many books, but she always has new insights.

Based on Aristotle's limited idea of equality, traditional concepts of rights assume that people have equal rights only insofar as they are similar, MacKinnon points out. White men who enacted the laws in the United States and Europe saw themselves as the standard: They did not see white women or women of color, children, poor men or men of color as equals. Even now, most rights laws are based on the concept of similarity; for example, pregnancy, a condition that men don't share, often isn't covered. Current human rights laws don't account for violations of women as women-that is, rape, battering and pornography. Although men sometimes commit those crimes against other men, that is, as MacKinnon has said, done as a means of degrading them by treating them like women.

If men saw women as human, would those men so often violate them and even enjoy violating them? MacKinnon asks. (I fear that I'm cynical enough to say, yes, that's part of the fun-many people, predominantly men, enjoy causing pain to other humans. But the more optimistic side of me says to go along with MacKinnon and imagine that it's possible to change men's cruelest practices or at least to convince some governmental bodies to recognize them as human rights violations.)

MacKinnon notes that some theorists now argue that states have become outmoded as a result of globalization. Multinational corporations, organized crime and religions have accumulated considerable power. Does that mean the masculinity of the laws has withered away, or has it just transcended its national form? MacKinnon asks.

Legal experts used to consider torture a violation of international law only when states did it, and to believe that only states could violate human rights. But that concept is changing, MacKinnon says. She asks crucial questions. If we can see that al Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center violated international law, even though al Qaeda isn't a state, why can't we see that rape and battering are violations of human rights? If genocidal rapes in Bosnia and Rwanda were violations of human rights, isn't all rape a violation of human rights?

"Men violently dominating other men for control of states is called war; men violently dominating women is relegated to peace," MacKinnon writes.

Some international compacts-the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women and the African Protocol on the Rights of Women-recognize violence against women as discrimination against women. The Inter- American Convention says "every woman. . . has the right to be free from violence in the public and private spheres." The Protocol says its signatory nations must enact and enforce laws against "unwanted or forced sex. . .whether in private or in public." These compacts have not been enforced, but they at least provide a theoretical basis for real equality, MacKinnon says. However, a weakness of CEDAW is that its preamble bases it in morality, which can be seen as debatable, she writes. CEDAW does not say that women's inequality is a lie, that there is no justification for it.

Laws on rape affect perceptions and actions both in the everyday world and in recognized group conflicts, MacKinnon says. "Emphasis on nonconsent as definitive of rape sees the crime fundamentally as a deprivation of sexual freedom," whereas emphasis on coercion sees the crime as a crime of inequality. She looks at the International Criminal Tribunals' decisions on rape in the genocides in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. In its first decision, Akeyasu, the Rwanda tribunal said rape "is a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed on a person in circumstances which are coercive." The decision did not limit rape to penetration. It said: "The Chamber [the tribunal] considers that rape is a form of aggression and that the central elements of rape cannot be captured in a mechanical description of objects and body parts." The tribunal went further: "coercive circumstance need not be evidenced by a show of physical force" but "can be inherent in circumstances like armed conflict or military presence of threatening forces on an ethnic basis."