It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes a small group of privileged women who align themselves with systems that oppress other women.
Catharine Mackinnon highlights the complicity of a minority of elite women who, by supporting patriarchal structures, gain power and privilege at the expense of the majority of women. This statement underscores the idea that not all women are united in the struggle for gender equality, as some may choose to elevate their status by aligning with oppressive forces, thus perpetuating the very systems that undermine women's rights.
In practice
This quote can be used in a women's rights seminar to discuss the complexities of female empowerment.
Stopped as attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequaltiy between men and women.
So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.
Feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.
Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.
Throughout our history each and every generation has expanded upon the freedoms won by their parents and grandparents. Each and every generation has removed some of the barriers to full participation in the American dream. And the next great barrier standing before our generation is the prohibition on marriage for same-sex couples
Why is it that no one understands me and everybody likes me
We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust.
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship-only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.
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