Assault By Paragraph

By Richard Lacayo

Anyone who doubts that words have consequences ought to talk to the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon. Certainly her words have had consequences. When Canada's Supreme Court decided to uphold the nation's toughened obscenity laws two years ago, they were moved in large part by MacKinnon's argument that pornography prompts men to a whole panoply of crimes against women, from gender discrimination to outright rape.

At the heart of her thinking is the notion that pornography is literally a form of assault by expression, something like saying "Kill!" to a trained attack dog. "Protecting pornography means protecting sexual abuse as speech," MacKinnon writes in her latest book, Only Words (Harvard University Press; $14.95). "Sooner or later, in one way or another, the consumers want to live out the pornography further in three dimensions."

For more proof that words have consequences, there is Carlin Romano, book critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer. His Nov. 15 review of MacKinnon's work in the left-leaning weekly the Nation set off a war of words that is reaching new heights of animosity. Romano, a former philosophy instructor, opened his review with a hypothetical proposition. "Suppose I decide to rape Catharine MacKinnon before reviewing her book. Because I'm uncertain whether she understands the difference between being raped and being exposed to pornography, I consider it required research for my critique of her manifesto . . ."

MacKinnon felt more than insulted. She felt . . . well, raped. "He had me where he wanted me," she told TIME last week. "He wants me as a violated woman with her legs spread. He needed me there before he could address my work." And the reviewer? "She's claiming a book review equals rape," says Romano. "That's quite a stretch."

Romano insists his opening paragraphs were simply a gambit to make plain the distinction between representations of an act and the act itself. As his review continues, he decides against the rape -- "People simply won't understand" -- but goes on to posit an imaginary reviewer, named Dworkin Hentoff, who likewise decides to rape MacKinnon, with the difference that he follows through. Both Romano and Hentoff are arrested for rape. But wait, Romano protests in his cell, I didn't do it. I just imagined it. Isn't there a difference?

Even if that much is granted, Romano's rhetorical conceit has brought dozens of mostly angry letters to the Nation, demands for an apology from two men's antirape groups and an escalating campaign of bitter counterpunching from MacKinnon and her supporters. "Carlin Romano should be held accountable for what he did," MacKinnon threatened last week in the Washington Post. "There are a lot of people out there, and a lot of ways that can be done."

Further vengeful hints have come from MacKinnon's companion Jeffrey Masson, the critic of Freudian orthodoxy whose libel suit last year against New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm hinged in its own way on the importance of maintaining distinctions between what actually happens and what is merely imagined. (He charged that in her profile of him, Malcolm had invented scenes and quotes.) Masson assured Romano in a letter that "I am not threatening you." That was just before he added, "I want you to know, if there is ever anything I can do to hurt your career, I will do it."

MacKinnon insists she recognizes that representations are not literally the same as realities. "The book does not say that to talk about a thing is the same as doing the thing," she says. But she doesn't always resist the opportunity to court confusion between the two. "Please disavow this rape of me in your name," she asked Nat Hentoff, the syndicated columnist and hard- line defender of the First Amendment, whose last name Romano had borrowed for his fictional reviewer. (The Dworkin part Romano lifted from another First Amendment stalwart, the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin.) Hentoff complied by publishing a column angrily doing just that. "Rape also means plundering or pillaging," he wrote. "Or using brutishness to humiliate someone."

"People claim I dehumanized her," Romano complains. "In fact, I did worse -- I took her seriously. The worst thing that can happen to a flamboyant claim is to be tested." To put it another way, MacKinnon's contention that depictions of sex can be equivalent to sexual assaults may come as news to women who have suffered the atrocity of an actual rape. When Romano charges that what he sees as her representation-equals-reality thesis threatens to trivialize what such women have endured, MacKinnon replies that Romano is merely pointing to their suffering as a diversion from his own offense against them. It could also be that both of them are simply writers whose sensitivity to the word rape is matched at times by their insensitivity to it.

With reporting by BONNIE ANGELO/NEW YORK