Letters to the Editor

My lunch with an antifeminist pundit Kate O'Beirne, author of the new book "Women Who Make the World Worse," says most women don't want the things feminists are fighting for. By Rebecca Traister [2006-01-17]

• MacKinnon is misquoted in this article. Where is the correction?

  Here's Rebecca Traister, preparing to ask a question for O'Bierne about a "quotation" from Catharine MacKinnon in her book:

  Yes. The MacKinnon quote about how all heterosexual intercourse is rape is old news. There has been a whole other wave of sex-positive feminism in part in response to ideas like that. ...

  In fact, the "quote" reported here as "old news" is a fabrication. It does not exist. Catharine MacKinnon never said this, although the view is commonly (erroneously) attributed to her. The one notorious example in which she was "quoted" as saying this was a column by Cal Thomas in March 1999, in which he quoted a passage from Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge giving this (mistaken) gloss of MacKinnon's views, and then (apparently too lazy to pick up the book to get his citations straight) mistakenly claimed that MacKinnon was the author of the book and that the quotation was in her own words.

  This has already been pointed out to Salon twice in the letters in response to the article, within hours of the publication of this story (letter from "Anonymous" at 9:36pm, Jan 16; letter from Mike Connell at 4:19pm, January 17th). A couple weeks ago The New York Times book review publicly posted a correction to Ana Marie Cox's review of O'Bierne's book, which committed a simlar hower. Why hasn't Salon published a similar correction to this interview, which contains a plain misstatement of fact?

  For more information, see the Snopes.com article at http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm and the welcome, if belated, editorial note to the New York Times book review at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/books/review/15cox.html

  -- Rad Geek
  [Read Rad Geek's other letters]
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