Week 4

Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination

- According to the approach to sex equality, equality is an

equivalence, not a distinction, and sex is a distinction.
- Two paths form from viewing sex equality like this: be the same as
men or be different to men.
- MaKinnon’s point is that to treat issues of sex equality as
sameness and difference is to take a particular approach.
- Gender neutrality is the male standard - like how unisex clothes
are actually just shaped to fit a male body and termed ‘unisex’ for
other reasons.
- Approaching sex discrimination in this way-as if sex questions are
difference questions and equality questions are sameness
questions-provides two ways for the law to hold women to a male
standard and call that sex equality.
- Pregnancy therefore is a difference. Difference doctrine says it is
sex discrimination to give women what we need, because only
women need it. It is not sex discrimination not to give women what
we need because then only women will not get what we need
- The difference approach misses the fact that hierarchy of power
produces real as well as fantasied differences, differences that are
also inequalities. Why should you have to be the same as a man to
get what a man gets simply because he is one? Why does maleness
provide an original entitlement, not questioned on the basis of its
gender, so that it is women-women who want to make a case of
unequal treatment in a world men have made in their image (this is
really the part Ar- istotle missed)-who have to show in effect that
they are men in every relevant respect, unfortunately mistaken for
women on the ba- sis of an accident of birth?
- Unequal power creates both the appearance and the reality of sex
differences along the same lines as it creates its sex inequalities.
- The special benefits side of the difference approach has also not
compensated for the differential of being second class. Under its
double standard, women who stand to inherit something when their
husbands die have gotten the exclusion of a small percentage of the
inheritance tax, to the tune of Justice Douglas waxing eloquent
about the difficulties of all women's economic situation.
- The work of Carol Gilligan on gender differences in moral
reasoning gives it a lot of dignity, but she achieves for moral
reasoning what the special protection rule achieves in law: the
affirmative rather than the negative valuation of that which has
accurately distinguished women from men, by making it seem as
though those attri- butes, with their consequences, really are
somehow ours, rather than what male supremacy has attributed to
us for its own use.
- For women to affirm difference, when difference means
dominance, as it does with gender, means to affirm the qualities
and characteristics of powerlessness.
- Gender might not even code as dif- ference, might not mean
distinction epistemologically, were it not for
its consequences for social power. - dominance approach.
- The dominance approach centers on the most sex-differential
abuses of women as a gender, abuses that sex equality law in its
dif- ference garb could not confront. It is based on a reality about
which little of a systematic nature was known before 1970, a reality
that calls for a new conception of the problem of sex inequality.
- If gender were merely a question of difference, sex inequality
would be a problem of mere sexism, of mistaken dif- ferentiation, of
inaccurate categorization of individuals. This is what the difference
approach thinks it is and is therefore sensitive to. But if gender is
an inequality first, constructed as a socially relevant dif-
ferentiation in order to keep that inequality in place, then sex in-
equality questions are questions of systematic dominance, of male
supremacy, which is not at all abstract and is anything but a
mistake.
- Seeing sex equality questions as matters of reasonable or
unreasonable classification is part of the way male dominance is
expressed in law.
- Give women equal power in social life. Let what we say mat- ter,
then we will discourse on questions of morality.

Lecture
- 1) Firstly, there was difference, then there was division, and then
came dominance - difference first model
- 2) Firstly, there was violence and dominance, then there came
division and then difference - dominance first model.
- MacKinnon criticises the Difference First Model and advocated for the
Dominance First.
- There is not a difference between men and women, but the law
enacts a difference like the racism-created race view.
- The variation between us is harmless; the boundaries created
between races were conceptualised to rationalise exploitative
practices with theories that state the ‘other’ as inferior.
- There exists variation in sex, but structuring this variation s a
grounds for difference is a choice - a political choice.
- Domination or oppression creates the reality it pervade, it does not
stem fro a natural difference, a natural dominance.
- Variation is sex, difference is gender (created difference to
maintain a theory of dominance).
- Women are women now, and men are men now because it allows us to place
them in a category - in a table of privilege. This links to race as well as
transgender issues.
- MacKinnon reserves the word ‘difference’ for the difference in our
social position - difference does not just mean variation, such as the
variation between sexes.
- Classifiable groups.
- Eye colour, sex, height = variation, gender, race, sexuality =
difference (because it is socially constructed). Some social
constructs have to be reclaimed, such as being a POC, being gay,
being a woman in order to address oppression and domination
because the ‘standard’ is white, heterosexual, male. Just because
the social construct, the difference, has been reclaimed is not sufficient
to claim it is a difference.
- Domination is the hierarchy itself.
- On conscription - MacKinnon makes a point of agency or
autonomy. Where the draft is seen as a requirement of citizenship,
the deny the draft is to deny citizenship partly.
- Feminism is against the draft anyway.
- Systemic sexism: sexism is built into the social world, or the
social systems. It is not a property of individual people or actions,
but of social structures. Pretty much synonymous with structural
sexism.
- Systematic sexism: sexism that is thoroughgoing. It is not an
accident or a one-off. It is not just a mistake; a mistake is leaving
the house without keys, the systematic relegation of women to
second-kind status is not that kind of thing.
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