As in her prior work, MacKinnon is caustic about the damage done by the traditional liberal distinction between a "public sphere" and a "private sphere," a distinction that insulates marital rape and domestic violence from public view and makes people think it isn't political. "Why isn't this political?... The fact that you may know your assailant does not mean that your membership in a group chosen for violation is irrelevant to your abuse. It is still systematic and group-based. It...is defined by the distribution of power in society."

In the two most deeply troubling articles in the collection, "Genocide's Sexuality" and "Women's September 11th," MacKinnon examines the internationally accepted definitions of genocide and terrorism, and argues that many acts of men against women meet one or both of these definitions. As defined under the UN convention on genocide, genocide is either killing or inflicting serious bodily or mental harm on members of a group, with intent to destroy that group either entirely or in part. The groups mentioned are "national, ethnical, racial, or religious" groups: So in that sense violence against women clearly doesn't qualify. On other grounds, however, one could argue that a great part of violence against women does involve a similar infliction of "serious harm" on women because they are women, and its aim can be said to be to destroy "in part"--for "destroy," if mental harm is sufficient for genocide, must mean not "kill" but "remove from the ranks of the fully human"--something that happens to women all the time.

Examining a wide range of cases in which rape occurs in the context of a recognized genocide (including both the Holocaust and the Bosnian conflict), MacKinnon argues that these rapes are not sui generis. Similar violations take place all the time. "In this light, what rape does in genocide is what it does the rest of the time: ruins identity, marks who you are as less, as damaged, hence devastates community, the glue of group." It's convenient not to notice a genocide this dispersed, this multinational, this perpetual. MacKinnon summons the international community to notice, and to grapple with the question of how to dignify violence against women as an atrocity worthy of the name. "If women were seen to be a group, capable of destruction as such, the term genocide would be apt for violence against women as well. But that is a big if."

Terrorism, she believes, is another concept that needs to be recast with women's lives in view. In confronting the reality of terrorism after 9/11, the international community had to find ways to conceptualize and condemn a new sort of organized violence that didn't fit previous definitions of war. It did so--but, again, it didn't notice the implications of the new concepts for the lives of women. Terrorism is unlike war in that the perpetrators are non-state actors who are not combatants in a formally declared conflict. "Common elements include premeditation rather than spontaneity, ideological and political rather than criminal motive, civilian targets (sometimes termed 'innocents'), and subnational group agents. What about violence against women fails to qualify?" A lot of this violence, including gang rapes and much stalking and sexual harassment, and most trafficking, is planned. Its victims are "innocents"--aren't they? And surely the status of women in relation to men is "political"--isn't it? And once again, the motives of men are not just those of the isolated criminal "sicko"; they are often quite fully ideological, expressing a view that women are there for men's use and control. What the precise consequences of the recognition of these similarities should be for law are not exhaustively developed. But one thing is very clear: States that make a big deal of saying that they will do this or that to states that "harbor terrorists" and yet fail to have the slightest interest in states that don't enforce laws forbidding violence against women are hypocritical. MacKinnon's aim is to expose this hypocrisy and get people involved in seeking creative legal remedies, acknowledging, as they do so, that women are full-fledged human beings deserving of the dignity of legal protections: "When will women be human? When?"

Throughout the book MacKinnon reasserts the conception of equality that has been, so far, her most influential contribution to legal thought. Similarity of treatment, she has argued throughout her work, is not sufficient for the true "equal protection" of the laws. Mere formal equality often masks, or even reinforces, underlying inequalities. We need to think, instead, of the idea of freedom from hierarchy, from domination and subordination. This insight had been influential in the law of race prior to MacKinnon's work. Thus, laws against miscegenation were defended on the ground that they treated blacks and whites similarly: Blacks can't marry whites, and whites can't marry blacks. The Supreme Court, however, invalidated those laws under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, saying that they upheld a regime of "White Supremacy." MacKinnon makes a parallel move in the area of sex: To deny women benefits that they need in order to function as equals (medical pregnancy benefits, for example) is to violate equal protection, even when the treatment of men and women is similar (no men get pregnancy benefits, and no women get them either). This insight has shaped legal thinking about sex equality, sexual harassment and the nature of the equal protection clause. It is widely agreed, for example, that MacKinnon's Sexual Harassment of Working Women is one of the most influential books by a legal academic, in terms of its actual influence on the law. The present book helpfully explains her equality theory again and shows how it operates in a range of international contexts.

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