MacKinnon and Young-- Mechanisms of Oppression 

Christine Brittain

            Catherine MacKinnon discusses the issues of sex discrimination inherently lurking beneath the guise of “legal sex equality.”  Readers can best critically interpret MacKinnon’s view of female oppression through two of Iris Young’s Five Faces of Oppression: exploitation and marginalization.

            Young describes exploitation through Marxist terms denoting that one class becomes exploited when its labor disproportionately benefits another class. Young provides an example where women give emotional and sexual benefits, however more frequently do not receive such benefits themselves (Young, 50-51).  MacKinnon’s work focuses less on exploitation of women in particular, but rather how current attempts for “equality” ignore the prevalent past exploitation that clearly affects where women are today socially, professionally and economically.  MacKinnon urges that prior exploitation of women so afflicted with by remaining forced within the confines of the home or workplace necessarily affects how women view their role today as well as how men or other cultures view their role and worth. 

            MacKinnon’s article most speaks from Young’s second face of oppression: marginalization.  In the past, women have been subconsciously pinned into certain parts of social and work life with little opportunity to move up or outside of those realms because specificities like education or perceived rationality have disassociated women from positions of power. Young describes marginalization in terms of the system of labor and the people that it cannot or will not use (Young, 53). Women cannot “legally” be denied a job or fired based on her sex, however, the law’s goals for sex equality inherently deny women certain rights based on their differences.  Because women need maternity leave, the American legal system allows for ways that women can be laid off if they need to go on maternity leave.  Because women are different, women have different needs than men, however vacation time remains the same in many companies or corporations because of the movement towards “equality.”  This supposed equality in reality undermines the female ability to be viewed as a woman in her workplace and rather determines her worth by masculine standards.