Speech & Harm: Controversies over Free Speech Edited by Ishani Maitra | Mary Kate McGowan New York NY:  Oxford University Press, 2012

To put into context this review of the neatly edited collection of essays, Speech & Harm: Controversies over Free Speech, you should know that there was a time I considered Catharine MacKinnon one of the most dangerous women in America. In the early 1990s, I was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida - and a free speech stalwart - while anti-pornography crusader MacKinnon and her erstwhile partner-in-whine, Andrea Dworkin, were working the opposite side of the First Amendment street. As ACLU director, I defended free speech for all, even offensive speech, and still believe it is the best possible way to protect society from governmental repression. MacKinnon and Dworkin fought for a giant First Amendment carve-out for pornography and any speech that objectified women as sex objects. For two women who did not like anything dirty, they spent a great deal of time greasing the slippery slope.

Over the intervening decades, MacKinnon's arguments failed to gain a legal foothold in the United States (with the exception of workplace sexual harassment law). Her cause has also since suffered from the ubiquity of pornography on the Web, making legal challenges impractical. For these reasons, MacKinnon's railings today sound more quaint than consequential. MacKinnon fronts this book, edited by Ishani Maitra, associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, and Mary Kate McGowan, professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College, with a high dudgeon foreword recounting for the umpteenth time the harms caused by pornography and calling again for a censorious legal regime of enshrined female victimhood. MacKinnon takes pains to remind readers that it was she and Dworkin who were the groundbreaking expositors of the harm theory of speech, as if due credit has not been properly granted them by subsequent legal scholars and philosophers and she is at risk of being forgotten. (Probably because she's a woman, MacKinnon must guess.)

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