It is for pornography, and not the ideas in it, the women are hurt and penetrated, tied and gagged, undressed and genitally spread and sprayed with lacquer and water so sex pictures can be made.

[1]: 20  Based on this analysis, she proposes a law against pornography, developed with Andrea Dworkin, that defines it as "graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words.

For instance, "requiring Jews to wear yellow stars" is symbolic expression, but because the idea is itself part of the discriminatory pattern, it is not harmless speech.

MacKinnon adduces the example that "courts have not taken chanting 'cunt' at a working woman as conveying the idea 'you have a vagina,' or as expressing eroticism, but rather as pure abuse.

Moreover, the similarities in their function can be seen in the pervasiveness of the confluence of sex and race discrimination: "Examples include: 'Jew faggot,' 'Black bitches suck cock,' 'Niggers are the living evidence that the Indians screwed buffalo,' and the endless references to the penis size of African-American men.

"[1]: 71  The core problem, in MacKinnon's view, is "the substantial lack of recognition that some people get a lot more speech than others," allowing the power distribution to become "more exclusive, coercive, and violent as it has become more and more legally protected.

"[1]: 72  As long as the Fourteenth and First Amendments are interpreted "negatively"—that is, prohibiting violations by government—instead of "chartering legal intervention for social change," inequality of power will continue to persist or deepen.

Kakutani adds that the statistics cited by MacKinnon are "highly debatable", and questions her "portrayal of women as helpless victims coerced by sadistic men.

"[2] In the United Kingdom, The Independent derided Only Words for its insistence "immemorial victim status for all females", its "lurid and unsupported statistics", and its "contemptuous handling of other individuals' freedom of choice.

"[3] In the conservative magazine The New Criterion, Roger Kimball criticizes "MacKinnon's tendency to treat her central categories as infinitely elastic metaphors," and her "breathtakingly simplistic and reductive view of human behavior."

"[6] In response from its readers, The Nation received an unusually high volume of mail, multiple subscription cancellations, and calls from two antirape groups for an apology, which it did not issue.

Dworkin also rejects MacKinnon's argument that women have not only a constitutional right to free speech, but a "right to circumstances that encourage one to speak, and a right that others grasp and respect what one means to say."

[10] In contrast, Susan Salter Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times praised Only Words for "lighting a fire under the complacent acceptance of pornography and inequality, racial and sexual, in this country.

"[15] Leora Tanenbaum laments MacKinnon's "notorious alliance with conservative politicians," who simply find pornography "obscene and immoral, without considering the oppression of women."

Moreover, Tanenbaum challenges MacKinnon's assumption that "all porn models and actresses are coerced by their male employers," noting many women express satisfaction with their work and even direct their own movies.

"[17] In The Threepenny Review, Stuart Klawans writes of Only Words, "Our initial sympathy gives way to discomfort, then pity, then (after a few false hopes) the bleakest horror and despair."