Although earlier writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Simone de Beauvoir, had offered "a rich description of the variables and locales of sexism," they had not produced a general theory of structural exploitation based on sex-based hierarchy.

In unequal societies, gender and with it sexual desire and kinship structures, like value and with it acquisitiveness and the forms of property ownership, are considered presocial, part of the natural world, primordial or magical or aboriginal.

... By rejecting persuasive methodologies simply because they have been used to secure the assent of women to the male experience and viewpoint, MacKinnon ultimately dooms her enterprise.

"[3] Jill Vickers accuses MacKinnon of failing to subject her theory to her own critique; that is, of not taking into account the plurality of contexts within which sexism occurs, thereby "globalizing and naturalizing the worst features of her own society.

"[9] Kathryn Abrams echoes this critique, arguing that MacKinnon assimilates Native American women into a "cross-cultural constant" that is "solipsistic and even manipulative."

[14] Judith Baer writes that Toward a Feminist Theory of the State "establishes MacKinnon as the preeminent figure within the scholarly subfield of feminist jurisprudence", although she takes issue with MacKinnon's assertion that the First Amendment protects pornography that "teaches men to degrade and dehumanize women ... Of course, it does not; constitutional doctrine puts obscene material outside the scope of freedom of expression and explicitly includes the preservation of individual morality among the state's legitimate concerns.

Brown called the work "flatly dated," developed at "the dawn of feminism's second wave ... framed by a political-intellectual context that no longer exists -- a male Marxist monopoly on radical social discourse.

"By exposing and correcting the patriarchal values underlying nationalism and justice, Catharine MacKinnon causes an earthquake in our thinking that rearranges every part of our intellectual landscape.