Pornography and Public Reason

To liberals, speech must never be sacrificed for other social goals. But liberalism has never understood that the free speech of men silences the free speech of women. It is the same social goal, just other people. This is what a real inequality, a real conflict, a real disparity in social power looks like. The law of the First Amendment compre hends that freedom of expression, in the abstract, is a system, but it fails to compre hend that sexism (and racism), in the concrete, are also systems. —Catharine A. MacKinnon1