“Only Fake Words” : Revisiting Catharine MacKinnon in the Age of Deepfake Pornography

Over 95% of deepfakes contain non-consensual pornographic depictions of women. In the United States, First Amendment jurisprudence has lent credence to the emerging legal argument that deepfakes are immune from prohibition, on the grounds that they qualify as protected speech. In this paper, I revive Catharine MacKinnon’s argument in Only Words (1993) — that pornography should not be protected as speech because it constitutes gender inequality — to demonstrate why her work holds renewed salience in the deepfake age. I advance three distinct claims: firstly, conventional pornography and deepfakes are contiguous in their shared endorsement of sexual coercion. Secondly, deepfake pornography falsely constructs and silences women, which warrants its formal designation as discrimination rather than as constitutionally protected expression. Thirdly, drawing upon G.W.F. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, I illustrate how fully synthetic pornography could constrain women’s sexual freedom in ways unforeseen by MacKinnon’s work, in part due to her myopic focus on the material harm of pornographic production and comparative inattention to how porn structures one’s sense of “self” and “other.” Taken together, I aim to answer the following question: What did MacKinnon get right about pornography, and how can we extend her account to more accurately diagnose novel dangers in the dawning age of artifice?