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In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.
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These words were quoted by the conservative writer Cal Thomas as coming from Professing Feminism, a book which he mistakenly ascribed to Catharine MacKinnon. The passage does appear in that book, but is given as the author's characterization of MacKinnon's views rather than a direct quotation.
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Instead MacKinnon argues that heterosexuality "institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission" (1982) and that "Sexual access is regularly forced or pressured or routinized beyond denial" (1991).

 

Catharine MacKinnon

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Men who are in prison for rape think it's the dumbest thing that ever happened... It isn't just a miscarriage of justice; they were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. That view is nonremorseful and not rehabilitative. It may also be true. It seems to me we have here a convergence between the rapist's view of what he has done and the victim's perspective on what was done to her. That is, for both, their ordinary experiences of heterosexual intercourse and the act of rape have something in common. Now this gets us into intense trouble. because that's exactly how judges and juries see it who refuse to convict men accused of rape. A rape victim has to prove that it was not intercourse. She has to show that there was force and she resisted, because if there was sex, consent is inferred. Finders of fact look for "more force than usual during the preliminaries." Rape is defined by distinction from intercourse—not nonviolence, intercourse. They ask, does this even look more like f**king or like rape? But what is their standard for sex, and is this question asked from the woman's point of view? The level of force is not adjudicated at her point of violation; it is adjudicated at the standard of the normal level of force. Who sets this standard?"

 

Catharine MacKinnon

 

Michael Moorcock: Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven't found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?
Dworkin: No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say that, then or ever.… My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse — it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman.

 

Andrea Dworkin

 

”Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance.”

 

Catharine MacKinnon

 

The truth is that both sexes participate in unwanted sexual activity. A feminist who was brave enough to ask these broad-based questions of both sexes astonished herself to discover that 94 percent of the men (as well as 98 percent of the women) said they had an unwanted sexual activity by the time they were in college. Even more surprising was her finding, reported in the Journal of Sex Research, that 63 percent of the men and 46 percent of the women said they had experienced unwanted intercourse. By feminist definitions of rape as unwanted sex, virtually everybody has been raped. And that’s how rape begins to look like an epidemic. It’s also how rape gets trivialized.

 

Warren Farrell

 

The idea that feminism is the first group that has ever denounced rape is a gross libel to men. Throughout history, rape has been condemned by honorable men. Honorable men do not murder; honorable men do not steal; honorable men do not rape. It goes all the way back through history. Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia caused the fall of the tyrants and the beginning of the Roman Republic. The idea that somehow suddenly feminism miraculously found out that women were being exploited and raped throughout history is ridiculous.

 

Camille Paglia