Having just taught Catharine MacKinnon's _Feminism Unmodified_ in a Law in Literature course, I took special interest in Professor Jenkins' remarks about MacKinnon's efforts to confront pornography in the courts. Prof. Jenkins says that he is against "using legal restraint as a strategy within what is essentially an ideological debate." Of course, one wants to know what he means by ideology (certainly a slippery term), and whether he actually believes that the law and ideology are two independent realms. MacKinnon believes that the general view of women in North America needs to change, and that using the legal system is one way to accomplish that end. Her concern is not so much with the First Amendment as with the Fourteenth, because she hopes to use the liberal acceptance of equality as a means to combat pornography. Expressions that tend to maintain or further the unequal positions of another group (e.g. women) are questionable in light of the Fourteenth amendment, in MacKinnon's view. Her appeal to the law brings all sorts of things, including pornography, into this debate, and extends the debate to many areas of culture, including advertising, "hate speech," soap operas, and popular fiction, to name a few. Prof. Jenkins' "interventions," taking place in university classes, pale in comparison. I trust Prof. Jenkins isn't suggesting only an elite approach, one restricted to a small portion of the academic community, and one that grants special status to "aesthetic works," as he calls them. Talk of "intervention" does not have the tone of protest that MacKinnon's works do. Ronald Dworkin's recent review (_The New York Review of Books_, Oct. 21) of MacKinnon's _Only Words_ also wants to make a a special case for works of "artistic value," such as "classic pornography" (e.g. D.H. Lawrence's novels). While Dworkin's arguments against MacKinnon are trenchant and mostly convincing, he does say at the outset that he feels that one of the great barriers to sexual equality (a phrase MacKinnon would not accept, given that she sees women as a class not a gender) is popular culture. He says, "No doubt mass culture is in various ways an obstacle to sexual equality, but the most popular forms of that culture -- the view of women presented in soap operas and commercials, for example -- are much greater obstacles to that equality than the dirty films watched by a small minority." This is a charge that should strike home to the encomiasts of popular culture who have written eloquently to this list. I look forward to the defense. Bruce Krajewski Department of English and Film Studies Laurentian University Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6 CANADA Email: [log in to unmask]