Nagel Doesn't Nail It

I ran across a rather odd bit near at the end of Thomas Nagel's mild review of Women's Lives, Men's Laws, a Catharine MacKinnon collection. I'll get to it in a second.

I call the review mild because Nagel has fundamental differences with MacKinnon but throughout most of it either agrees with her or disagrees on minor, technical issues. Understatement may be preferable to overstatement, but this is more a case of missing the boat.

After taking it easy, his final paragraph begins "MacKinnon’s anti-liberal credo needs to be addressed seriously." Precisely, so why does Nagel wait until the final paragraph to do it, and then only in generalities? He speaks up for "personal autonomy" and notes MacKinnon's policies will lead to "tyranny in the name of equality" (I would have said "tyranny instead of equality") but seems to cede that she's got good ideas that simply go too far--an argument that plays into her claims, rather than refuting them.

Earlier, in comparing one radical critique of liberal society (Marx's) to another (MacKinnon's), Nagel notes Marx's opposition to private property and due process. I'm guessing Nagel would have no trouble stating this is foolish in theory and disastrous in practice. Why then can't he come out and say MacKinnon has rotten ideas based on a faulty view of the world? Is a top-notch thinker like Nagel so cowed by gender politics that he's afraid to appear to be on the wrong side of certain issues for even a second? MacKinnon is a demagogue who throws up raped and dead bodies of women at her opponents, and, if anything, should be treated with contempt for this, not caution.

But here's the bit in the review that got to me:

What about female sexual pleasure? MacKinnon mentions it only once, in a riposte to Judge Richard Posner’s unwise claim that men have a stronger sex drive than women. This, she says ignores "the clitoral orgasm, which, once it gets going, goes on for weeks, and no man can keep up with it, to no end of the frustration of some. (This underlies the often nasty edge to the query 'Did you come?,' when it means, aren’t you done yet? I am.')"

What is going on in Nagel's mind here (a question he should appreciate)? I'm not entirely sure why he's quoting her (read the whole thing for context--it seems to be about how she views sex differently from others); regardless, why call it a "riposte" when it amounts to, in classic MacKinnon style, hyperbolic nonsense, without in any way replying to Posner's "unwise" claim?