Andrea Dworkin RIP

http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/09/20/dworkin/index.html

uh, look around you. see all those bazillions of people? obviously humanity's pretty fond of fucking, on the whole.

xpost yes, i thought her marriage sounded wonderful, frankly. and i like getting laid.

It's also depressingly fond of territorial invasion, which is what Dworkin compared it to in the hope that fucking would go away. Her book Scapegoat compared women to the Jews as universal scapegoats, and ended up advocating that women found a sort of Gender Israel. Salon:

"Dworkin's most original and controversial conclusion to all this is that "women need land and guns." Women must reject pacifism and literally create their own militant, separatist territory (or Lebensraum?). As a practical concept, of course, the idea is nothing short of nuts. But even as an exercise in rhetoric it is unconvincing, mainly because it is unclear why Dworkin believes that Womanland would be immune to the temptations of structural power she has just been at such pains to illustrate. If the Israelis are practicing the sadism they learned from anti-Semites on the Palestinians, won't women also find their own scapegoats?"

"Wandering past the marquees, I paused to read an events blackboard. Sitting next to it was an American woman of enormous girth, a sort of greying mannish hippy with a touch of Jerry Garcia about her. I realised with a start that it was Andrea Dworkin, the ultra-feminist who shook me to my core when, in my late 20s, I read her book 'Intercourse' with its thesis that all penetration of women by men is -- while the sexes remain unequal -- violation, and all literature a graph of rape. I eavesdropped long enough to hear her say '...it would probably just play into my megalomaniacal passion for...' She sounded like a much nicer person than her books suggest, although later I read in The Scotsman that she advocates total separation of the genders and a mother's right to execute paedophiles.

"I went to sit on the grass. The sun was shining and some children were playing. An attractive girl came and sat down right between me and Andrea. I never know what to do in situations like this. Do you look admiringly at a sunbathing girl or do you pretend indifference? This time it was much worse, because Andrea Dworkin was sitting right behind the object of my lust! Thank god my 'male gaze' was hidden behind big bulbous blue ski shades."

If she was happy, then I think that sounds pretty great.

If she was happy, I'd rather be miserable.

-- m coleman (lovebugstarsk...), April 11th, 2005 4:04 PM.

Not that I agree with her politics, but if I'd come from her backgroud, I'd probably equate sex with rape as well.

Michael Moorcock: After "Right-Wing Women" and "Ice and Fire" you wrote "Intercourse". Another book which helped me clarify confusions about my own sexual relationships. You argue that attitudes to conventional sexual intercourse enshrine and perpetuate sexual inequality. 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?

Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. 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. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.

The whole issue of intercourse as this culture's penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the "all sex is rape" slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don't think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.

It's important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the "all sex is rape" slander repeatedly over the years, and it's been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.

The entire interview can be found here: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MoorcockInterview.html

Again, I don't agree with everything she said, but I think some of her arguments have been vastly oversimplified.

I would if I was genetically programmed to do so... biological imperatives run pretty deep.

"ferlin/foucault otm: there's a kind of anxious conformist bullying at the root of it, courtesy ppl apparently made nervous that not everyone shares their tastes and drives"

this has nothing to do with my tastes and drives - I was just pointing up the fact that since the reproductive act is so deeply rooted in the human animal, arguing that it should be completely done away with is inherently marginalizing. This is not a "good"/"bad" value judgment thing on my part - its an observation of statistical reality. Whatever segment of society there is that's willing to/desires to abstain from sex for political reasons is gonna be really, really, REALLY tiny.

(as a follow-up to my SF suggestion)

This was long before she was raped and victimized as a prostitute. Sounds like she had an anti-social streak a mile wide. If she'd been born a generation later, she could've shot up a highschool Columbine-style. And that line quoted earlier, "woman need guns and land," echoed vintage Black Panther rhetoric. Another boomer generational voice still trapped in the 60s.

x-post

i wasn't accusin you of doin this shakey

(millie tant has uber-kewl shoes!) (in fact she is v.stylish all over!!)

i mean one said, all right--thats the case, lets be all transgressive and hott about it and one said, well we need to stop--but there is something almost creepy, and v. obv. violently powerful about the cock in cunt fucking---something in that phallocentrism that keeps women in place.

(has anyone been following the exuses and the lack of discourse, and the forgiving of the soliders and the blaming of the victims that has occured wrt to the ca 150 rapes in colorado--that should be on the cover of the new york times.)

buh?

"v. obv. violently powerful about the cock in cunt fucking---something in that phallocentrism that keeps women in place. "

this is baloney. a physical act developed long before the advent of consciousness (much less ideology) doesnt have any inherent political meaning. get one biology book.

eg i'm not exactly sure what events calum's charge of exploitation (re linda lovelace) refers to, but one possible way in which AD "exploited" LL is by ventriloquising her, by converting LL's story into grist for AD's mill, into fuel for her movement and nothing more (instead of giving LL a voice, she silences her) (i've no idea if this represents the facts in the case)

anyway, this ventriloquising/silencing as a power strong writers have - and whatever else she is, dworkin was a very strong writer (hence the intensity of reactions against her)

but i don't think she ever really addressed that

Kinda depends on position and style, no? Man tied up on a bed, woman straddling him: This does not preserve that role for the cock.

That's an interpretive framework, a way of reading the movement of the cock, one that is interesting but does not nec. have any "real" quality to it. It's like associating "green" with "money" and noting how nature displays a lot of green when it thrives and how this indicates that it is natural to accumulate money and wealth.

Needing guns and land is a theme that resonates through the whole of American history. It fits with so many American tropes and tragedies: radical individualism, right wing libertarianism, the gun lobby, "the security state", litigation culture, Waco, the Unabomber, sexual prudishness, even suburban sprawl and the sprawling American body shape... It's all about post-protestant non-conformity, the rhetorical passion of an extreme (and finally fatal) form of individualism.

Maybe Dworkin was more typically American than even people like Twain and Whitman. This idea that you have to fight all the time, that society is your enemy, that you have to split off and form a radical-puritan-utopian community somewhere because normal folks doing normal things are evil and persecute you. She's there on the Mayflower, speeding away from sex and society, she's there at Salem witch-hunting, victimising and then claiming, in turn, to be the ultimate victim. And there's even a bit of Oprah in her strategic compassion.

"a physical act developed long before the advent of consciousness (much less ideology) doesnt have any inherent political meaning"

get one logic book!!

(which is like the most insanely complicated question, but still needed to be addressed)

I think it's pointless to argue about which came first: sex, politics, or consciousness. Just because a sexual act has a biological basis doesn't mean that it can't also be political.

Kinda depends on position and style, no? Man tied up on a bed, woman straddling him: This does not preserve that role for the cock.

Yes, but how many people have sex that way? Not many. But even in the less extreme case of the woman on top, certainly the woman has a lot more agency/initiative than Dworkin is giving her credit for.

implication of the first sentence: that human society will be therefore stratified by the degree to which reproductive sex is deemed present, acceptably contained, in control, out of control etc etc, by those with the ability to deem

the sentences aren't opposites exactly, but they do step on each other's toes

"inherent political meaning" - obv not, if this implies republican vs democrat or whatever - but anthony's point that you were objecting to wz that cock-and-cunt fucking has a deep cultural power to it, and if THAT'S what yr calling an "inherent political meaning", then i think the sentences clash

most of what yr describin just IS protestantism!! (i'm too tired to look it up but tom paulin says somewhere that autobiography is the exemplary form of the protestant political text)

I recently bought Deep Throat - curiousity got the better of me and I'd wanted to see it for a while. Watched it in the company of a female and another guy. We had a good chuckle at it, as it is kinda funny - though such a shame about Linda Lovelace. I told me gfriend I picked it up and she couldn't care.

The real misogyny, in my opinion, comes from certain people on this forum whose attitude seems to be that women should never be lusted over or spoken about in a sexual content and that - in doing so - the person is somehow a mad woman hater. I really long for the day when we are all as liberated as somewhere like San Francisco. Having spent a few days in the city's gay district and bars and seen how no one gives a shit about sexual orientation, heavy petting on the streets etc I really wish we could all take that lead. I swear that one day I'm moving there.

Upon what information have you based this? Why do think this matters? Why do you think I'd care?

Actually, I'm prepared to concede that you may have more. Who knows? Pure egotism on my part inclines me to believe that my friends, though putatively less numerous, are far superior in quality.

TEARS OF LAUGHTER

Dworkin always struck me as someone brilliant who wasn't aware enough of how her own particular experiences affected/skewed her insights. Then again, judging from her popularity among women at the time, she obviously touched a nerve, so perhaps many women felt their experiences were similar.

from

Is it even expected today that a woman should just be okay with pornography? Like we've 'progressed' to the point where no one should get upset by it? Was Ariel Levy RIGHT???

-- Abbott, Monday, February 4, 2008 12:57 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

It's not my obsession with porn, babe, it's your reaction to it!

-- wanko ergo sum, Monday, February 4, 2008 12:59 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

I totally do get this vibe from modren non-'square/straight' society (can't think of any terms that would work outside West Side Story) that a chick's just supposed to accept men jerk it to .mpegs and such, her man jerks it, so it goes. Her opinion doesn't matter, unless she's for it.
1. Is this true and
2. how did it happen and
3. is this a good or bad thing?

I was gonna respond to your questions regarding this on the eharmony thread where you invoked Ariel Levy. Anyhow, my impressions:
1. True: Yes, I think this has become increasingly the case over the past several years, esp. in the eyes of many younger i.e., early-20's/late-teens dudes
2. The Hows: Internet presumably removing the "shame factor" previously associated with pornography; plus the media push towards "porn chic", "hey porn's gone mainstream"; plus an x factor (pun not intended) of sorts of women going along with it for whatever reasons...like kinda what Levy talks about in her writings
3. Good or bad? Hmmm. Well, I don't wanna live in a society in which porn is illegal, but I can find enough objectionable things about the contemporary porn biz such that the added factor of women feeling like they are uptight or something if they are not cool with their boyfriends/husbands gettin' down w/the porn is pretty sad...actually, I think it's a sad situation for both women and men.

Part of me thinks that porn will eventually "mellow out" from what it's become, and return largely to the comparatively "innocent" Playboy/Penthouse-type sutff of decades past...I'm not sure why I think that, other then that it seems like things have swung to such an extreme that it's hard for me not to imagine it as part of a cyclical thing that must eventually revert back to something more balanced and sane.

So for whatever reasons, my attempt at answering this question is informed in no small part by me personally being skeeved out by what porn has become in the past few years. But more to the point of your inquiry, it's something that obv. needs to be worked out by individuals/couples... and the fact that societal pressures exist to such a degree that people would feel like there is something wrong with them if they are not down with the current climate, well, again that seems sad to me.
3.

looks like she won, ultimately

Really good overview of her thought and writings: https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/025_05/20623

yeah great piece. always found her relationship w Moorcock very interesting.