Second Wave (Re: MacKinnon and Dworkin and sex)

JBrown72073 at cs.com JBrown72073 at cs.com
Mon Oct 21 19:30:48 PDT 2002


Barry Deutsch wrote:
>My real problem with MacKinnon and Dworkin is that they're waaaay too
>obsessed with sex (not unlike you). Sex is not the be-all and end-all;
>I think sex equality would advance faster and further through equalizing
>pay, childcare responsibilities, and political representation than it would
>advance from banning porn. But that's why M. and D. are radical feminists
>while I'm just a liberal/socialist/3rd wave feminist, I guess.
>
>Barry

Dworkin and MacKinnon's politics are not really reflective of the main original politics of the second wave, where there was much less focus on issues of sexual violence and much more focus on learning about ourselves and getting men to stop being so self-centered in bed. For example: Anne Koedt's "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm," the original Our Bodies Ourselves course. And winning abortion as a backup removed the nerve-wracking roulette wheel aspect of sex. So, thank feminism for that. In general, the politics developed away from dealing with the everyday--good sex, fair sharing of housework, and developing a theory from struggling on these issues—to addressing the extreme cases (rape, battery) and attempting to develop a theory based on that. I think the first route was more fruitful.

Jenny Brown (also of Redstockings)



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