[lbo-talk] Andrea Dworkin dead

Wendy Lyon wendy.lyon at gmail.com
Tue Apr 12 02:12:11 PDT 2005


On Apr 11, 2005 7:43 PM, amadeus amadeus <amadeus482000 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> I think like any decent thinker a lot of people
> distort her, particularly with the idea that all
> intercourse is rape.

She only had herself to blame with that "distortion" (which wasn't really as much as a distortion as her defenders claim, IMHO). No, she never said that all intercourse is rape - not in those words anyway - but she did say that intercourse makes women victims, that it makes us inferior, that if we claim to enjoy it we are "collaborators", that "in seduction, the rapist bothers to buy a bottle of wine".

I realise that a lot of people who criticise her have never read a word she actually wrote, but I read a lot of her works (obscenity law was my academic specialty) and I am firmly of the belief that most of the criticism really isn't far off the mark. I'm not sure feminism will ever recover from the damage she and MacKinnon have done to it.



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