[lbo-talk] Andrea Dworkin dead

Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
Tue Apr 12 17:44:40 PDT 2005


On 4/12/05, Wendy Lyon <wendy.lyon at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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..

Another excerpt, http://www.yelah.net/articles/fighting
>...Michael Moorcock: You have been wildly and destructively
misquoted. I've been told that you hate all men, believe in biological determinism, write pornography while condemning it, have been censored under the very "laws" you introduced in Canada and so on. I know these allegations have no foundation, but they're commonly repeated. Do you know their source?

Andrea Dworkin: Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and lobbying groups for pornographers. Some of the lobbying groups call themselves anti-censorship, but they spend so much time maligning MacKinnon and myself that it is hard to take them seriously. And it seems to be only defending pornography that brings them out. I would define illiteracy as the basic speech problem in the US, but I don't see any effort to deal with it as a political emergency with constitutionally based remedies, such as lawsuits against cities and states on behalf of illiterate populations characterised by race and class, purposefully excluded by public policy from learning how to read and write. Fighting MacKinnon and me is equivalent to going to Club Med rather than doing real work.

-- Michael Pugliese



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