Andrea Dworkin believes that all intercourse is rape.
FALSE. She has never said this. She sets the record straight in a 1995 interview with British novelist Michael Moorcock. And in a new preface to the tenth-anniversary edition of Intercourse (1997), Andrea explains why she believes this book continues to be misread:
[I]f one's sexual experience has always and
without exception been based on dominance--not only
overt acts but also metaphysical and ontological
assumptions--how can one read this book? The end of
male dominance would mean--in the understanding of
such a man--the end of sex. If one has eroticized a
differential in power that allows for force as a
natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could
one understand that this book does not say that all
men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape?
Equality in the realm of sex is an antisexual idea if
sex requires domination in order to register as
sensation. As sad as I am to say it, the limits of the
old Adam--and the material power he still has,
especially in publishing and media--have set limits on
the public discourse (by both men and women) about
this book [pages ix-x].
--- Michael Pugliese <michael.098762001 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 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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>
"Mary Poppins is alive and well in Argentina, she sends her regards." - Rod McKuen, The Mud Kids
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