I was especially taken aback when the usually reasonable Ann Althouse, University of Wisconsin law professor and blogger, decided to "honor" Dworkin with this tribute. Althouse notes that in contrast to the "blatantly partisan" feminists who flocked to Bill Clinton's defense when he was accused of sexual misconduct, "Dworkin, for all her overstatements and wackiness, was truly devoted to feminism as an end." All right, so Dworkin was nonpartisan in her demonization of men and male sexuality ("What needs to be asked," she notoriously told a British writer on Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, "is, Was the cigar lit?"). That's a good thing? And what is this "feminism" she was dedicated to, anyway? It certainly wasn't liberal feminism, anti-censorship feminism, or pro-sex feminism, all of which she despised.
I've read a lot of Dworkin's books, but I read them a long time ago, and I really can't remember the extent of "her demonization of men and male sexuality," which I don't agree with. I remember finding a lot of rousing and provocative ideas in those books and a real passion about harms done to women. I think I was careful about what I wrote; my honoring of this woman who had just died was not unqualified. I'm glad Young thinks I'm "usually reasonable" but I'm going to defend myself and say that this was another example of my being reasonable.
Here's what Young wrote in the comments section to my original post (linked above):
As a semi-regular reader of your blog, I am extremely disappointed by your positive comments about Andrea Dworkin.... Dworkin was a psychopath -- a pitiful woman to some extent, because she was so obviously sick; but unfortunately she acted out her sickness on a public stage, by demonizing not only men (and male sexuality) but women who have the temerity to enjoy heterosexual sex.
(Yes, Dworkin spent the last 20 years of her life living with a man, and she wrote warmly about her father and her brother. But it's possible to be a bigot and to make a few personal exemptions. By the way, Dworkin's companion, John Stoltenberg, was an avid follower of her anti-male views; he wrote a book called Refusing to Be a Man, and in his own writings described the penis as "an instrument of oppression.")
By the way, let's please not get into the tiresome discussion of whether or not Dworkin actually uttered or wrote the words "all sexual intercourse is rape." Read this chapter from Intercourse and see for yourself:
"Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more."
"Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior."
"Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women."
I showed some of these passages to a friend who had never even heard of Dworkin before. Her immediate response: "She's writing about rape, not sex."
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose a man -- a very troubled men who had had horrible experiences with women -- wrote book after book arguing that women are evil sirens and parasites whose sole purpose in life is to sexually manipulate and destroy men.
Would anyone be hailing him for his "challenging" and "provocative" ideas? Would there be a lot of quibbling over whether he actually ever used the words "All women are whores"?
Yet you, Prof. Althouse, seem to embrace the left-wing double standard with regard to hate speech -- it's not really so bad if directed at "the oppressor" and motivated by concern for the oppressed.
I prefer to agree with Daphne Patai, a former women's studies professor who has written: "Cultivating hatred for another human group ought to be no more acceptable when it issues from the mouths of women than when it comes from men, no more tolerable from feminists than from the Ku Klux Klan."
The accusation that I "embrace the left-wing double standard" was a response to something I wrote in the comments: "People who speak out on behalf of the oppressed can be admired -- with qualifications -- despite their anger-driven overstatements and misjudgment." And I wrote a comment later explaining this:
My phrase "people who speak out on behalf of the oppressed" refers to Dworkin's writing, which is concerned with rape victims, pornography workers, prostitutes, etc. I think women have been oppressed throughout history, around the world, and that there is scarcely a more important concern, but it doesn't justify hate speech and it's not even helpfully dealt with by vilifying men. I'm just trying to explain why I don't vilify Dworkin.
I'm sorry I just don't have the heart to point out the shortcomings of the woman's work. She just died! I alluded to some disagreements I have, and I don't have a problem with the substantive content of Young's post other than that I obviously don't think I departed from my usual reasonableness.
Young points out this op-ed in the NYT by Catharine MacKinnon, which I somehow missed yesterday. MacKinnon's point is that Dworkin was mistreated and that "[h]ow she was treated is how women are treated who tell the truth about male power without compromise or apology." It's not surprising that people reacted strongly to the very harsh things Dworkin said, and it's simplistic to call what she said "truth" and leave it at that. It was dramatic overstatement for effect. She provoked a big argument -- as did MacKinnon -- and I don't see how you can blame people for fighting back on the important subject of sex.
And much of the mistreatment MacKinnon describes is the typical lot of the writer. People talk about writers' work without taking the trouble to read it all the time. People misstate and twist the meaning of what people say all the time. And people mercilessly ridicule public figures for the way they look -- though surely Andrea Dworkin got a particularly harsh version of that treatment. Dworkin made people really angry, and even if there was a good measure of sexism in that response, a lot of the nastiness was returning in kind what she dished out. That is part of being taken seriously.
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Well, Mossback, I wouldn't use the word "oppressed" or make personal complaints about my own lot in life, but I think sexism is a serious matter and feminism is still important. I sense you'd like to brush it all aside and say the problems have been solved in the U.S. That's too easy!
I think that it's rather sad if we can't see a person's good attributes without excusing all their bad ones, or admit someone's fault without negating every good thing about them.
Why is it so terrible to say that Dworkin was right about something? It's not like saying she was right about everything, or even right about most things, or even right more than occasionally.
When girls are being brutally rendered truly “physiologically inferior,” we shouldn’t even have to tolerate the kind of garbage Dworkin writes much less honor her in any way whatsoever.
Who's the "we" here, exactly?
I'll make a generalization of my own: too many people expect an all-or-nothing sort of opinion on things. I certainly don't know everything about Dworkin - I'm a youngin who'd never heard of her until her obituary came out - but what I do know from what I've read this past week is that she was the man-hating type of feminist. That doesn't preclude the possibility that she might have done something right at some point, even if that was overshadowed by her more provocative work.
The road to censorship was paved with Dworkin's good intentions. She was, in part, responsible for the banning of books written by several friends of mine. I have trouble forgiving that.
It does matter, Brian, because your use of we means you speak for someone other than yourself.
No it doesn’t, but as I said, it certainly doesn’t mean it is right to honor a hateful bigoted lunatic for her help in some cause simply because you are sympathetic to it.
I don't think I honored her anywhere in my previous comments. I'm pointing out, however, that since you and I have different views of her doesn't mean neither of us are incorrect. But I don't see it as a "disservice to legitimate discourse" because as we're doing here now, it allows us to discuss why Dworkin's work was so inflammatory for some people.
"I'm sorry I just don't have the heart to point out the shortcomings of the woman's work."
At least you admit you were lazy about it and performing the typical societally demanded knee-jerk response in praising the recently dead in spite of their obvious and well-known failings.
Sort of like how everyone avoids bringing up the embarassing fact that the recently dead Pope did more to harm the Church (by covering for child molesting priests and their protectors).
If you're going to defend your factually incomplete adulation of Dworkin by copping to the "be nice to dead people" argument, while simultaneously defending your own laziness in addressing the "whole picture," then you've got zero intellectual credibility.
Zero. Calls of "inappropriateness" are a time-honored way to censor and oppress unpopular speech.
"If you can't say somthing nice..." right?
Well, I'd rather you said nothing at all.
Cal: What I wrote wasn't "knee jerk" -- it was carefully considered and exactly what I wanted to say. I often write about someone who just died, but most deaths I ignore. I want what I choose, and some recently departed I would speak ill of. Depends on the person and what they meant to me.
Leeontheroad. Thanks. That was well put.
Ann: I'm sorry I just don't have the heart to point out the shortcomings of the woman's work. She just died!
Me: Bravo. If only Christopher Hitchens had the same hesitation before he wrote about Bob Hope, Pope JPII, ...
And Ann, I must have missed the memo where Cal became your editor in chief, but I do hope you kick him to the curb quick.
I'm certainly no expert on Andrea Dworkin having only read "Right Wing Women" but you didn't have to read her to be aware of her popular impact. Having grown up in the radicalizing atmosphere of the late sixties, early seventies I was aware of the groundswell of grassroots feminism wherein ideas, theories and manifestos germinated and proliferated in profusion. Perhaps this is why I didn't find much that was attributed to Dworkin to be particularly original. It seemed to me that I had been exposed to most of her ideas in embryo as they gestated among the uncited rank and file.
Finally, I took time to read her. I don't think it can be denied that she was a skillful and passionate writer. Still, "Right Wing Women" struck me as profoundly wrong headed and since its argument was bound up with all the strands of her arguments about patriarchy and heterosexuality I concluded that she was off track there as well.
After all this time I still recall (albeit a bit hazily) the two passages that informed my judgement. In the first she was outlining the inherent oppressive and brutal character of male/female sex. In an aside she chose to emphasize "...particularly deep thrusting.." I remember thinking 'How seriously can we take someone who thinks they can micromanage the individual sexual behavior of billions of human beings? How seriously can we take the opinions someone who evidently believes, with absolute certainty, that she can define the essence of such intimate acts for all people in all circumstances?' I kept reading though.
Which brings me to my second recollection. Dworkin described her confrontation with what she regarded as blatant anti-Semitism amongst right-wingers at a conference in Texas. The anti-Semitism consisted of conference attendees not being shy about asking her if she was Jewish.
Being a native southerner with many friends who hale from the north east, I'm aware that questioning people about their religion is not a common practice there. However, the case in the southern states is precisely opposite. It would be unusual if, upon making an acquaintence, people didn't inquire about church attendance, etc. Evidently Dworkin had no notion of this.
The two instances are significant, I think, in that they illustrate that the source of her greatest strength was also the source of her greatest frailty. As her passion grew directly out of her personal experience so did her misjudgements. She didn't see that, while we inhabit systems of social, sexual and political constructions,we do not experience them in identical fashion. Individual experience is not interchangeble, no where less so than in the intimate depths of the human psyche.
I don't agree with those who say this failing defines her as insane . Damaged surely. Disturbed? Almost certainly. All of which is finally beside the point. Andrea Dworkin's truth was her own, for each of us to accept or reject according to our own experience.
What's worthy of thought and discussion is not why so many reject her theories but why her words, her experience, have resonated with so many.
No, I don't think you were too kind.
All I know of Dworkin is that I had to read an essay of hers for my junior year of high school, for AP Language and Composition.
I recall being actually disturbed to read it. The things said (at least in this essay) made her seem quite clearly completely out of touch with reality. As it was also probably the only example of feminist literature (as feminist literature) I've ever read, I think her writings did (and do) a great disservice to feminism.
And therefore I think even limited praise of her is a mistake. It's not wrong mind you, just not what I would call a wise decision.
Prof. Althouse:
Your reply is greatly appreciated. I have to say that I don't quite understand how you can separate Dworkin's "passion about harms done to women" from her demonization of men and male sexuality, since the two are so interwoven.
I think Brian Courts makes an excellent point: if you're opposed to race-based affirmative action, you don't praise a racist bigot who shares that opposition.
To take another example: If you're concerned with the plight of the Palestinians, surely you don't offer qualified praise for a pro-Palestinian writer (even a recently deceased one!) whose writings are filled with anti-Semitic vitriol.
So why is anti-male venom seen differently? Because men are "the ones in power"?
Finally, I'd like to ask you a question, and please believe me that I'm not asking it in a snide or sarcastic spirit. What ideas of Dworkin's, specifically, do you find so "rousing and provocative"?
Proustman,
"That post approaches the nadir of rational discourse, w.b. Especially in the context of a discussion of Dworkin's writings."
I couldn't disagree more.
Exactly how does recognizing that everyone will assess Dworkin in light of their own experience suggest that she should be immune to criticism? This is something that would be true of any writer's work. I was seeking to put the emphasis where I believe it belongs, on the living not the dead.
I consider my view a hard nosed recognition of fact. The entire significance of Dworkin's theories lies in the appeal they had for a large number of women, including individuals such as Susie Bright who eventially broke with her. If this were not so we wouldn't be having this discussion since we probably would not know who Dworkin was.
That being the case and considering that the woman is dead, I don't quite understand the morbid desire to pillory her corpse. Surely our time would be better spent seeking to understand the appeal she held for so many women still living. After all, they are the ones we are still sharing the planet with.
Or are they wicked, psychotic, manhaters as well?
In addition, since I think I made my profound disagreement with Dworkin quite clear, I don't understand why you felt compelled to recite an indictment of her. I'm hardly her advocate. I can only guess that it springs from a personal need to condemn her post-mortem.
I'm reminded of the trial of Pope Formosus who, having been some months dead, was exhumed by and old enemy who had ascended to the Papacy as Pope Stephen. He propped Formosus' corpse in a chair in the Vatican and proceeded to put him on trial. The carcass was prosecuted, condemned, excomunicated, mutilated and then thrown into the Tiber after being dragged through the streets, thereby insuring that Formosus is remembered to this day.
It's my impression that you are in danger of sliding into the same pit in which Dworkin enmeshed herslf. Your personal antipathy for Dworkin is so profound that it is affecting your critical judgement. Or did you really mean to state the following:
"So now that she's dead, some want to draw a graceful veil over her living words, injected into the culture without the culture's unanimous consent."
Since when is the "culture's unanimous consent" required before expressing an opinion, however noxious or erroneous? Or perhaps you meant that the lack of unanimity legitimates criticism? Of course, I never argued that criticism was illegitimate so this seems hardly reasonable. Or, if you prefer, rational.
Here's the question I would like answered. I agree with much, though not all, of your criticism of Dworkin. Yet I don't hate her while you obviously do. I wonder why that is?
Cathy Young: Thanks for responding again. You ask "What ideas of Dworkin's, specifically, do you find so 'rousing and provocative'?"
As I've written, I haven't read anything by Andrea Dworkin in over 10 years. The last thing I read was the novel "Mercy," which I thought was just terrible -- and terribly written, unlike her nonfiction. It's easier for me to remember how interesting I found "Intercourse," "Right Wing Women," "Women Hating," and "Pornography: Men Possessing Women," than it is to remember exactly which ideas in them impressed me. But I'll try.
To me the emphasis was on the disrespect shown to women more than a hatred of men. Dworkin demanded that people care about the degradation of women -- specifically in everything sexual. She challenged women not to be smug and just think that they had found a good man for themselves and to distance themselves from the suffering of other women. That is, she tried to demonstrate that the sexual domination of women was everywhere.
Maybe that relationship you think cherish is your our benighted eroticization of domination. That's really something to think about!
Ack... that should have read:
Maybe that relationship you cherish is your our benighted eroticization of domination.
Anyway, I still think that is a brilliant challenge to women!
Oh, ack, again! I should read:
Maybe that relationship you cherish is your own benighted eroticization of domination.
One thing about comments is that you tend to dash them off more quickly than a regular post, but you can go back in and edit a regular post. I'll be more careful. Sorry.
I think MacKinnon tarred herself with that brush.
And she continues to do so.
Proustman,
Thanks for a reasoned reply and clarification. I now understand the intended irony of your comment vis-a-vis "consent". In that context it is a fair point.
At risk of appearing ungracious, I would suggest that it is always risky to debate views that one has received second hand. However confident you may be of your sources, the resulting opinion remains a product of hearsay at best. Better to go straight to the source and make your analysis from direct evidence.
Andrea Dworkin was fundamentally dishonest all the time. Her standard technique was absurd hyperbole, designed to provoke disagreement. She was a provocateur. A polemicist. A troll.
Using rape as a proxy for all the injustices inflicted on women by men is wildly dishonest. Rape is not in any way similar to glass ceilings in corporations, or sexist comments from guys who think they're being funny.
Notice that Dworkin had no interest in motherhood, or even fair employment practices in the workplace. I'm not sure if Dworkin ever worked for a wage or a salary in her life. I'm pretty sure that she was a virgin when she died. (That story about her marriage to an unnamed Dutch anarchist in an unnamed Dutch city is uncorroborated and so far-fetched in its lurid descriptions of physical abuse that it reads like fiction.)
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