"I, like many a young woman, was once wildly judgmental about plastic surgery. I grew up in the 1990s..."

"... at the bizarre, lonely intersection of second-wave feminism and Manhattan privilege. Many of the girls in my private high school had their breasts enlarged and their noses shrunk. I congratulated myself for not following suit, even though I didn’t have a bump on my nose and I wasn’t flat chested. My mother, the writer Erica Jong, had a whole gestalt back then: pro-sex feminism, which of course meant keeping herself appealing enough for men to want to have sex with her. She worried about her own weight and beauty constantly. Julia Phillips, a successful film producer and writer, once compared her to 'Miss Piggy when her face is in repose'.... My mom was the concubine of more than a few powerful men. To preserve that status, she had a face-lift in her 50s. Many of the feminists who populated my mother’s narrow townhouse — Andrea Dworkin, Betty Friedan and Phyllis Chesler among them — did not believe in molding themselves into something different for men’s delectation. These women rejected the beauty-obsessed power structure that my mother embraced. Instead, they hoped to change that culture by refusing to comply with it...."

Writes Molly Jong-Fast, who got a deep plane face- and neck-lift, in "I’m Not Going to Lie About My Neck" (NYT gift link).

The New York Times embeds Erika Kirk in the tradition of Right Wing Women.

I'm reading "Erika Kirk Takes a Leadership Role in Turning Point USA/After years spent emphasizing family life in the public eye, she will now run the group her husband built."

She is one of a raft of conservative female leaders right now who are building prominent careers and public-facing lives while emphasizing a particular message: telling young women to focus on getting married and starting a family, rather than having a public-facing life....

Oh, the contradiction! You advocated prioritizing home life, so what are you doing here? It feels so rude to confront the new widow like that. But perhaps the NYT feels it doesn't really count because it's talking about a whole "raft" of women.

J.K. Rowling quotes Andrea Dworkin.

“Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence...Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.” Andrea Dworkin pic.twitter.com/ZJwHZeR5hh

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) March 25, 2023

"Billie Eilish began watching porn aged 11 to be cool, 'one of the guys.' But the brutal, abusive scenes she encountered gave her nightmares and in her first sexual relationships..."

"... she complied with acts she hated 'because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.' Porn, she said this week, 'destroyed my brain.' Yet already Eilish, who only turns 20 this weekend, is being censured for her 'anti-porn tirade.' Her lush voice, dark lyrics and seven Grammys can’t save her from being branded a Swerf (Sex Worker-Excluding Radical Feminist), a slur applied to any woman who dares challenge the global sex trade. For a decade the supposed progressive position on pornography has been that it is liberating and 'sex positive.'... In her recent book 'The Right to Sex', the Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan describes teaching her students the work of 'second wave' feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who argued that porn writes the script for male oppression. Srinivasan assumed undergraduates would find their position as outdated and repressive as she did. Instead they were electrified, agreeing with 1970s feminists that porn objectifies women, ignores female pleasure and, like Eilish, that it groomed them into sex acts they didn’t enjoy. Srinivasan reflects that at 36 she only encountered porn as an adult, while 'sex to my students is what porn says it is.'... A generational shift is under way.... Younger people, whose childhoods were defiled, will agree with Billie Eilish who says with a fearlessness born of pain: 'As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace.'"

Writes Janice Turner in "Porn apologists are running out of excuses/The pop star Billie Eilish will be an inspiration to many young people in rejecting grotesque images of sexual violence" (London Times).

Here's Eilish's song on the subject:

"The collection contains Dworkin’s more outrageous assertions, the ones that repelled me as a young woman and concerned critics like my mom and other pro-sex feminists..."

"... that men need to forgo their 'precious erections' and 'make love as women do together.' That pornography 'incarnates male supremacy' and is 'the DNA of male dominance.' That all intercourse, while not literally rape, violates the integrity of a woman’s body, that women who want it are 'experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority.' What women really want, she argues, is 'a more diffuse and tender sexuality.' (Speak for yourself!) Her lens was dark as hell: 'We are very close to death,' she said in a speech about rape. 'All women are.'...  In many ways, my views about feminism were shaped by the disagreement about the role of sex in women’s liberation, which morphed into the 'sex wars' of the late 1970s and 1980s — the 'anti-sex' feminists on one side, the 'pro-sex' feminists on the other... With the right to sexual pleasure safely a tenet of modern feminism, [Dworkin's] writing ... galvanizes me to dispense with likeability and embrace indignation.... Next to the vacant, rah-rah version of sex positivity I grew up with in the ’90s, Dworkin’s rage seems downright clear-eyed.... Last Days at Hot Slit is a mirror for what I’ve been afraid of for years: being defiant, being ugly, being unloved by men, even being unloved by other feminists like Andrea Dworkin."

From "Sex, Lies, and Andrea Dworkin" by Nona Willis Aronowitz (New York Magazine).

In "feminist circles today," is it "taboo" to oppose prostitution and pornography?

In "Not the Fun Kind of Feminist/How Trump helped make Andrea Dworkin relevant again" (NYT)— which I've already written about today, here — Michelle Goldberg writes something about prostitution and pornography that I need to break out into a separate post:

[T]he resurrection of Dworkin’s work and reputation is in some ways quite strange, because her contemporary admirers tend to reject her central political commitments. Dworkin, who’d turned tricks as a broke, bohemian young woman, wanted to outlaw prostitution and pornography, and in the 1980s she made an alliance with the religious right to push anti-pornography legislation. There is no sympathy for such a bargain in feminist circles today, where it’s mostly taboo to treat sex work as distinct from any other kind of labor.

In the comments at the NYT, some readers take issue with her. Among the most-liked comments is this, from a reader named Liz:

This article is false in that it’s “mostly taboo” for feminists to view “sex work” as different from work. Do your research — there are many of us (again, not the fun kind of feminists) who oppose prostitution as the exploitative, misogynistic, and violent system that it is. Pro tip: if your feminism aligns perfectly with what pimps, traffickers, and johns desire, it’s not so feminist after all. Dworkin is getting the resurgence she deserves.

And this, from a reader named Lisa:

Back in the 90s, as a young feminist, I thought Dworkin’s anti-porn stance was a ridiculous dismissal of women’s agency. Now, having worked with teenagers for 25 years, I see the damage pornography has done to young people’s sense of themselves as sexual people and to their ability to build sexual relationships. It’s so much worse with the internet normalizing the extreme.

Kids —boys and girls— are seeing hard core, brutal pornography long before they’ve even had a first kiss. Teenage girls seek to be aesthetically pleasing and fulfill porn-derived expectations without regard for their own desires or even comfort. Dworkin may have been a frizzy caricature in overalls, but she wasn’t wrong.

And this, from ML:

"So what it is in [Andrea] Dworkin’s long-neglected oeuvre that has suddenly become resonant?"

"Perhaps it’s simply because we’re in a moment of crisis, when people seeking solutions are dusting off all sorts of radical ideas. But I think it’s more than that... Dworkin was unapologetically angry, as so many women today are. Even before 2016, you could see this anger building in the emergence of new words to describe maddening male behaviors that had once gone unnamed — manspreading, mansplaining. Then came the obscene insult of Donald Trump’s victory. It seems like something sprung from Dworkin’s cataclysmic imagination, that America’s most overtly fascistic president would also be the first, as far as we know, to have appeared in soft-core porn films. I think Trump’s victory marked a shift in feminism’s relationship to sexual liberation; as long as he’s in power, it’s hard to associate libertinism with progress. And so Dworkin, so profoundly out of fashion just a few years ago, suddenly seems prophetic."

Suddenly, suddenly.

The assertions of suddenness come from Michelle Goldberg, writing at the NYT in "Not the Fun Kind of Feminist/How Trump helped make Andrea Dworkin relevant again."

For the record, I read Andrea Dworkin when she was alive and kicking and her books were relevant the first time around. I read "Intercourse," "Pornography: Men Possessing Women," "Right Wing Women," "Woman Hating," and even "Mercy: A Novel."

So I don't need "Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin," the new collection of Dworkin writings that seems to prompt Goldberg.

Now, why exactly was Dworkin "so profoundly out of fashion"? I think the answer is that women want to be sex-positive. They didn't want to have to give up sex to be feminists. Dworkin's analysis was very unsettling and provocative, and it was always easier to leave her book shut and not have to deal with the arguments she raised. I'm not impressed by the women who go into these books now because they seem to synchronize with hating Trump. To impress me, you have to put feminism first, and that means you should have cared about this stuff when Bill Clinton ruled the roost.

Goldberg quotes one of the editors of the newly published collection of Dworkin writings:

“Me and my peers, we believed in this sort of fairy tale, that there was a line of demarcation that was very clear between rape and nonconsensual acts, and consent,” said Fateman. “We knew where the line was, and everything on the side of consent was great, and it was an expression of our freedom. But that’s not the experience of sex that a lot of people are having.”

Is that even true? You and your friends all believed there was a clear line and everything on one side was great and on the other side was rape? So all that "great sex" you were having, you never had any qualms about how bad it might actually be? In the interest of giving you credit for having something of an intellect, I've got to say I don't believe you.

From my 2005 post, "Andrea Dworkin has died":

Feminism was only a means to an end for a lot of people who positioned themselves as the voices of feminism. Their abjectly partisan goals came to light when they supported Clinton and (especially) smeared Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. It was an appalling spectacle. I care a lot about feminism, but I have not trusted the self-appointed voices of feminism since then. Dworkin, for all her overstatements and wackiness, was truly devoted to feminism as an end. She didn't care enough about free speech and she was over-the-top in her aversion to heterosexual sex, but I mean to honor her with this post.

Criticized for that post, I responded in "Have I been too kind to the late Andrea Dworkin?"

"For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality."

"In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same principle, castrated himself."

From "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido" by Stephen Marche (in the NYT). Marche gets a little too personal:

Professionally, too, I have seen just how profoundly men don’t want to talk about their own gendered nature. In the spring, I published a male take on the fluctuations of gender and power in advanced economies; I was interviewed over 70 times by reporters from all over the world, but only three of them were men.

People not being interested in your book is not "profound." Especially if you promoted it with the phrase "fluctuations of gender and power in advanced economies."

Acknowledging the brutality of male libido is not, of course, some kind of excuse. Sigmund Freud recognized the id, and knew it as “a chaos, a caldron full of seething excitations.”... Freud also understood that repression, any repression, is inherently fluid and complicated and requires humility and self-searching to navigate....

We're taking Freud seriously again?! This makes me want to go back and reread what Andrea Dworkin wrote about Freud. Just a snippet*:

Inescapably, a woman’s body incarnates shame, her genitals especially signifying dirt and death: whether referred to in a Playboy party joke as “gash” or expounded on by Freud:

Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a consequence of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain.

Just seeing those genitals turns a man gay or makes him rub up against rubber for a lifetime; to “surmount it,” this great fear caused by these monstrous female genitals, means to mount her successfully, unintimidated by the wound, her castration, the blood, the slime, the filth. “Oh yes,” wrote Freud to Jung, “I forgot to say that menstrual blood must be counted as excrement.”

Dworkin, Andrea. "Intercourse" (pp. 231-232). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
___________________

* Freudian innuendo intended.

Robert Stacy McCain reads Jessica Valenti's memoir "Sex Object."

Excerpt:

Dear God, what awful choices she has made in her life! Her personality was warped by insecurity, a problem made worse by the way her parents burdened her with their own ambitions and, of course, there was New York City itself.... The working-class neighborhood where Jessica Valenti grew up was frequented by hookers and their customers, and when she traveled to school via the subway, she encountered the notorious “flashers” and “mashers” (exhibitionists and frotteurs) who have menaced the city’s public-transportation system for decades. Ms. Valenti doesn’t seem to understand this as a uniquely urban hazard....

"The battle lines among American feminists over selling sex were drawn in the 1970s."

"On one side were radical feminists like the writer Andrea Dworkin and the lawyer and legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon. They were the early abolitionists, condemning prostitution, along with pornography and sexual violence, as the most virulent and powerful sources of women’s oppression. 'I’ve tried to voice the protest against a power that is dead weight on you, fist and penis organized to keep you quiet,' wrote Dworkin, who sold sex briefly around the age of 19, when she ran out of money on a visit to Europe. Other feminists, who called themselves 'sex positive,' saw sex workers as subverters of patriarchy, not as victims. On Mother’s Day 1973, a 35-year-old former call girl named Margo St. James founded a group in San Francisco called Coyote, for 'Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.' Its goal was to decriminalize prostitution, as a feminist act. In its heyday, Coyote threw annual Hooker’s Balls, where drag queens and celebrities mixed with politicians and police. It was a party: In 1978, a crowd of 20,000 filled the city’s Cow Palace, and St. James entered riding an elephant. By the 1980s, Dworkin’s argument condemning prostitution moved into the feminist mainstream, with the support of Gloria Steinem, who began rejecting the term 'sex work.' St. James and the sex-positivists were relegated to the fringes....."

From a long NYT article by Emily Bazelon, "Should Prostitution Be a Crime?/A growing movement of sex workers and activists is making the decriminalization of sex work a feminist issue."

"Why Did the Greatest Feminist Actress Deny Being a Feminist?"

"While promoting the movie Suffragette, [Meryl] Streep was asked if she is a feminist. ‘I am a humanist,’ she replied, further fueling the misguided belief that ‘feminist’ is a dirty word."

I am a humanist! That's like saying "All lives matter" when someone asks whether "Black lives matter." So Meryl's in trouble with the good-thinking people, and just when she's got a movie called "Suffragette."

Here's the full interview. Excerpts:

Is being ladylike overrated?
‘I would say it is underrated. Grace, respect, reserve and empathetic listening are qualities sorely missing from the public discourse now.’...

Are you a feminist?
‘I am a humanist, I am for nice easy balance.’...

What single thing would you change about the film industry to make it less sexist?
‘Men should look at the world as if something is wrong when their voices predominate. They should feel it. People at agencies and studios, including the parent boards, might look around the table at the decision-making level and feel something is wrong if half their participants are not women. Because our tastes are different, what we value is different. Not better, different.’

Back to the first link, which goes to a column in The Daily Beast by (the delightfully named) Teo Bugbee:

So what is it that’s so undesirable about the word feminist?... The common refrain in moments such as these is that feminism is simply a belief in equal rights. 

(That's a subject we were just talking about yesterday (here). And it's the way Hillary Clinton defined feminism recently.)

And while that is true, it’s also a vast oversimplification of the history of a movement that has had time to develop over the course of a century. There is not one feminism, but many feminisms...

That plural — "feminisms" — which you don't see that much these days, was big in the late 1980s, back when I was one of the many women who felt compelled to read and understand the book "New French Feminisms." The plural was both a burden and a relief: a burden, because it's complicated (and perhaps French!), but a relief because you could use the word your own special way, take charge of the meaning creation, and not have to give yourself to a big group of ideological enforcers.

Bugbee proceeds to distance herself from one particular 80s feminist, Andrea Dworkin, "the radical feminist most often cited when critics of feminism want to find a feminist who is explicitly anti-man." Bugbee assures us that almost no feminist today believes in "radical separatism," so it bothers her "that women are denying feminism because of even the possibility that they might find themselves in a world where they must align themselves against men."

I'd say Streep and others who decline the label are not so much "denying feminism" as wanting to remain independent of a terms that other people are actively defining and enforcing. It seems risky and troublesome: You'll have to keep an eye on them lest they cause you to seem to be saying something you don't want to say. An artist, e.g., Streep, can't be distracted by monitoring all these politcos and web-scribblers.

Bugbee proceeds to talk in a completely political way about liberal issues like funding Planned Parenthood and passing equal-pay laws — that is, to be the very kind of ideological enforcer who makes people worry about the consequences of accepting the "feminist" label... which is the likely answer to the "why" question in the post title.

"I am not a passive person, but I chose to fall into a more submissive role in our relationship..."

"... because I wanted to do everything in my power to make my marriage and family work.... The definition I'm using with the word 'submissive' is the biblical definition of that. So, it is meekness, it is not weakness. It is strength under control, it is bridled strength."

Says Candace Cameron Bure, an actress I'd never heard of, who has a book.

This got me trying to remember a trend in the 1970s that took this approach. There was Marabel Morgan's "Total Woman":

The Total Woman sold more than ten million copies and was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1974. Grounded in evangelical Christianity, it taught that "A Total Woman caters to her man's special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex or sports," and is perhaps best remembered for instructing wives to greet their husbands at the front door wearing sexy outfits, or draped in transparent saran wrap, with nothing (but herself) underneath. "It's only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him," Morgan wrote.

I think there was another book that was less oriented toward sex, something more like "the surrendered wife," but I see Morgan talked about "surrender" and that there was a book that came out in 2001 called "The Surrendered Wife," which inspired a movement, "The Surrendered Wife movement," if I am to believe Wikipedia.

Here's a 2001 NYT article about "The Surrendered Wife":

Her suggested path back to marital bliss runs suspiciously close to the doormat. ''Instead of throwing out traditional roles, try them on again,'' [the author, Laura] Doyle exhorts in Chapter 13, called ''Abandon the Myth of Equality.''...

[The book] has inspired Surrender Circles around the country where women gather to practice saying, ''Whatever you want, dear'' with a straight face....

Do men really want their wives gathering in circles with other women and chanting "surrender" cant?

Ms. Doyle believes that every decision, from vacations to child care, is an opportunity to make a husband feel more masculine and thus more eager to please. To get hubby to carry packages, a wife should marvel at how big and strong he is. ''This will feel odd -- perhaps even dishonest -- at first,'' writes Ms. Doyle, who actually suggests that women practice covering their mouths with duct tape to curtail the urge to sass....

I love the "at first." If you're bullshitting, at first, you'll feel uncomfortable, even ashamed, but make it a habit, and that old, nagging conscience becomes a thing of the past.

The surrendered wife provides sex on demand (a rather innocuous edict compared with a zestier suggestion in Marabel Morgan's 1973 work, ''The Total Woman,'' which urged wives to greet their husbands naked and wrapped in cellophane). Being available, Ms. Doyle temporizes, ''doesn't mean you don't have to ask for what you want first.''

You've got to give old Marabel Morgan credit for putting an image in our head that we never forget... or remember mostly. Cellophane and Saran Wrap are not the same. You could get more compression with Saran Wrap — more of a Spanx effect — while cellophane would merely be loose, albeit transparent, packaging. But there's no accounting for taste. Try both! Try aluminum foil too. Who knows what household wrap best contains a woman's "zest[]."

By the way, why is sex on demand considered "innocuous" compared to presenting yourself wrapped in Saran on the day of your choosing? Maybe only because sex on demand is a more abstract concept. I think if you go through the effort of picturing it — and what an arduous mental exercise that is! — you'll see that it's "zestier" than the old 1970s Saran Wrap routine.

That's a long digression. You may remember that I was on a search for another 1970s books, something less sex-oriented than "The Total Woman." I ask Meade if he remembers, and he suggests "The Sensuous Woman." No, no, that's more sex-oriented. "Not too long ago only 'bad' girls had a good time in bed. 'Good' girls endured — and wondered what they were missing."

What I am missing is the name of that other 70s book. I Google "counter-feminist books of the 1970s" and get to Wikipedia's "List of feminist literature," which is in chronological order and is very long.

I spot Andrea Dworkin's "Right-Wing Women," from 1983, which probably has the answer I'm looking for, but I'm not seeing it in a searchable form. I searched the NYT for a discussion of Dworkin's book (which I read 20-some years ago), and I found the puzzlingly titled "JOINING HANDS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST PRONORGRAPHY." (The NYT also spells "pornography" correctly many times, but also misspells it as "pornograpy," so I'm just going to guess that the word elicited messiness in the proofreaders.)

That NYT article revisits the old anti-pornography movement, which presented the feminist problem — I remember this so well! — do you want to win a fight that you can only win in alliance with the right wing?

Miss Dworkin said she had never met [Jerry] Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly or any other conservative leaders. ''But more and more right-wing women are coming to hear me speak,'' she said. ''They keep reading in the papers that they're on our side, and I'm having the most interesting conversations I've ever had in my life with them. I don't ask women to pass a political litmus test to talk to me.''

While many feminists disavow Miss Dworkin and her work, she, in turn, is critical of what she calls ''organized feminism'' for not taking a stronger stand against pornography. ''The National Organization for Women is incredibly cowardly and timid on the issue,'' she said, ''because they don't want to alienate their liberal supporters.''

Now, I've dragged you into the 80s, but the 80s grew out of the 70s, and there was an interesting interplay between feminism and the answers to feminism, especially in the way the more radical feminists diverged from liberal feminists of the NOW ilk and found fellowship with the right-wing women. But this is only a blog post, and we can't go down all these roads. I've already gone too far, I didn't find what I was looking for, so I'm stopping now, and I'll update if anyone reminds me what's that book from 4 decades ago.

UPDATE: A reader emails the name of the book I was trying to remember: "Fascinating Womanhood."

The first step to a happy marriage is to understand that all life is governed by law--nature, music, art, and all of the sciences. These laws are immutable. To live in harmony with them produces health, beauty, and the abundant life....

The art of awakening a man's love is not a difficult accomplishment for women because it is based on our natural instincts. However, in our highly civilized life many of our natural instincts have become rusty due to lack of use. You need only to awaken the traits which belong to you by nature....

The study centers around the ideal woman, from a man's point of view, the kind of woman who awakens a man's deepest feelings of love... The role of a woman when played correctly is fulfilling, fascinating, and full of intrigue...

The complicated story of Linda Lovelace — soon to be 2 motion pictures.

The star of "Deep Throat" — which is the most profitable movie ever made – led a fascinating life that tracked so many of the cultural trends we lived through. Of course, she got none of the $600 million the $30,000, hour-long movie made. That had to be annoying. But she was the face (and neck) of the porn that suddenly everyone felt they could actually go see. The Nixon administration prosecuted the filmmakers for obscenity. You've got bad old Nixon coming after you. What a strange combination of glamor and squalor!

Her follow-up films flopped, and she became a heavy cocaine user in the mid-1970s, then she made the God move: "God had changed her life." When the 80s came around, she threw in her lot with the feminists:

Wendy Kaminer "can't find feminism" in the charges of sexual harassment aimed at Yale...

"... at least not if feminism includes independence, liberty, and power for women."

 Instead I find femininity -- the assumption that women are incapable of fending for themselves in the marketplace of epithets or ideas, the belief that women are rendered helpless by misogynist speech and the sexist tantrums of their male peers....

What accounts for such feminine timidity, this instinctive unwillingness or inability to talk or taunt back, without seeking the protection of university or government bureaucrats?...

Decades ago, when Catherine [sic] MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and their followers began equating pornography with rape (literally) and calling it a civil-rights violation, groups of free-speech feminists fought back, in print, at conferences, and in state legislatures, with some success. We won some battles (and free speech advocates in general can take solace in the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the right to engage in offensive speech on public property and public affairs). But all things considered (notably the generations of students unlearning liberty) we seem to be losing the war, especially among progressives.

Did European witch-hunting kill 9 million?

I've been under the impression that was the real number, ever since I read Gyn/Ecology about 15 years ago. But I see here, that number is entirely wrong:

"For witchcraft and sorcery between 1400 and 1800, all in all, we estimate something like 50,000 legal death penalties," writes Wolfgang Behringer in "Witches and Witch-Hunts" (Polity, 2004). He estimates that perhaps twice as many received other penalties, "like banishment, fines or church penance."

Other recent estimates range from 40,000 to 100,000 executions over those early modern centuries. These remain appalling numbers, even when put in the context of the far greater numbers killed in religious wars and the fact that resort to capital punishment was at one of its high points in European history.

No one should underestimate the cruelty these numbers represent. "Witchfinders," Malcolm Gaskill's full-blooded account, just published by Harvard University Press, of the most notorious witch hunt in English history, makes that clear in engrossing detail.

But contemporary historians bridle at the huge numbers that have become part of the witch hunt mythology-and the implicit or explicit comparisons to the Nazi campaign of genocide. Professor Behringer traced the estimate of nine million victims back to wild projections made by an 18th-century anticlerical from 20 files of witch trials. The figure worked its way into 19th-century texts, was taken up by Protestant polemicists during the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf in Germany, then adopted by the early 20th-century German neopagan movement and, eventually, by anti-Christian Nazi propagandists.

In the United States, the nine million figure appeared in the 1978 book "Gyn/Ecology" by the influential feminist theoretician Mary Daly, who picked it up from a 19th-century American feminist, Matilda Gage.

Do such unfounded myths do anyone any good? Certainly many feminists, including some identifying themselves as neopagans, agree with contemporary historians about the answer: No.

Have any of you folks read "Gyn/Ecology"? Oh, that is a rousing book!

UPDATE: Cathy Young (who also participates in the comments) expresses shock at my "rousing book" compliment to "Gyn/Ecology." (She and I also had some debate about the writings of Andrea Dworkin.) I wrote this in the comments:

I just said it was rousing, not that it was good or right. I went through a period when I read a lot of Dworkin and Daly's books. They were very stimulating, but also ultimately stimulated me into wanting to distance myself from them. There are plenty of things in the treatment of women to be outraged about, but polemical works that demand that you reach and maintain a permanent state of anger just seem sad after a while (or dangerous, if they are actually effective).

Have I been too kind to the late Andrea Dworkin?

Cathy Young, who wrote in the comments section of my post on Andrea Dworkin, has this post on Dworkin over at Hit & Run. Young doesn't think anything positive should be said about the recently departed feminist, and is especially distressed that I said something positive:

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.

Andrea Dworkin has died.

She was 58. The staunch feminist won widespread fame seeking anti-pornography legislation, on the theory that pornography caused rape: "Pornography is used in rape - to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act." She was a major cultural figure in the late 80s and early 90s, who wrote some amazing books that were quite readable if you didn't get too angry at some of the connections she made.

UPDATE: Susie Bright has a lot to say about Andrea Dworkin here:

It was Andrea’s take-no-prisoners attitude toward patriarchy that I always liked the best. Bourgeois feminists were so BORING. They wanted to keep their maiden name and have it listed in the white pages; they wanted to get a nice corner office in the skyscraper. When I was a teenager in the 70s I couldn't relate to those concerns. It was Dworkin's heyday....

I loved that she dared attack the very notion of intercourse. It was the pie aimed right in the crotch of Mr. Big Stuff. It was an impossible theory, but it wasn’t absurd. There is something about literally being f**ked that colors your world, pretty or ugly, and it was about time someone said so.

And here:

The contradictions between Dworkin's brilliance and her lunacy have always gotten under my skin. ... Every time I put down one of her books, I was impressed by her passion, and by the risks she could take with her imagination--- and yet I was also convinced that she was cracked. The more she attacked sexism, the more I felt imprisoned by her concept of sex itself. Her arguments for liberation folded in on themselves, in a victimized dervish dance; they became just another bar and stripe in the code of the double standard.

ANOTHER UPDATE: There are some interesting comments to this post, including one with the phrase "Shame on you, Prof. Althouse." The third comment says "Nice to see another Susie Bright fan," which made me stop and ask myself whether I am a Susie Bright fan, which made me remember I love Susie Bright's contributions to the commentary track of this DVD.

AND MORE: Dworkin said she liked George Washington, and that was enough for Richard Brookhiser. But there's more:

Later on, when NR twitted feminists for supporting a later president, Bill Clinton, I got a note from Dworkin pointing out that she didn't. I wrote a paragraph for "The Week," beginning with the old New Yorker lead-in, "A friend writes..."

Dworkin's prose was unrelenting, hard, clean and compelling. Florence King praised it (while disagreeing with many of her conclusions). She really meant it. R.I.P.

Ah, how that resonates! Feminism was only a means to an end for a lot of people who positioned themselves as the voices of feminism. Their abjectly partisan goals came to light when they supported Clinton and (especially) smeared Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. It was an appalling spectacle. I care a lot about feminism, but I have not trusted the self-appointed voices of feminism since then. Dworkin, for all her overstatements and wackiness, was truly devoted to feminism as an end. She didn't care enough about free speech and she was over-the-top in her aversion to heterosexual sex, but I mean to honor her with this post.

YET MORE: Cathy Young has comments inside and on Hit & Run. I respond to the Hit & Run piece and ask if I've been too kind to Andrea Dworkin here.