SubscribeAdvertise here: Contact FM.
Well written, as always, Susie, and far more charitable than Dworkin would have been to you had, god forbid, the situation been reversed. If she had made any note of your passing at all, it would surely have been derisive.
I like your observation that Dworkin rejected the notion of the unconscious. I knew there had to be other areas where she and I disagreed as profoundly as we did about sex and porn. I suppose the rejection of all our unrecognized individual motivations made it easier for her to deny her own.
I didn't know Ms. Dworkin had been ill, as I followed her career no more closely than she followed mine. I strive for compassion in the face of suffering wherever I encounter it, but there's no getting past the fact that she despised you, me and everyone like us. I, too, found that some of her observations had resonance, including those regarding porn. However, I got fed up with her one-note approach to the complicated subject of gender relations long, long before the symphony ended.
Her ranting hatred of all things male and masculine was the source of more misery and confusion for heterosexual men and women over the past twenty years than all the sins she attributed to porn during that time, by and large wrongly. Her thinking turned the bedroom, which should be a place where people go to be loving and kind to each other and to share pleasure, into a politicized battleground.
I knew right away that she didn't speak for me. My sexuality that didn't fit in her box and she had no use for any story that didn't conform to her vision of woman-as-eternal-victim. Indeed, among the many insults she hurled at women like myself, none was more hurtful than her loud insistence that we were incapable of asserting our individual sexual identities because they had been stolen from us by the vast, evil conspiracy of patriarchal domination and that we were just too dumb and brainwashed to know it....
Bah. It's all bad, and embarrassing. I would urge commentors here not to escalate.
- Fuck Greenpeace, and fuck you.
- You are a feeble, self-righteous excuse for whatever you are.
- The itty bitty cock committee has arrived.
It's perfectly clear (to me, anyway) that the excessive response to her occasional over-the-top comments are prompted by fear and loathing for feminism [...]No, that seems too simplistic. For one, given the liberal circles in which most MeFi users presumably (voluntarily) run, and the unreflective quality of the kind of 'feminist' discourse that gets pulled out of asses in off-the-cuff conversations like this one, it's more likely that emotional responses to posters like michelle are preemptive strikes (for better or worse) against the tired, rigid, uncritical proto-feminism that passes for enlightenment among those who've taken, say, porn as their own personal Skeletor. 'In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king' should not be interpreted as a goddamn song in praise of one-eyed men; it's reasonable to demand something a little more supple from those who claim to elevate the discourse.
I've seen numerous blowjob clips where women are "wearing" a toilet seat around their necks and their heads are being held via their hair in a very violent manner.Never even heard of this (and by now I figure I would've), though certainly I'm aware of more degrading shit to be found online. 'Numerous' strikes me as hyperbole, given the uncountably vast universe of Internet porn.
The Abu Ghraib photos are considered atrocities but they are no different than what is done to women in the pornography industry. Except when it's done to women, people call it "harmless entertainment".is merely wrong, starting with the voluntary nature of participation in mainstream porn, continuing through the whole porno directors don't kill people line of argument, and moving on from there. That much certainly is a 'kook, radical argument' and no mistake. But at day's end, it's only trolling, and while it's enjoyable to fulminate about all this, I'd rather just have a Firefox extension that allows me to cut out all comments by a given user. Worse and stupider things have been said on this website.
"starting with the voluntary nature of participation in mainstream porn"Note the word 'mainstream,' and let's have something stronger than Fox News-style 'a lot of people don't believe' if that's available.
Ah, but a lot of people don't believe that the participation is as essentially and universally "voluntary" as you imply.
posted by danb at 6:08 PM on August 6, 2006