(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

I'm so used to outpourings of ignorance and loathing when it comes to Andrea Dworkin that I was relieved to read a respectful, balanced obit in the Washington Post, accompanied by a rather lovely portrait. It's a comfort to be reminded that the media is not the exclusive habitat of trolls.

Comments

[zazuomgwtf.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link.

[mrmateo.livejournal.com]

Kate, it is not ignorance and loathing when you are on record equating sex with rape. That's just one reason people hated the woman so.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

... that's the ignorance I'm talking about. Few people with opinions about Dworkin have read her passionate, enlightening, flawed works; instead they rely on the anti-feminist cartoon of her, with all its lies and distortions, of which the she-said-sex=rape lie is the most popular.

[cherrypep.livejournal.com]

Ah, but cartoons compress handily into just a few bytes. And they're simple, easy, black n'white behavioural guidelines. Blessed be those who think in these terms, for they have bugger-all to worry about.

When I was twenty I'd have been thinking, "What a nutter". That's life for you, and communication too; without a little shared ground I'd never've had the faintest what she was on about. Few years later, I can read her articles and albeit in differing terminology, I'm seeing reason in that there anger. So maybe I'm nuts, which is just fine. I wouldn't for a minute claim that I agree with everything she ever said, because frankly I haven't read most of it, and I don't even agree with everything I ever said. Passion doesn't necessarily endow you with an instant first class in English Lit just because you have something to say, either (pity, or I'd be out there searching for an issue).

Personally I try to avoid taking this stuff seriously, for fear of losing what they call 'perspective', that little bit of wiring in the brain that stops people running off shrieking into the distance. But, y'know, it sincerely invalidates a lifetime of passionate work when you're On! Record! Equating! Sex! With! Rape! One certainly couldn't spend another second on the work of someone who supposedly said that. No way. Uh-uh. Forget it. You could never take someone seriously after somebody said that someone had heard that the person in question employed a rhetorical device like that, I mean, as if (duh). No, it invalidates anything and everything that they may have said, so we can all erase that person from our memories and rejoin the real world.

Or get some sleep, which sounds like a good plan at this time of the morning.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

It is a remarkably respectful obit, though I don't think that's the same as 'balanced'. I had no idea she'd done such wonderful things before the 1980s before she started to believe in her own infallibility. If she'd died some twenty years ago, I would have sincerely mourned her. Not now.

I detested her not because I disagreed with some of her opinions, or her stridency, but because of the alliances she made with the Christian Right and serial killers in her tunnel-vision crusade against pornography. That seems akin to a doctor joining forces with the tobacco industry and Jim Jones to campaign for mandatory imprisonment for marijuana possession. Feh.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

alliances she made with the Christian Right

Now I'm curious - with which Christian Right individuals and/or organisations did she ally herself, and what was the nature of their alliance? Or do you just mean they were both critical of porn, albeit for wildly different reasons and in wildly different ways?

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

Dworkin testified before the Meese Commission, the Reagan government's attempt to gather enough anecdotal evidence to justify tougher censorship laws. Support for the Dworkin/MacKinnon laws came not from feminists, many of whom spoke against it on First Amendment grounds, but from Republicans of the Christian Right and individuals such as Phyllis Schlafly. One of the kinder obituaries for Dworkin, in the National Review, describes her "respect for Christian conservatives".

I grant you, Dworkin may often have been quoted out of context by both her right-wing supporters and her left-wing critics (admittedly, she and MacKinnon did the same with Ted Bundy). And her criticisms of the right (e.g. "The Bush/Cheney plan is a moral sewer.") may not have been quoted as widely as her anti-porn statements, her "mandated intercourse" comment, or her suggestion that Hillary Clinton should shoot Bill and be pardoned by Gore. But she continually allowed her work and her notoriety to be used by the rabid right, regardless of their differences on other issues (such as gay rights, or abortion), which makes her statements about compromise in the obit you cite laughably ironic. (I recommend reading her essay at http://www.countercurrents.org/us-dworkin021104.htm - it's the only indication I've ever seen that she grasped the concept of irony.)

I think here we may be dealing with the difference between Dworkin's books, and her public persona as self-confessed provocateur. It was the latter that lent itself to becoming a cartoon. Do I wish we lived in a culture that valued books more than video sound-bites? Of course, and I'm sure she did too... but we don't, and she knew that, yet she gave every sign of co-operating with those who wanted her to appear as the right's man-hating porn-obsessed pet feminist.

But now she's dead, and the books are still around, so maybe the future will judge her by those. We'll see.

[cherrypep.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that life as an extremist does not really promote anything other than absolutism. The very few times I've met anybody who fought an extreme corner, I've had about the same impression.

Take a different sort of example: take Richard Stallman of the Free Software lot (please do; anything to get rid of the bugger, haha). The chap annoys the living daylights out of me, because of what I perceived as a complete refusal to accept the many needs, motivations and cares of users and society at large, which led to a community that, though effective in its stated aim, is about thirty years out of date with respect to many issues and thus exclusive of a large and relevant segment of the planet. Eventually, I figured that it's difficult to stand firm on every issue without stomping all over every other issue, which if you're not too acquainted with free software/debian politics, occurs regularly in the RMS camp. If you're a debian developer, you'll know this anyway :D

In an ideal world, there'd be time and freedom to compromise, to choose the right moment, to argue things out slowly and carefully, making maximal use of all the information at hand. From my point of view, that would be a better world, because like everybody who ever got frustrated with radical behaviour, I and my pointless moderate pals have our own lives, our own concerns and our own fears. But it ain't easy to do that, because listening to all the voices is the job of a politician, and it's not even popular when they do it. "Flipflopping", I believe they call it. So to avoid accusations of inconsistency and "muddying the message", it seems fairly inevitable that absolutism results. Many reasonable people then leave the room and find themselves a moderate, tolerant community that doesn't spit on all but one of their deeply-held convictions.

I'd be the first to admit that I'm as thick as any metaphor for a very thick thing that comes to mind, and regularly lose arguments with blokes from places like Oxford about topics such as these, and have no real idea as to why communities ought to require establishment of a radical and self-selecting culture plus polarisation to the point of schism simply to underline a simple message. You will therefore have to excuse me for what is very likely to have been an unhelpful observation. I'm merely assured that this is often the case. Seeing as the same appears to have been true of Martin Luther, some of whose output suggests a need to wash out the skull with soap and water, I'd think it's not as such a result of TV culture, though I realise that sensationalism is popularly felt to be a TV phenomenon.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

To the best of my knowledge, the Christian Right lent no support to the Dworkin-Mackinnon civil ordinance. Those who supported it included feminists.

Regarding the Meese Commission, Dworkin testified (as per the ordinance) that pornography violates women's civil rights (it should be noted that she opposed criminal "obscenity" laws). I do think it's fair to say that involving herself with the Commission lent aid and comfort to the right-wingers who were anti-sex rather than pro-woman. At least women's voices were heard - numerous victims of sexual assault, and other feminists, also testified - but the nature of the Commission meant their testimonies could just be appropriated.

Part of Dworkin's testimony is online here.

[cherrypep.livejournal.com]

That's a good obit.