(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

[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.