Andrea Dworkin Last Days at Hot Slit
A review of Last Days at Hot Slit—The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder. (Semiotext(e), March 2019)
Dworkin and Mackinnon created the language and the methodology of pro-censorship feminism. In their hands, feminism was subtly twisted from a declaration of female agency and power into an insistence on feminine weakness—a view now established as a salient aspect of mainstream feminist thinking. In their formulation, women were so weak and downtrodden that the establishment must step in to defend them from pornography. This development dismayed liberal feminists.
“While gossip among women is universally derided as low and trivial, gossip among men… is called theory, or idea, or fact.”
Interesting observations about autism. We are happy to talk about autism as an extreme male brain. What would an extreme female brain look like?
Baron-Cohen, who’s theory this is, says that the polarity here is that between systems and people. An extreme female mind would be systems-blind. It wouldn’t care about consistency. It wouldn’t link evidence to conclusions in a systematic manner.
It would simply assert. And those assertions would be driven by attachments to people. There would be positive expressions of this, such as loyalty to friends or caring for family. There would be negative expressions of this, principally blind tribalism.
Take an extreme female mind, find its most negative tribal expressions, add in uncontrollable anger, and you’ve got Andrea Dworkin.
(By the way, I find reasoning of the linked Globe and Mail article above quite compelling).
I would expand this point to cover Postmodernism itself. It is (in vulgar form) an attack on factuality and systematicity from a tribal perspective. Whatever ‘fact’ reflects badly on my tribe can be dismissed as a conspiracy by mysterious powers to do us down. Almost all postmodern positions, in the wild, come down to this.
Doubts about Dworkin by Catherine Bennett (2000)
Dworkin said: “A big part of the fight was facing facts; and facts had a lot to do with what men had done to us, how men used us with or without our own complicity.”
Feminists always ignore a simple truth of human intersexual relations. In about 90% of sexual couplings, the setup is the man competing for the woman’s VOLUNTARY selection and the woman selecting the man VOLUNTARILY (the other 10% are female initiated sexual encounters for the most part, not via involuntary). Women hold the tremendous power of mating selection in our society. Note that not all sexually reproducing dimorphic species are like this. For example, Bonobo females will have sex with any male who initiates. There is no rejection or competition.
But in humans? We have what’s called a “tournament mating” sexuality. Essentially women hold a nonstop contest for who is the best mate for them and award sex accordingly. Men compete for that choice. Even more challenging for men? All women, regardless of their “sexual market value”, are interested in the top 20% of men in terms of SMV. Men are more likely to seek their own level. It’s not a stretch to say that men are exploited via this setup as 50% of males never get to reproduce successfully and pass on their genes while 75% or more of women do so.
Yet feminist dominated “gender studies” simply refuse to deal with the massive power imbalance in favor of women in sexual selection. Hence, I can’t take any feminist seriously. Try and get this. Men have 10-17x the testosterone of women, and testosterone controls sex drive. Men are super-charged sexually compare to women in terms of frequency of arousal and interest and sexual desire, due to our biology. We don’t have a choice in terms of much of this. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to claim men are victims but if we are examining “power”, it would seem crucial to note the one-sided advantage women have in sexual selection.
Dworkin was a mentally ill, man-hating harridan who’s “success” and notoriety is an affront to all men and common decency. She faked a past as an abused sex worker, pretended to be a lesbian and many sober thinkers doubted the rape in Paris that she reported in her later years. She needed compassion and treatment, yet she gained massive power. Talk about “hate”? Andrea Dworkin defined male hatred and institutionalized the hatred of masculinity.
She’s a Goebbels-like character, nothing less. Spewing anti-male bigotry and hate nonstop and calling it analyses. Nope, she was a loathsome, hideous human being. Any feminist who doesn’t denounce her utterly and isn’t ashamed of her is my enemy just as much as Dworkin was. As a man, I’m not required to respect or accept someone with such hatred about me. The very fact that articles are written about her at all, I mean she’s the Bull Connor of male-hatred for fuck’s sake.
Another leading light of radical feminism, Shulamith Firestone, was schizophrenic. To think so many women listened to them and still do.
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a bee ee?Shulamith Firestone died at age 67 a couple of years ago. They found her body in her small Upper West Side apartment a week later when the smell tipped off one of her neighbors.
What is interesting about Dworkin is that her work is prefaced on the understanding that human social hierarchies are based in the first instance on male status hierarchies, and female status hierarchies are parasitic on male status hierarchies. Second, females have status in male status hierarchies only based on their sexual availability to heterosexual men, and their ability to reproduce. Third, female identity in human social hierarchies is inherently negative–a hole, a zero, a vagina. There is no positive identity for women.
Politically, because female status is based on sexual availability and reproduction, female status can only be enhanced by human females controlling (and restricting) heterosexual female availability and reproduction. Females (especially lesbians) need to control heterosexual females sexuality and reproduction for the good of females in order to raise their status by increasing scarcity, artificially inflating “pricing” by artificially restricting the supply of goods. This strikes directly at the existing social hierarchy.
In contrast, activities like increasing the share of women in high prestige, male-dominated professions lead to the expected result: a decline in prestige and pay. While infiltrating male-dominated institutions may be useful in order to destroy their prestige, the result can only be leveling–limitations on the potential for males attain prestige and develop positive identities.
Second, because human societies are inevitably driven by male status hierarchies, the only way women can achieve a positive identity beyond being simply a vagina is to separate and cut themselves off from men. Only then can women have a truly female-centric status hierarchy in which they can have a positive identity as persons, separated from men.
I point this out because Dworkin’s fundamental assumptions about gender are profoundly reactionary. In fact, perhaps it is her grim insight into human nature that in the end drove her to the desperation that led to her early demise.
While I have no doubt that her political insight–the key to raising the status of women in male status hierarchies is by putting lesbians in charge of regulating heterosexual activities (thereby creating conditions of artificial scarcity)-is likely to be carried forward by activists, because it works. On the other hand, if we view modern feminism as essentially a rent-seeking lobby for mostly heterosexual professional woman, it is clear that modern feminism will never be capable of handling the truth.
I had the (mis?)fortune of attending college and law school in the late 1980’s-early 1990’s at the height of MacKinnon-Dworkin mania. they were an interesting odd couple to say the least: Dworkin was an unhinged, angry, disheveled, flamboyantly frumpy, uncredentialed polemicist who could grab you by the collar and scream from the rooftops.
by contrast, MacKinnon was the smooth-talking, measured, Ivy League law professor who was ALWAYS fashionably-dressed and well-coiffed, not to mention VERY conventionally attractive. after Andrea finished screaming, MacKinnon would slip the legal brief under the door.
of course they had the exact same goal, just completely different styles and methods in reaching that goal.
Oh, I think it’s abundantly clear that Dworkin then and the ‘feminist’ antiporn movement now are quite strongly alinged with the religious/socially conservative right. If anything, the two movements have moved more closely toghether, so that the leadership of many of these anti-porn, anti-sex work orgs (of which there are many and who benefit from lavish US government funding) are increasingly led by a new breed of ‘feminist’ evangelicals.
The more accurate assessment is that the right is as divided on this issue as the left is (and you can certainly see that in the comments section here), and sexual conservatism vs sexual liberalism is a strong markers of one’s place on the authoritarian/libertarian axis rather than the right/left one. So no surprise that authoritarian feminism has found common ground with the authoritarian right on this issue, and in some cases, the ideologies have effectively merged over the last several decades.