Would she have had those views if she was prettier and thinner?
Meh. When I was sixteen, my ex-pastor’s ex-wife (newly divorced and very bitter) gave my then-girlfriend a set of books by Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly. Let’s just say that she liked them more than I did, and it fucked up both our thinking about healthy hetero relationships for a longass time.
I’ve read a bit of Dworkin and a bit of Daly, and I found them both to be utterly repugnant in their views, absolute bigots. I’m not glad she’s dead, but I sure am glad that her views are out of favor.
There are great feminists out there, authors whose respect isn’t based on genitalia. bell hooks and Gloria Steinem are fantastic, for example. Dworkin, not so much.
Daniel
Well, apart from her following him from agency to agency trying to pursue it, that is.
Regards,
Shodan
Do you mean a romantic or professional relationship?
I’m self-identifying here as a person who considers Clinton the best Prez to have held office during his lifetime, but the issue is not whether or not Lewinsky is personally a victim but rather whether what Clinton did, in having sex with his intern, was wrong. And it was, and the criticism of feminist for not going after him is well-placed.
::sigh::
You don’t have sex with your interns (even mutually volitional sex), especially not on-the-sly like that, because it sends the message that this is part of the internship responsibilities. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, hello new intern, you know the, umm, ropes, right?
re: Dworkin, she espoused a lot of views I find indigestable and unpalatable, although there’s some good stuff in Pornography: Men Possessing Women. I’d say the same of Mary Daly — there’s some brilliant material lurking amongst the intolerable theories. Doesn’t make either one of them other than adversaries when I’m doing theory.
If anything, the worst things she said did a lot to discredit her colleague Catherine MacKinnon by association, and MacKinnon was the better theorist.
Both of them should’ve known better than to wish to authorize the (patriarchal) State to censor sexual materials that it (the State) deems violent or degrading to women. Talk about entrusting the fox with the policing of the henhouse…
Also, re: porn itself — where I disagree with Dworkin and her ilk:
a) While, yes, deliberately sexualized images of women can be constructed so as to eroticize power relations, contempt towards women, violence towards women, and so on, it is seriously damned important when theorizing in this manner to construct a theoretical category of deliciously erotic images of women that eroticize nothing of the sort, even if you go on to declare that category to be an empty set. And if you’re going to declare it to be an empty set, you’d better develop the reason why and elaborate it. Is it contextual, i.e., that in a context where men do, in fact, possess power over women, it is impossible for an erotic image of a female to be free of the taint of context? If so, abstract it out. State for the record that in a hypothetical world lacking such inequality (and why be a feminist if not to have such a world in mind as one’s goal?) that such images would not be a problem. Then you’ve got to elaborate on the difference between that and the kind of image that intrinsically, as part of the image, eroticizes power of men over women, especially if you’ve put a lot of time and effort into detailing the problems of violent and/or humiliating erotica and porn.
b) You picked a hell of a time to suddenly become heterocentric. You accidentally leave your Adrienne Rich and Jill Johnston in your other luggage or something? You can’t just toss up the images and then treat them as if erotic images of women were inherently and exclusively appealing to males (all of whom are somehow suddenly heterosexual). And once you’ve distinguished between the image and the sexualized perception and acknowledged that the sexualization is in the perception and not inherently within the image (although it may well mirror cultural erotic norms which explains how the pornographer is able to know what will tantalize the buying audience, etc), you have to stretch your theory to show how (patriarchal) culture defines the erotic and pornographic as well as vice versa, how the mirroring works. You can’t just posit a cause-effect relationship. Your colleague MacKinnon was honest and perceptive enough to note that
… in other words, that in the context of a power inequity between parties sexually attracted to each other, each party finds the power inequity (along with other things that are “of” the other or “of” the relationship dynamics as they experience them) to be erotic, at least under the right provocative circumstances. That this may mean that we all (women and men) have an erotic stake that runs contrary to the desire for sexual equality, and to that extent you may be on to something important with regards to the contents of the porn we consume, but it also points up that porn only incidentally causes the refuels the power imbalance; for the most part, it simply reflects it. We find it sexy because it repeats the patterns in which our erotic experiences have occurred already.
Damn. Miller got to it before me. President’s staff - ha!
I think they used each other. We all know how Billy used Monica, and Monica used Bill for connections. Typical affair, not different from any other, and not really any less tawdry, shameless, or callous than any others.
Speaking as a conservative, Clinton frustrates and irritates even being out of office. It’s not anything he;s doing now or not doing. It’s just that his official tenure was so useful and yet so damaging. I think many of his decisions were very, very bad for us now, and yet some of them were farsighted. He was a reverse Bush: both good politicians. Clinton faked erudition, and Bush fakes bad English. Likewise, Clinton had disastrous and useless foregn policy, while having a great domestic policy overall (not everything mind, you, and he was prone to pretense like all politicians). Bush has the right idea in foregn policy, but often makes missteps on domestic. Perhaps its because he believes in those decisions, though I generally suspect he gets into most of his domestic troubles simply by being desperate to appeal, even if the policy makes no good sense. Both are unfarily blamed for things not really germaine to their office or over which they have no control (or actualy do the ight thing on but are villified over a strawman).
And both of them infuriate the opposition to no end.
And… I forgot to mention that I, young as I am, have no knowledge of Dworkin at all. Sounds like an oddball. Not really worth noting.
smiling bandit: I’d reverse your assessment of Clinton and Bush. Clinton’s domestic policy was fairly status quo, neither amazing nor disastrous. I think his foreign policy was outstanding in a lot of cases. Foreign leaders were his friends in a lot of cases, not just foreign leaders.
I reserve judgement on Bush’s domestic policy for the moment, there is a lot of stuff the administration appears to be doing that will have more long-term than short-term impacts, and president’s are usually judged based upon short-term views while their successor gets the accolades/blame later. I think his foreign policy is idiotic, we could have a much better relationship with Iran for instance, and thereby have a lot more influence. I think if he’d given some props to the youth resistance, and not labelled Iran part of the “Axis of Evil” then that would have made a lot of difference toward Iran moving away from such a radical stance toward the US. I think it’s time to start recognizing Iran as a power broker that needs to be respected. He more or less ignores India when making decisions. I like that he has taken a strong stand on Israel removing settlers even if the decision to move those settlers is too little too late. I believe a much more calm diplomatic approach to foreign policy could have worked better, but then, what do I know?
AHunter3: Something I’ve often wondered about re: the objectification of women, is the effect of the fashion industry on women. I think fashion magazines are far worse than porn, and the fashion industry is dominated by gay men and straight women. Women read fashion magazines and feel imperfect when they are not 6’2 and 105 lbs. Why does our society let gay men tell us what is sexy on a woman? Personally I think the fashion industry has made women in our country overall less sexy, not more. Certainly the big titty big ass porn star paradigm is ridiculous as well.
Erek
She wasn’t much of a presence at Wellesley in the '80’s, although we certainly knew who she was. We got a brief summary of her writings and didn’t give them much weight in Women’s Studies, but that may have been a New England love of moderation more than an outright rejection of her. There were a few “all sex is rape!” gals around, but everybody made fun of them and ignored them. The latter was worse for them; they were mostly shouters who wanted attention, even if they did good things like organize Take Back the Night marches. Guess that’s how I’ll remember her too. I do think her own abusive first marriage colored her experiences way too much.
At the risk of hijacking, I believe that this is one of those times when a firm, principled stance is called for, and I measure success in politics by the outcome more than method, tough bothhave there place. I don’t care whether “stoopiD busHitler LEID!!1111one” because I understand his principles, what he intended, and why. It may not work, but I beieve it has and had a better chance than any other course of action.
Aside from that, I feel that saying, “We oppose you! We reject you!” right back at Iran is exactly the right thing to do. Until the government there falls or apolgizes, they are still our declared, sworn enemy, and the government publicly villifies us. No accomodation is possible, because the leadership (if you can call it that) is an evil pack of thugs in preistly garb. I also believe that such public, open, and unequivocal stances of moral beliefs will aid in keeping America from succumbing to same disease of apathy that pagues Europe. Calmness and cool-headedness is often a good thing, but it should never be taken as a reason to avoid bold action. But enough about that.
To bring this bakc to the debate at hand, did she ever comment about nations like Iran or Afganistan? And if so, how did she avoid the inevitable instant heart attack?
Running thru minds of women browsing fashion mags: a poll for het females
Of the threads I’ve started on this board, that one was one of my all-time favorites 
I don’t mind her. She seemed to genuinely hold the beliefs she expounded.
She also had expressed her dismay at some of the misguided actions as a result of her beliefs.
My only exposure to her was the MacKinnon collaboration and I walked away with the belief that while sincere, she was happily staunch in her wrong-headedness. Even with some stable ideas to support, her over-zealous approach to shouting wild eyed usually took precedence. Not to mention, I think the whole anti-porn stance was simply for press and its sensationalizing use. The false attribution thing seemed to fall somewhere between giving her another platform, martyring her among the faithful and being truly contemptible. Or is that too strong a word?
However, I was somewhat sad to read of her passing. Having grown up around so many women ashamed to proclaim themselves as feminist, it’s always disheartening to lose someone who identified that way proudly.
~faithfool, happily avowed feminist, occasional porn peruser and definite enjoyer of male company and parts 
Must.Resist.Urge.To.Hijack.Thread.
(CoughIraqCough)
I just read his Obit in The Torygraph. It seems she had a fairly gruesome life. May God grant her rest.
They’re feminists. Do you really have to ask?
I get the impression that she and her ilk were the reason many women were and are “ashamed to proclaim themselves as feminist”, for fear of being identified as misandrist lesbians with bad hygiene and a persecution complex. There are far better examples of strong, independent women.
Stranger
Actually, Andrea Dworkin (for some reason, I started to type Andrea YATES!) is one of the main reasons women ARE ashamed to call themselves feminists-they don’t want to be associated with her ilk.
Oh that’s Andrea Dworkin’s fault? I thought it was because they were cowardly and ignorant.