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All we need is Tina Fey for true comedy. Tyler will barely have to try. He doesn't even need the other two co-speakers.
http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/01/10/andrea_dworkin/
Sadly, I have both Intercourse and MacKinnon's Only Words - "pornography is the law for women" - right here on my book boxes. I read them both when they were new. Tragically, I remember both of them fairly well. I confess Only Words is clearer to mind because it is better written and concise.
Dworkin's context is clear. Power dynamics in the patriarchy make heterosexual sex tantamount to rape. Penetrative sex is the male's expression of contempt for women. She just says so, flat out. I mean, we live in a semi-patriarchy today - so that's the way it is today. That's her statement of reality, or as she wrote, "the material conditions." Women inevitably suffer violence and economic disadvantage, which is the basis of the exploitation, yadda yadda yadda.
But somehow in some mysterious state of "equality", which apparently could be realized only by criminalizing even the mildest forms of pornography, even perhaps fashion advertisements in Vogue, and by making men hate themselves constantly, then sex will be ok again.
But let me emphasize that we do not, as Dworkin says, live in such an equal state. Outside the equal state, sex is rape. Therefore now sex is rape. That's just her argument no matter how many fancy hairs she and her acolytes tried to split.
The problem is - even if you are not a big evolution fan - that frankly I and many modern women don't feel these supposed degrading material conditions. Thanks to capitalism, even in its current state, I make waaaay more money than most men, am certainly not submissive to any, and have the means of birth control and choice to foster my own destiny. I'm just not a victim here as Dworkin wants to analyze me. And I really resent her trying to tell me she knows my state better than I actually live it.
In fact, let me compare myself, as I am wont to do, Queen Elizabeth I. Although not an absolute monarch as she was, I demonstrably have much more personal power and freedom than she ever did over my own self.
Look, Dain, I'm a feminist. But this kind of MacKinnon-Dworkin-Shalit-Farley craziness is exactly what turned an entire generation of women away from feminism. This is the old-fashioned, men-are-evil, sex-is-bad stuff that has set us back so far.
We really need a different attitude if we are to progress further, an attitude in which men are our partners who face their own issues that we must address together. And I think most women under 35 or 40 now have this attitude.
I'm not committed to being on one side of this issue - I'm not a gender studies major - but I think that Dworkin is being accused of her critics of stating, unequivocally, that heterosexual intercouse ought be treated as a criminal act: rape, which she denies in the interview excerpts provided.
I'm a sex positive individualist feminist myself, though as a straight man I recognize that this isn't particularly impressive.
unleas I'm missing something....
I don't know Tyler's thoughts on this.
Does he suggest somewhere that supply and demand should set the price he pays for his wife, or just the price she has others pay for her?
And for him? Does anyone get to bid? Guys to?
What a farce.
Sometimes, rather than being a mush-headed follower framing the argument, you just have to ask the panelists the obvious.