Pornography and Its Discontents

Cathy Young of Reason takes up the unenviable task of speaking ill of the dead in a Boston Globe obit-ed on Andrea Dworkin. Her column is the first responsible comment on Dworkin's legacy I've seen. With all due respect—I don’t see that Dworkin deserves the respect of feminism. Feminists should have disposessed her work as beyond the pale as it hit the presses, and the movement would be stronger today for having done so.

Normally I find truck with the "by excess, progress" thesis Kevin Drum poses. (Which he's totally just saying to get back in the girls' good graces, but anyway.) Insofar as Dworkin's work, as rhetorically bombastic as it was, called greater attention to violence perpetrated against women, her work deserves praise. But I think that degree is marginal and greatly outweighed by the harm she did to the movement. For one thing, Dworkin’s work was more academic clarification of violence than public activism about it; for another, it takes willful misreading to withdraw from her fundamentalist campaign against pornography any practicable applications.

I’m surprised, for example, to see Amanda Marcotte, a strong feminist blogger, illustrate the point: She links to a Feministing post (about a brutal high school rape and attempted cover up) and comments on it in the context of Dworkin's work, saying that Dworkin "raised awareness of sexual violence." The times aren’t so caveman that only by the critical lens of feminism are rape and conspiracy monstrous, but nevertheless. The problem, I think, is that Dworkin’s given credit for drawing attention to the pressing question of whether and how explicit imagery frames societal perceptions of and behavior toward women—a pressing, difficult empirical question—but not only did she not treat this question with data, she never treated it at all. The empirical concern acknowledges a distinction between the virtual and the real, but Dworkin draws no such line; as Creep and Blink puts it, she occupies the "blurry line between leftist and rightist totalitarianism and paranoia" (link courtesy Lindsay Beyerstein).

The pornography Dworkin took to be literal violence against women was “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.” (In answer to which I’m tempted to quote Ellen Willis: “What I like is erotica, and what you like is pornography.”) The semantic baggage Dworkin invested in "explicit subordination,” she spent a career unpacking, but time and again she clarified that she meant pornography to mean, in fact, heterosexual sex, whether mediated by voyeurism, commercialism, otherwise, or not at all. Somehow I recognize that it shows poorly on me to quote her as saying, “Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman”—as if I’m cherrypicking the one erratic statement from her catalogue. But she meant that quote and all the other incendiary blasts. The camp she contradistinguished is men, whom she hated. She thought that heterosexual intercourse was rape, she said so time after time, and one only needs to read what she wrote to understand that.

But Amanda, Feministe, Bitch Ph.D. —all soft on her. It goes without saying that the misandry espoused by Dworkin (and Catherine MacKinnon) is the source for the “feminazi” smear and its many variations. Inexcusable, misogynist bludgeon though that may be , it’s not unfair to suggest that feminists are partly responsible for the persistence of that slur, by not only failing to disassociate Dworkin from the movement but in fact canonizing her among second wave feminists. Give her some credit for stepping up the rhetoric a notch, I guess, but her scholarship was atrocious.