Talk:Andrea Dworkin/Archive 3

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Dworkin's attitude to heterosexual intercourse

The following quotation from her book, "Intercourse", was removed with the comment that it did not mean that she felt being constructed for vaginal penetration was worse than being an Auschwitz inmate. Out of interest, can somebody (radgeek?) please explain what other interpretation could be reasonably put on it? She says there is "no analogue" to having a vagina, not even in the Nazi death camps or Gulag. It might, of course, mean that having a vagina is far nicer than being in Auschwitz, but given the context -- the description of intercourse as "humiliation", her apparent suggestion that men select vaginal entry specifically to debase or dominate women -- and the overall thesis of the book, it seems a reasonable conclusion to reach. Why mention these bywords for horrific torture if not to emphasise the awfulness of having a vagina?

"There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse; for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag."

I don't think that this point requires "interpretation." Dworkin says what she means: there aren't ready analogies between the conditions that she says women experience in patriarchy and the conditions of other oppressed peoples. She suggests that the reason for the difference is that some forms of patriarchal oppression are sexualized. She makes no claims at all about what is better or worse; she merely says that they are, in this respect, not the same. Radgeek 21:41, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

The quoted excerpt does not refer to patriarchy. It says there is “no analogue” to “being made for penetration, entry, occupation”. Just before, we are told that during intercourse “[t]he vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart”, and that “[s]he is occupied -- physically, internally, in her privacy”. All of this is a clear reference to the biological reality of women, and its relation to vaginal intercourse. Why, if she were referring to women’s subordinate position in the patriarchy, would she talk in such explicit language about their genitals?

Since you’re presumably not suggesting that the patriarchy is responsible for the morphology of female genitalia I can only assume you are excavating some esoteric meaning from what you see to be Dworkin’s deeply figurative language. If so, I’d like to see a clearer explanation of this process and resulting view, because it certainly doesn’t qualify as uninterpreted. And no, complaints about “depiction” (the spin you put on this in the “Intercourse” article) won’t do. Regardless of depiction, the vagina is indeed “muscled” and “the muscles have to be pushed apart” during vaginal intercourse; and no amount of sexist imagery has ever had any bearing on that.

You are of course entitled to your own views of what this all means, and I believe the article as it stands reflects them. These views may even accord with what Dworkin said elsewhere. But that does not mean that the obvious interpretation, pertaining to the mechanics of vaginal entry, is invalid, or that it should be removed from the article. Even if it could be shown that Dworkin’s subsequent defence of her views were not back-pedalling, and that “Intercourse” was entirely consistent with everything else she had said, it would not negate the usefulness of showing why her critics have interpreted her books in certain ways. At best it would warrant suitable wording to reflect the divergence of interpretations.

Finally, you are being ridiculous in suggesting her comparison with, among others, Auschwitz and the Gulag, “makes no claims at all about what is better or worse”. The strong implication, as I’ve already said, is that women’s situation is worse. If she were drawing a value-free comparison why was every counterpoint a deeply negative one? To suggest that one can invoke for comparative evaluation the “atrocities [of] the twentieth century”, including the work of Stalin and Hitler, and not imply negativity is pure absurdity.

Stuarta 14:06, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Unless I've missed something, all that can be unambiguously inferred from Dworkin's statement is that the degree of submission inherent to having a vagina is greater than that suffered by prisoners in Auschwitz and the Gulags. This may not be all that far from calling the female condition downright "worse" than being in a death camp, but there is still a difference, and to disregard it would be PoV. 85.64.246.205 01:28, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Of course, her intent while writing it, and other possible interpretations of it, while relevant, do not negate what a disinterested reader might make of it. It would seem very relevant to the discussion of the "intercourse equals rape" question. So I would like, if possible, to see a case for exclusion. As things stand, we have a contention -- that "intercourse equals rape", the fact that this statement does not explicitly appear in the work, and her assertion that this was not her view. The quotation above, and other material from her book recently excised from this article, would seem to be at least as valid contributions to the discussion.

The material "excised" was reverted because you put in long quotes without context or even so much as offering a proper citation in the work (or even a link to the online copy of the 7th chapter). The passages were restored once I took the time to find the paragraphs in the book. It was then moved to the new article Intercourse (book), which is linked from the section on Intercourse in the Dworkin article, because of the length required by long block quotes and discussion of context. (You could have found all of this out by examining the History tab for this entry, incidentally.) I'd like to suggest that detailed discussion of the contents of the book should go under the article on the book; the section in this article about the author should mainly discuss it in terms of the development of her views on pornography and sexuality, and mention the controversy over the book's argument.

I can’t imagine why you put “excised” in quotation marks. All of the quotations were indeed excised from the main article, to be replaced with a further apologia from Dworkin. Only two have been reinstated, and in a different article – the “Intercourse” one. The quotations which you excised, and which continue to be absent, included another relevant one comparing vaginal to anal sex:

“The creation of gender (so-called nature) by law was systematic, sophisticated, supremely intelligent... Fuck the woman in the vagina, not in the ass, because only she can be fucked in the vagina.”

Further context that you apparently deemed irrelevant included her view that “penetration was never meant to be kind” and that sex is a “humiliation ritual”.

I agree, it would have been preferable to have supplied page numbers, although the lack of them was certainly no grounds for a quotation’s removal – many quotations on Wikipedia lack them. Thank you for adding those for the quotation that you added back into the “Intercourse” article. As for the context, that appears to be solely your interpretative framework, including the reiterated assertion that the statement, “All heterosexual intercourse is rape”, does not feature in “Intercourse”. As noted above, this is not the only context that a reader might benefit from.

Stuarta 14:06, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

"Excised" was put in quotation marks because the material was put back in to the Dworkin article once proper references were added. They were then moved to the Intercourse article (you could have found this out by checking the page history). Why? Because this article is about Andrea Dworkin, not about the book Intercourse. Why was that done? Because Intercourse is a culturally important book that deserves its own article and I might point out that there have been specific complaints from other editors on this talk page about the length of the Dworkin article and the amount of time spent dwelling on what amounts to little more than competing argumentative essays. The elliptical quote that you lifted verbatim from Mullarky's review (I had to do some digging to find that that's where you got it from, since you didn't cite your sources) was left out because it was not used to support any point of controversy about Dworkin's work with any cited origin other than your own original research about the "seeming implications" of Dworkin's work. Mullarkey doesn't take it to mean what you think it "seemingly implies" in her review, for example. In case you are interested, here is the actual quote, without ellipsis; it comes from "Chapter 8: Law" in Part 3 of Intercourse, pp. 156-157 in my paperback edition:

"The creation of gender (so-called nature) by law was systematic, sophisticated, supremely intelligent; behavior regulated to produce social conditions of power and powerlessness experienced by the individuals inside the social system as the sexual natures inside them as individuals. There were the great, broad laws; prohibiting sodomy; prescribing fucking in marriage; directing the fuck to the vagina, not the mouth or the rectum of the woman because men have mouths and rectums too; legitimizing the fuck when it produces children; each turn of the screw so to speak heightening gender polarity and increasing male power over women, fucking itself the way of creating and maintaining that power. Fuck the woman in the vagina, not in the ass, because only she can be fucked in the vagina. Fuck to have children because only she can have children. Do not waste sperm in sex acts that are not procreative because the martial aims of gender are not advanced; pleasure does not necessarily enhance power. Every detail of gender specificity was attended to in the Old Testament, including cross dressing: "A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment; for whosoever doeth these things is an abomination unto the Lord thy God" (Deuteronomy 22:5). A woman had to be a virgin, or she could be killed: "But if this thing be true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the damsel; then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die..." (Deuteronomy 22:20-21). The regime of fear was established through threat of death; and the regime of fear created sex roles, called nature. Laws mandating gender-specific dress as God's will, gender-specific virginity, vagina-specific fucking, the legitimacy of the fuck dependent on producing a child, shaped the nature of intercourse as well as the natures of men and women. Opposites were created; a hierarchy was created; intercourse expressed both the opposition and the hierarchy. Intercourse became the "natural" expression of the different "natures" of men and women, each pushed away from having a common human nature by laws that prohibited any recognition of sameness; each pushed into a sexual antagonism created by the dominance and submission that was the only intimacy they shared." (156-157; emphasis added)

The passage is quite explicit that its concern is the conditions produced by a particular sex of laws under the conditions of a particular form of social power. (I've boldfaced a passage that, in particular, might be helpful to you in understanding many things in the book that you seem to misunderstand.) More to the point, however, it is rather obviously not concerned with making any claim about the relative merits of penile-anal and penile-vaginal intercourse (any more than it's specifically concerned with comparing the relative merits of fellatio or masturbation or sex using contraceptives with unprotected penile-vaginal intercourse). The passage is a discussion of Torah, not a sex advice column. Mullarkey knew this because she had read the book, and didn't make the interpretive claim that you want inserted into the article. I suspect that you don't know it because you have not read the book.

If you can connect this passage to some specific controversy about Dworkin published in a source other than your own personal exegesis of Dworkin, then feel free to quote it, with references, in connection with the specific controversy (and, may I suggest, the names of the specific people in the controversy). If you can't at least produce that information in sourcing the claims you make, then maybe you need to think more about whether WikiPedia is the right forum for these claims.

Radgeek 17:08, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

As for what "a disinterested reader" might make of Dworkin's writing, that's a perfectly reasonable topic for discussion, but I would suggest that if that is what you're interested in writing about, you should cite actual disinterested (or interested) readers who have made the interpretations that you offer, rather than using WikiPedia as a forum for your own textual exegesis (cf. WP:NOR). Radgeek 21:41, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Of all your contributions on this topic, this is the most ludicrous. First, you say interpretation isn’t necessary; then you suggest I can cite someone else’s interpretation as long as it isn’t mine. Finally, during what I suppose you believe to be some sort of argumentative coup de grace, you deliver the admonition not to use “WikiPedia as a forum for your own textual exegesis” – this after battling all comers for the right to lard the factual account with partisan apologetics.

This is simply egregious. What I've "larded" the passages in questions with are quotations from Dworkin about the meaning of her own work, identified and cited as such. That's not original research; it's a responsible attempt to give one of the sides in a point in dispute her hearing. If you think that that is the same thing as simply presenting weasel-worded anonymous interpretations of what a passage "seemingly implies," think again.

Along the way we’re treated to this: “you should cite actual disinterested (or interested) readers who have made the interpretations that you offer”.

It demonstrates a) that you don’t know what “disinterested” means and b) that you didn’t read the link I added to Maureen Mullarkey’s “Nation” review of “Intercourse”, which does view the quotations I added in essentially the same light. This review supplied me with the quotations as well as the starting point for my analysis. I’ll discard the fatuous notion that I cite a “disinterested” reader as empty rhetoric. Instead I’ll make the simple, obvious point that if the spectrum of opinions of Dworkin’s work includes the views of Mullarkey, and if her opinion has basis in Dworkin's words (which it does), then it deserves to be represented in this Wikipedia article.

Stuarta 14:06, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

As a matter of the WikiPedia editing process, let me suggest that if you are going to make analytic claims about Dworkin's work and what it "seemingly implies," you may want to name, or at least link to, the source for those claims rather than hiding behind anonymous language like "seemingly implies" or "some critics" or similar (cf. WikiPedia:Avoid weasel words). If there is no source other than your own personal "analysis" of controversial points, then asserting as fact that a passage "seems to imply it" is a violation of WP:NPOV, and asserting that you personally think that it a passage seems to imply it is a violation of WP:NOR.

As a personal note, I'd also suggest that if you expect your "analysis" of Dworkin to be taken seriously, the starting point for it should probably be the book Intercourse, not press reviews of it and elliptical quotations that you have lifted from those reviews. Just out of curiosity, do you so much as own a copy of the book? Have you ever read it any more of it than the Internet copy of chapter 7 and the quotations that you've found in various reviews and discussions? Radgeek 17:08, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Radgeek, you seem well-informed on this topic. I just want to point out, though, that in this comment taken in context with some others, you're asking for contradictory things. Stuarta should not be putting her own analysis in; on that I agree with you. The only alternative is to look at verifiable published sources discussing it, such as press reviews and scholarly works. And the truth of the matter is that Dworkin's work is controversial, and many opinions exist. This article seems to emphasize the positive ones. We need to work on NPOV. moink 17:23, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Moink, thanks for the comment; I'm afraid I don't quite understand you, though. What are the contradictory things you think that I'm asking for? I didn't mean to suggest in this comment that Stuarta should be adding "analysis" based on a reading of the book itself any more than adding "analysis" based on reviews and elliptical quotations lifted from them. I'm sorry if that's how I put it across; it's not what I meant. The "personal note" (and a number of the spats with Stuarta and others over the reading of certain specific passages) are intended as just that, personal and interpretive notes which are mostly off to one side of the topic of how to edit this and related articles. I agree with you that this article would benefit from a NPOV presentation of the claims of some of her critics in press reviews and scholarly works; what I disagree with is the insistent and frequent actions of editors such as Stuarta and Mare Nostrum (to take a couple recent examples) to insert weasel-worded POV editorializing based on their own views, without reference to and often without citation of the critics making the charges in question. Does that help clarify, or does it just muddify more? Radgeek 18:08, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Maybe I misread your comments. Let me clarify what I meant. Elsewhere you seem to suggest that Stuarta and others should not put their own opinions in the article, as this would be original research. I'm with you on that. Here you say that "the starting point for (Stuarta's analysis) should be the book Intercourse, not press reviews of it." I interpreted that as meaning that you disagreed with quotations of press reviews being put in the article. It seems now you're clarifying that to say that's not what you meant, and that this is more of an off-topic discussion. Ok. But back to the article, what it needs is some well-sourced criticism of Dworkin's views. moink 18:17, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying. I agree with you that the article could use well-sourced discussion of Dworkin's critics, either in the sections on her life and work, or in the section on "Legacy and Controversy," depending on which is more appropriate and leads to a better-reading article.

I don't know how long you've been following this article or the Talk page, but one of the outstanding issues here is that there have been a series of editors (including User:Seminumerical, User:Doovinator, User:Stuarta, and User:Mare Nostrum, who have repeatedly inserted selective, uncited quotes and completely unsourced editorializing in an attempt to express their own views of Dworkin, who expressly stated their desire to use this article as a forum for original research to "debunk" Dworkin's work, and who vandalized this and related pages (see for example Seminumerical's vandalism of Feminism, vandalism from an IP address <<<just to clarify things, I have not repeatedly vandalized anything, I wouldn't even admit to a single act of vandalism, except that when I clicked on Radgeek's link to my vandalism I recognised it as my own drunken input. I had been away looking after an ill relative and had little access to a computer for about six weeks, otherwise I would have made a point of vandalising the site some more. Well what I said about dworkin was not vandalism, rather the truth, but it looked unprofessional. Not what we want to see if we are to compete with the nearly dead Encyclopedia Britannica. I mean Dworkin is an habitual ranter. Anyhow, I only had access to a 56k modem at the time. I'll try to remind everyone that Radgeek is an habitual pussy more often from now on. Seminumerical 06:08, 22 April 2006 (UTC)>>>that shortly thereafter made edits that User:Stuarta claimed as his or her own, Mare Nostrum's quasi-vandalism of the opening paragraph, etc.). They have also engaged in repeated personal attacks against Andrea Dworkin and against me as well. This makes it rather hard to assume good faith as I ordinarily would. It also may help explain why I'm interested in pointing out on this talk page that some of the editors here do not appear to have any significant direct contact with Dworkin's work, have contributed very little constructive, non-combative work to the article (amounting to a handful of external links and a paragraph on the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography), and that this may be important to keep in mind when trying to resolve disputes over recent edits. Radgeek 18:49, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't wish to start a flamefest, but I do find it mildly ironic that, in reponse to adding this section

"Elsewhere she apparently suggests that women are, on account of their penetrable sexual organs, consigned to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims"

the reversion from radgeek said "You also need to read more carefully if you think she suggests that intercourse is worse than Auschwitz." The sentence above does not say that. It says that women are "consigned to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims" because of their "penetrable sexual organs". This derived from the considerations above, and from their apparent link with "being made for intercourse; for penetration, entry, occupation". It doesn't mention intercourse, and it doesn't compare sexual intercourse with a concentration camp -- a nonsensical comparison to make.

Stuarta 10:34, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Fine. I apologize if I misstated your interpretive claim. However, you also need to read more carefully if you think that Dworkin is suggesting that having penetrable sexual organs consigns women to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims. In fact, you need to read more carefully if you think that Dworkin is suggesting that having a vagina consigns women to suffering at all. Dworkin doesn't identify women or female sex organs with sexual penetration; she argues that "the discourse of male truth" identifies women and female sex organs with sexual penetration, and that sexual practice in patriarchal societies enforces that identification. (See also The Root Cause in Our Blood for related themes.) Radgeek 21:41, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I have addressed this above. I based my interpretation on reading the words Dworkin wrote in “Intercourse”. Whether she wrote something about “the discourse of male truth” (whatever that means) elsewhere is of no relevance to the semantic content of her quoted words, and does not imply that I didn’t read “carefully”. In the content that I added and you removed, I said this:

“she apparently suggests that women are, on account of their penetrable sexual organs, consigned to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims”.

I remain of the view that this is a reasonable interpretation of the paragraph now quoted in the “Intercourse” article, and which I discussed above. I never suggested that she identified “women or female sex organs with sexual penetration” – another of your inventions – and I never made unqualified assertions either way in my original modifications. I said, “she appears to be disturbed by the mechanics of vaginal entry”, that the book “contains the strong suggestion that she disapproves of heterosexual intercourse” and that “she seemingly implies anal heterosexual sex would be preferable to the vaginal norm”. None of this is unequivocal (although certainly the wording could be tightened up slightly) and I fail to see how you could so categorically dismiss such views of her work from being represented in a neutral article.

Stuarta 14:06, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Stuarta, let me suggest that, while I find these claims completely unsupported by the text, and the "implications" to be the creatures of your own imagination, WikiPedia is not ultimately the forum for settling this dispute (as per WP:NPOV). Before, however, you say "Yes, that's why we should make sure these passages go in the article!" let me also suggest that WikiPedia is not the forum for you to present your own original interpretation of Dworkin's book -- as per WP:NOR. For the purposes of editing this article, I do not care whether you think Dworkin is best read as advocating what you claim she advocates, or even whether you find these readings "reasonable." You need to find a different forum for setting out your own detailed reading of Intercourse, because WikiPedia is not a forum for presenting original research. Radgeek 16:22, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

More between Mare Nostrum and Radgeek on POV

SO!! STRUGGLING TO INJECT BALANCE INTO THIS LOOPY ARTICLE BUT FRUSTRATED AT EVERY TURN? PERPLEXED WHY CONSENSUS IS SO ELUSIVE IF WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE OBJECTIVE? Need comic relief? Well, then! For some oily Dworkin hagiography, try the Rad Geek People's Daily, e.g., [1], and [2] ("those of you ... know I absolutely adore Andrea Dwworkin") and don't forget the search function, e.g., Why Andrea Dworkin was Right (Volumes 1 through 6!) Also among many others, there's this [3] ("her words changed my life"). Or alternatively, for the "preacher of hate" view (people can be so negative!), try party-pooper Cathy Young in the Globe[4] Mare Nostrum 21:53, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I admire Andrea Dworkin, have read most of her work, think that she was right about many things, and make no bones about it. Similarly, you and a few others who have posted on this Talk page strongly dislike Andrea Dworkin and think that her views on many things are wrong and indeed bizarre or mad. You have made no bones about that either. Now that we have filled out the ad hominem context, what has any of this got to do with the process of editing this article? —Radgeek 20:00, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

NO, NO, NO. I am interested in a neutral account of this extremely controversial person's life. I do not have a whole website writing about how I adore her, the many amazing contributions she made, how I despise her critics, or similar -- and I don't have any Dworkin writing history of any other kind, either.Mare Nostrum 11:53, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Neither do I have any such website (if you want to see one, you're better off going to Nikki Craft's AndreaDworkin.net). I have a website on general topics, which has included some articles concerning Andrea Dworkin and expressing admiration for her as a person and support for some of her views. I do indeed think well of Andrea Dworkin. You think poorly of her and have repeatedly stated this in the above discussion. In any case, what has this got to do with the process of editing this article? Radgeek 04:46, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

This article is becoming bloated and argumentative. It should not read as a forum in which pro and anti-Dworkin forces do battle. IronDuke 23:26, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I'd like to suggest that part of this can be avoided by confining any extended discussion of, say, the proper reading of one of Dworkin's books to articles such as Intercourse (book). Also that criticism of Dworkin from random dudes with a web site (which have mostly been inserted through weasel-worded references to "some critics," etc.) be kept to a minimum. IronDuke, what would you suggest as ways to improve the flow of the article and avoid turning it into a debate forum? —Radgeek 00:56, 5 February 2006 (UTC) MARE NOSTRUM rejoins, They are not "random dudes", they are shocked by this person, the word "feminazi" was invented by such people to describe her in part because they don't no what else to call her and smaller sites and references aren't included anyway, which may be unfair to the thousands of appalled smaller-scal commentators who don't devote whole websites to this subect.

It is bloated and argumentative, that is what you get when you have a guy who has his own I-love-Andrea-Dworkin-and-I-hate-her-critics website guy (who knew?! does Wikipedia encourage that, IronDuke?! I used to take this more seriously - ha ha!!),

when you have such a person, doing much of the writing about such an iconoclast. Think positive, it used to be bloated and hagiographic.

And I sure am for cutting it down. Air has to be given to her outrageous bombast (the reader has to understand what so many people are reacting to), but if there are good arguments for putting it in context (e.g., later changed her outlandish views on incest), that's great though it should be very brief. We have to hold her accountable for her invective, she said all these things and there sometimes isn't a good explanation. That's life. If we were writing about JFK, we wouldn't say that many people argued he was a philanderer but if you read his own account he actually said what a good fellow he was, how devoted to Jackie (and then quote him about it, and add other adoring material from his admirers). Probably he did lots of good things, but he *was* a philanderer and we don't need to drone on about what a misconception that is. Maybe Dworkin was a big mouth, who didn't mind her words (or liked to shock people) -- some people are just like that. We have to accept that she said some deeply appalling things, much of it mutually contradictory, and maybe she changed her mind later (views evolved, matured) or had some reason to say them -- but if so, the explanation needs to be really short and not a recitation of all of the pro-Dworkin propaganda on any particular point. We don't need to use Dworkinite hyperbole that something was a "grave" misunderstanding of her work. We do not have to list one by one her legal recommendations before the Meese Commission, but just summarize them respectfully in one line. We don't need to quote her at lengthy on and on about how she "condmened" obscenity laws (that inapt verb was reverted at least five times) at the same time that she called for **new** anti-porn laws, it appears highly self-contradictory anyway and it can best be summed in a very short, respectful description. We don't have to quote irrelevancies like how many minutes she spoke before the Meese Commission (also reverted back in several times), argue that vampires or dracula somehow modify the fact that she said repeated that "romance boils down to rape", don't need to recite how *she* compared her own work to fighting the Ku Klux Klan, or that her partner MacKinnon thought she should have the Nobel Peace Prize. We don't need to quote at length from her books, or hear her account of illness -- she thought she was raped and that such affected her overall health, the doctors disagred but she maintained such. Period. She claimed spousal battering? Then she did. We don't need to know if it was her legs or head that she said were injured, if she was battered, then much of her body surely would surely be injured. And there is far too much descriptive material in here about her "groundbreaking" writings, all that can be greatly shortened and in a respectful and faithful way. The reader can go to Amazon or her site if they seek such information. Mare Nostrum 11:53, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Look, you may think that you are entitled to ornament the article with numerous links to critics of Dworkin, ranging in credibility from published columnist Cathy Young to a hatchet piece written by an obscure Marxist-Leninist splinter sect and subsequently republished on an e-mail listserv, without any mention of the fact that Dworkin explicitly rejected these interpretations of her work or her stated reasons for doing so. I think that that's wildly irresponsible. You may also think that citing from Dworkin's work is unnecessary; I think that citing sources is something that WikiPedia rather desperately needs more of, and furthermore I'd like to point out that I am doing so, in part, to clarify the source for the material is Dworkin's own writing, something that you claimed to be important to ensuring that the article is NPOV. As for "holding her accountable" for your own POV on the contents, effects, and value of what you describe as her "invective," that is explicitly not the purpose of WikiPedia. Radgeek 04:46, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

P.S. When I came on here, the state of this article was that it especially "silly" to say that Dworkin was a misandrist because she lived with self-loathing male (Author, "Refusing to to be a Man") and Dworkin campaigner John Stoltenberg and such was proof she was not sexist. So we've come some way. Now let's shorten.

Reversions, February 5, 2006

The following edit is shameless POV. From the first paragraph; emphasis mine:

She is best known for her bombastic polemics (e.g., "Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.").

It's also factually absurd. Dworkin reached the national stage as an activist against pornography and Pornography: Men Possessing Women remains very clearly one of her most widely-read books. She was best known as a critic of pornography (which I actually think is rather unfortunate, for reasons that aren't worth digging into here); you might, for example, notice that her anti-pornography work is mentioned in either the first paragraph or the tagline of nearly every press obituary or column on her death ([5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1457325,00.html, ...). The two major printed articles that I can find that front-load a mention of her polemical style or its effects on readers are fellow feminist Katharine Viner's column in The Guardian, and the obit for the London Times, which also mentions her anti-pornography work in the tagline before the story even begins.

I conclude that Dworkin is most remembered for her anti-pornography activism.

SHE MOST CERTAINLY ISN'T. She is "best known," inside and outside the women's movement, as a misandrist, probably the most influential one of all time, and as a prolific author of some of the most startling anti-male invective ever published. Whatever her worshippers may wish for the bigot, this by far is legacy above anything else.Mare Nostrum 09:27, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

The following edits range from pointless wordsmithing to vandalism against documented facts.

1. The attempt to say that Dworkin condemned criminal obscenity laws without using the word "condemned." Again, what is the point? Dworkin specifically stated "We are against obscenity laws. We don't want them." and further that "Obscenity laws are also woman-hating in their very construction." She spends two pages' worth of testimony explaining her reasons for rejecting them as ineffectual in practice and anti-feminist in principle. If does not amount to a "condemnation," I am not sure what you think does. In your comments above, you claim that she is here suggesting a form of criminal obscenity prosecution, under the heading of the "criminal conspiracy" provisions that she suggested. No, she's explicitly not; she's suggesting "criminal conspiracy" provisions for what she construes as violations of women's civil rights, not for obscenity. This is explicit in her testimony. The difference may not seem important to you, but it was important to her, and the importance that Andrea Dworkin attributes to a distinction is more important than the importance that you attribute to it when glossing the contents of a speech by Andrea Dworkin. Sorry.

1. The removal of the length of Dworkin's testimony before the Attorney General's Commission. This is sourced (your original complaint seemed to be a lack of verifiability). It contributes three words to the sentence and gives a fuller picture of the testimony. What's your deal?

1. The obstinate removal of Dworkin's comparison to the SPLC Klanwatch project and the use of civil rights litigation against the KKK. Why? She said this. It's documented. It's relevant to understanding her view on the pornography industry and the right way to deal with it.

Since this exhausts the changes made, other than a correction to the image code (which I'll restore momentarily), I've reverted these edits, which frankly border on deliberate vandalism. There is no way that you could earnestly think that "best known for her bombastic polemics" is an acceptable first-paragraph characterization for an NPOV article on a person's life, and your other changes simply delete documented information without warrant. Please think harder about the way that you are going to approach editing this article if you intend to continue doing so. Radgeek 05:19, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

De-bloating

Hey Radgeek and Mare Nostrum. Sorry I didn’t respond earlier, RL intrudes. This article is continuing to grow, and I don’t think it serves anyone’s purpose, pro or anti-Dworkin, to let this happen. This is why I think it’s happening: too many facts. Radgeek makes a good point about maybe spinning off some of the stuff here into its own article(s). Maybe there could be a decent-sized article on Dworkin’s writings, and then shorten all the stuff on her writings in this article. That would be a start.

Here’s another example of how this article is getting bloated. Someone adds a sentence like, “Some critics have noted that Andrea Dworkin kicked her dog every day after work.” Someone else adds another quote, “Andrea Dworkin actually never kicked her dog. This was a myth.” Then a quote from Dworkin’s seminal book I Kicked a Bunch of Dogs is introduced, followed by a claim that the quote from that book was taken out of context. Thus we have bloat resulting from a quote that never should have been put in there on the first place, because it doesn’t matter whether Dworkin was in the habit of kicking dogs.

So, what I would propose cutting (or moving to daughter articles):

When Dworkin was 10, her family moved from the city to the suburbs of Cherry Hill Township, New Jersey, which she later wrote she "experienced as being kidnapped by aliens and taken to a penal colony" (Life and Death, 3). In sixth grade, at her new school, she was punished by school administration for refusing to sing "Silent Night;" she later wrote "I wasn't a religious zealot; I just didn't like being pushed around, and I knew about and liked the separation of church and state, and I knew I wasn't a Christian and didn't worship Jesus. ... To this day I think about this confrontation with authority as the 'Silent Night' Action, and I recommend it. Adults need to be stood up to by children, period" (Heartbreak, 21-22).

Dworkin studied music as a child (Heartbreak 1-4), and began writing poetry in sixth grade. Throughout high school, she read heavily (with encouragement from her mother and father). She was especially influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Che Guevara, and the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg (Life and Death 23-24, 28; Heartbreak 37-40).

Soon after testifying before the grand jury, Dworkin left Bennington to live in Greece (Heartbreak 80, 83) and pursue her writing. She traveled to from Paris to Athens on the Orient Express (83-85), and went to live and write in Crete (87). While in Crete, she "wrote a series of poems called (Vietnam) Variations; poems and prose poems I collected in a book printed on Crete called Child; a novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on Burning Boyfried" -- a reference to the pacifist Norman Morrison, who had burned himself to death in protest of the Vietnam War -- "and poems and dialogues I later hand-printed using movable type in a book called Morning Hair" (98).

Many feminists, on the other hand, published sympathetic or celebratory memorials online and in print ([11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]). Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin's longtime friend and collaborator, published a column in the New York Times, celebrating what she described as Dworkin's "incandescent literary and political career", suggested that Dworkin deserved a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and complained that "Lies about her views on sexuality (that she believed intercourse was rape) and her political alliances (that she was in bed with the right) were published and republished without attempts at verification, corrective letters almost always refused. Where the physical appearance of male writers is regarded as irrelevant or cherished as a charming eccentricity, Andrea's was reviled and mocked and turned into pornography. When she sued for libel, courts trivialized the pornographic lies as fantasy and dignified them as satire" [18].

This graf above could stay, but much-tightened.

Some critics, such as Gene Healy [19], Larry Flynt's magazine Hustler, and the "Alliance Marxist-Leninist" [20], allege that endorsed incest. In the closing chapter of Woman Hating (1974), Dworkin wrote that "The parent-child relationship is primarily erotic because all human relationships are primarily erotic," and that "The incest taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them. The incest taboo does the worst work of the culture [...] The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism" (Dworkin 1974, p.189). Dworkin, however, does not explain whether "fulfillment" is supposed to involve actual sexual intimacy, and one page earlier characterized what she mean by "erotic relationships" as relationships whose "substance is nonverbal communication and touch" (188), which she explicitly distinguished from what she referred to as "fucking" (187). Dworkin's work from the early 1980s onward contained frequent condemnations of incest and pedophilia as one of the chief forms of violence against women (Letters from a War Zone 139-142, 149, 176-180, 308, 314-315; Intercourse 171, 194; Life and Death 22-23, 79-80, 86, 123, 143, 173, 188-189), arguing that "Incest is terrifically important in understanding the condition of women. It is a crime committed against someone, a crime from which many victims never recover" (Letters from a War Zone, 139). In the early 1980s she had a public row with her former friend Allen Ginsberg over his support for child pornography and pedophilia, in which Ginsberg said "The right wants to put me in jail," and Dworkin responded "Yes, they're very sentimental; I'd kill you" (Heartbreak 43-47). When Hustler published the claim that Dworkin advocated incest in 1985, Dworkin sued them for defamatory libel (Dworkin v. L.F.P., Inc., 1992 WY 120, 839 P.2d 903; the court dismissed Dworkin's complaint on the grounds that whether the allegations were true or false, a faulty interpretation of a placed into the "marketplace of ideas" did not amount to defamation in the legal sense).

We really don’t need the above, either the assertion that Dworkin was pro-incest or its rebuttal.

Other parts of this article that get a polemical are things like:

She became well-known for passionate, uncompromising speeches that inspired her audience to action… “Uncompromising?” I don’t even know what that means here.

Dworkin rejected the interpretation as a grave misunderstanding of her work [21]. Why not just let it read as “Dworkin rejected this interpretation of her work [22].”

Also, there are many typos…

Hullo, I think those are very good observations by IronDuke. For the sake of transparency, I want to say this: I have enough doubts about the outcome that have have no further plans to contribute to this piece in the interim term, so please don't await action by me. I will kindly leave it at that. Best, Mare Nostrum 14:00, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

IronDuke, thanks for the suggestions. While I agree with you about the pro- vs. anti- dynamic that's causing several sections to swell into competing argumentative essays (sometimes under cover of anonymous "critics" or selected citations from Dworkin's work), I don't agree that the narrative of, for example, her childhood or her time in Crete is "bloat." Maybe we just disagree on the ideal length for biographical articles; it seems to me that on WikiPedia, we can afford to be detailed as long as the article is well-organized. (I am, however, quite open to the suggestion that the article needs, among other things, some better organization. In fact I'm pretty sure that's true.) Here are a couple suggestions: I am sure that there are sections other than Intercourse (and the dispute over its thesis) that can productively be shortened and the longer version put into daughter articles. I'd also like to suggest that one way we could try to accomodate both a desire for a brief explanation of her comings and goings, and a desire for a detailed article, is perhaps to write 1-2 more paragraphs, to be placed at the top after the one-sentence description and above "Her life and work," which could provide an overview treatment that would be fleshed out in the following paragraphs. What do you think? Radgeek 05:49, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with a lot of what you say. It's late, and I haven't fully digested it, but I would just offer this: while you're idea of an information-rich Wikipedia article is totally legit (and you'd find a lot of support out there on WP for it) my bias is in favor of articles that deliver what people most want to know -- the notability factor, you might call it. So, Dworkin on pornography interests me, Dowrkin as a little girl in the suburbs less so. I guess what I'm saying is, we shouldn't ask people to wade through a gigantic article filled with a lot of smaller facts (however true) to find what they're looking for down at the bottom (not that everyone is, but you get my drift). It's a thumbnail sketch, a highlight reel, not an actual biography. But I could well be wrong on this. It's an intersting point, I think, in any case. I'll try to be more specific later. IronDuke 08:04, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

HOW'S THE PROGRESS BY THE WAY in getting Andrea the Nobel Prize for Literature as the piece says? Anything the Wikipedians can do to push that toward a vote in 2006? Mare Nostrum 13:44, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

The "official" interpretation of Dworkin

Since there's been no response to my previous comments, let me put my general point here. As the article stands, it is heavily weighted towards the Radgeek interpretation of Dworkin's work. That isn't my interpretation of her work, and it isn't that of various reviewers, although it may have been the interpretation she promoted in subsequent interviews. It provides no clue as to why she has had the "all sex is rape" claim attributed to her.

As an example, the only hint of why anybody might interpret "Intercourse" as being anti-sex is hived off into the separate "Intercourse" article, and there it is counterbalanced by strong statements of Dworkin's alleged actual stance. Additional quotations on this subject, which still seem very relevant to the issue, were removed in favour of apologetic material. In the main article we just hear of "critics" making a false claim about a statement not in the book, as if that were the sum total of their criticisms.

It's my view that there are numerous statements in her books which support the idea that she was strongly against heterosexual intercourse. They may well have been hyperbolic, and she may in fact have been motivated by a more nuanced analysis of the portrayal of sex, but that doesn't alter what she wrote. (I'm prepared to go into detail on what this was, as I did above, but since it provoked no reply I'm trying a more general tack here.)

Perhaps she expressed herself poorly in those books, or she was inconsistent in her views. Regardless, I believe readers have a right to examine what she wrote without being led by the nose to an exculpatory view. It isn't neutral to wave away the obvious and far from isolated criticisms with some later denial of hers, without even making clear whence they came, and it isn't neutral to put criticisms in the mouth of Cathy Young, etc., but adopt the "official" view, as informed by Dworkin's later denials, for the basic thrust of the "Intercourse" article. She had serious critics, and she handed them ammunition in the form of extreme assertions regarding men and sex. If the article doesn't make that clear then it isn't a fair article, in my view.

Stuarta 14:04, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you that these articles come across as apologetic. I've been wanting to fix them for a while, but I'm not really knowledgeable enough to do so. If you are, please incorporate your knowledge. moink 14:35, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Second that. Doovinator 15:03, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry that you think that the sections on Intercourse (inter alia) are not adequately neutral. Like all WikiPedia articles, I don't doubt that they could stand improvement. However, I will point out, first, that this article is about Andrea Dworkin, not specifically about Intercourse, and that detailed examination of the controversy over Intercourse is better kept to the article Intercourse (book). If you do not think the controversy is adequately explained in the short blurb that discusses the broad sweep of the book and mentions the controversy over its interpretation and refers the reader to that article for more about the controversy, then by all means please make some suggestions about a short summary addition that would help out. However, given that there has already been quite a bit of discussion about avoiding bloat in this article, please try to consider how far the suggested changes advance a coherent overview of the author's life and work, and how far they distract from it in order to dig in to questions of detail about a book that has its own article.

As for what readers have a right to, they have a right to hear Dworkin's replies to her critics as well as those critics claims (made in the critics own names, not in the anonymous forum of what "some critics" say or what passages "seemingly imply" or "strongly suggest"). If you have any concrete recommendations about phrases or introductions that "lead them by the nose" to Dworkin's statements -- as in, engage in POV editorializing -- then by all means point them out. If all that you're complaining about is the fact that Dworkin's replies about her own work are being cited in reply to critical claims made, then I think you have an odd idea of what imposes on the rights of readers.

And as for your view of what Dworkin said in Intercourse -- as opposed to cited appeals to the views of published critics -- why should we be interested in that as far as the article on either Dworkin or Intercourse goes? WikiPedia is not a forum for original research. Sorry. Radgeek 17:22, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply Radgeek.

You haven't responded to the first, most detailed part of my comments. I'd be interested to see your reply.

Stuarta, while this is a topic of some interest to me, my primary goal here is not to convince you of what I take to be the correct reading of Intercourse. Nor should it be; that's not the purpose of this Talk page or this article (or for that matter the article on Intercourse). Nor is my time unlimited. I'm sorry that I haven't had the chance to reply to everything you say, and that my responses here will also no doubt not fully reply to your questions or claims. Fortunately, all that it is necessary to cover here is the process of editing a biographical profile of Andrea Dworkin. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

You're apparently suggesting you didn't excise quotations, despite the fact you admit you removed them from the main article, and that they consequently remain absent from both that article and the "Intercourse" article. Given this basic fact, all the rest, including your question and answer session, is irrelevant to the matter.

What I'm suggesting is that it's inaccurate to characterize this as an "excision" when what I did was remove the quotes until I could verify and find the citations, and then restored the two longest quotes after I'd done so. Here's the history, for those who haven't checked: the quotes were removed when I reverting (at 5:57 GMT) a series of edits you made, when those were provided without citations or references and interspersed with your own attempts at anonymously conveying what Dworkin "strongly suggests" or "seemingly implies." I then restored the two longest quotes to the article at 7:08 GMT after I had done the work of finding the two long quotations in the book. I put in these cited quotations about the experience of intercourse as "occupation" (once I had done your bibliographic work for you) because they are directly relevant to a notable public controversy over the meaning of Intercourse. At 7:32 GMT I moved them to the newly created article on Intercourse along with a lot of other material so that there would be more space for discussion of Intercourse and the controversy surrounding it, un-cramped by the demands of a non-bloated article about the author. It's true that I did not restore the passage that you nicked from Mullarkey's review, which she in turn quoted from Chapter 8 ("The Law") because it was not connected to any controversy over meaning except for your own unsourced (and inaccurate) claim that maybe Dworkin was suggesting that penile-anal sex was preferable to penile-vaginal sex. She wasn't, and as I was unsurprised to find when I located your source for this quote, Mullarkey doesn't think that that's what the passage means. (Or if she does think that, she certainly doesn't say it in her review.) What she thinks it illustrates is the way that Dworkin's analysis mixes together biological facts and social roles, and insists on the role of social conditioning in sexuality to a degree Mullarkey finds dangerous. Again, if you want this quote back in, and there is a sensible way that you can connect it to the surrounding discussion of Dworkin, her reviews by Mullarkey and others, and Dworkin's replies, then you should feel free to put it in the article on Intercourse, with a cited reference. However, I doubt that either it or other long block quotes (and the block quote is long if you are not going to try to hide the most important parts under an ellipsis) has much place in the 2-3 paragraph blurb that Intercourse by necessity is limited to in the article about Andrea Dworkin. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

You suggest that I cannot link the "fuck the woman in the vagina" quotation to "to some specific controversy about Dworkin published in a source other than your own personal exegesis". This you do three paragraphs after stating that your "digging" showed the quotation to be from a highly negative review of "Intercourse" in the Nation, which provoked a number of letters for and against. I therefore can "connect this passage to some specific controversy", and you know this.

This is disingenuous. The fact that you took the quotation from a controversial negative review does not mean that your use of the quotation connects it to a specific public controversy. All that you used it to do was provide a springboard for your own claims about what Dworkin "seemingly implies" about the relative merits and demerits of different kinds of sex. That's what I object to. If the quote were actually part of a discussion of the review, then that would be something different entirely. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I note that your "egregious" response doesn't address the flip-flopping on interpretation, so I don't know your latest view on this subject.

Look, there are (as I explicitly stated above) two different things being compared here. (1) Quotations from Andrea Dworkin from Intercourse and from later interviews about the meaning of her work. (2) Unsourced attempts by you to say what quotations "strongly suggest" or "seemingly imply." If you have specific examples where I or some other editor of this article have engaged in unsourced attempts to assert controversial claims of interpretation about Dworkin's book, please point them out and we can talk about the best way to fix them. If you have claims about the meaning of Dworkin's work that you can attribute to specific critics, then please feel free to point them out and they can be incorporated into either the Dworkin article or the Intercourse article or both. If all you're objecting to is the explicit citation of Dworkin's glosses of her own work in reply to critics, then it is silly to describe this as "larding" the article with "partisan apologetics," as if Dworkin's own reply to critics about her own work is not relevant to a discussion of what it means, or as if it were equivalent, from the standpoint of WP:NOR and WP:NPOV, to unsourced controversial editorializing about the "strong suggestion" or "seeming implication" of passages quoted. If you are going to claim that this is inconsistent with my views as expressed elsewhere, please substantiate the claim by showing where the inconsistency is. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

So be it. I'll restrict myself to pointing out that you characterise what I wrote as "original work" and "personal exegesis", whereas what you produced is apparently "a responsible attempt to give one of the sides in a point in dispute her hearing". Can you explain this judgement?

Because the "responsible attempt" consists of quoting Dworkin's explicit statements about the meaning of her work, not making unsourced hermeneutical claims from the standpoint of an anonymous editor without providing sources. The difference between the two under WP:NOR ought to be obvious. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Why is the other side largely confined, with the small exception of some specific citations in the "Intercourse" article, to "critics" alleging that she said something she didn't? Where are the more substantive criticisms?

As I've said several times, I have no objections to naming specific notable critics and citing their specific arguments. The article would benefit from this. However, your past contributions have not done this; they have attempted to provide your reading of Dworkin, couched in weasel words about "seeming implications" and the like, without any references to the sources (such as Mullarkey's review) that you are now saying you'd like to see more of in these articles. I agree that the article would benefit from a better presentation of critics' views (and have made an effort myself to remove pro-Dworkin POV editorializing, to add links to critical reviews of Dworkin's work, to name specific critics and explain the places in Dworkin's work that they draw on for their claims, etc.).

What I am suggesting is that stuff like (unsourced report as if uncontested fact) "For instance, she appears to be disturbed by the mechanics of vaginal entry," (unsourced hermeneutics reported as fact under cover of weasel words) "On account of this, she seemingly implies anal heterosexual sex would be preferable to the vaginal norm," (unsourced hermeneutical claim reported as fact under cover of more weasel words) "Elsewhere she apparently suggests that women are, on account of their penetrable sexual organs, consigned to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims," etc. are not helpful to that aim, and are not going to fly as attempts to gloss critical responses to Dworkin (because they don't attempt to gloss them; they attempt to write a personal argumentative essay on Dworkin's book).

"[A]nalytic claims" are already present in both articles. The difference is they aren't qualified with those hated "weasel words". For instance, the Auschwitz quotation is framed by a preamble talking of "depictions of intercourse", as if this is the unquestionable meaning of the passage. But the quotation goes further than depiction or portrayal (and indeed does not mention them), saying

The "preamble" you're discussing here is the third paragraph of Intercourse (book), which states that Dworkin talks about the depiction of intercourse in literature and pornography. This is uncontestably true; I suggest that you read Chapters 1-6 of Intercourse if you're unsure about it. The article does not, contrary to your suggestion, say that the quotation is merely describing intercourse as depicted in "the discourse of male truth." It states that Dworkin is describing a view of sex that's enforced by the political conditions of patriarchy. I'm sure there is a better way of writing that, and if you have an NPOV way of doing so in mind, please let's hear it. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

"There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied--physically, internally, in her privacy... There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation."

Literary depiction of women, as I pointed out in the section of my comments that you ignored, has nothing to do with female physiology.

You may think that this is true, but Dworkin does not, and her view is more important than yours in understanding what she means. One of the important claims of Intercourse is that the enforcement of a certain view of sex, expressed in literature and pornography, and embodied in the law (see the long block quote I provided for you from Chapter 8 above) has profoundly affected men's and women's understanding and experience of women's physiology. You might know this if you had read the book. That said, the primary issue here isn't how to sort this out between us. It's how to write about Intercourse in an NPOV way in light of some of the intense controversy surrounding it. If you don't think the article as written does a good enough job, let's hear your suggestions for improving it. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Why, as I've already asked, did she mention the "muscled" nature of the vagina and the physical act of penetration so explicitly if she was just talking about depiction? Neither of these is a function of depiction.

See above. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

After comparing "being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation" to imprisonment in Auschwitz, she goes on to say

"The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people--physically occupied inside, internally invaded--be free; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self-respect?"

Again, Dracula and Madame Bovary have no bearing on the reality that women are biologically designed to be "physically occupied inside" during sexual intercourse. It is therefore false to suggest that this is all about depiction.

Dracula and Madame Bovary and the rest of the literary works that Dworkin discusses in Intercourse are explicitly discussed as contributing to, and expressing, the cultural and political framework in which penile-vaginal intercourse is experienced as occupation, invasion, entry, penetration, etc. by women. You cannot simply discard the first 6 chapters of the book and then pretend that you have an adequate understanding of the relationship (or lack thereof) between these chapters and the discussion in chapter 7 and expect to be taken seriously as a reliable interpreter of Dworkin's meaning.

Nor does the article on Intercourse suggest that this is all about "depiction." It specifically states that in Dworkin's view the terms of that depiction are enforced by particular political and economic conditions and that this affects men's and women's experiences of sex itself. Again, I'm sure that there is a better and clearer way to say this than it is said in the article; and if you have some ideas I'd love to see them, but do bear in mind that the fact that Dworkin's book does situation her discussion of those experiences after a long discussion of the depiction of intercourse in literature and pornography is simply an uncontroversial fact about the book. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

You suggest that I, among others, was responsible for "insistent and frequent" insertion of "weasel-worded POV editorializing". As far as I remember I made one change. You further suggest that this "editorializing" was criminally based "on their own views". You have, as I've already noted, added explanatory paragraphs to the articles, but we are apparently not to take this as "editorializing". What is it then? Even if I accept that Dworkin's words must be filtered through third party controversialists (I don't), why would your interpretative contributions be exempt?

I am not objecting to quoting Dworkin. I am objecting to your attempts to interleave your own commentary about what the quotations "strongly suggest" or "appear" to express or "seemingly imply" when those interpretations are in fact points of controversy and disputed by the author herself. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

You claim I was among those "who expressly stated their desire to use this article as a forum for original research to "debunk" Dworkin's work.

I didn't claim this. What I said is that you were part of a series of editors whose actions had included this and several other things, without attributing specific actions to specific authors. I assume that people are capable enough of reading the rest of this Talk page to determine who said what when. I'm sorry if my language and grouping was unfair to you. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I never said anything like this. Nor did I personally attack Dworkin or you, let alone repeatedly. (Since you raise it, I was not responsible for the vandalism from an IP address subsequently associated with me. It presumably derives from the combination of a proxy server and a discussion I had with a friend about the Dworkin page before contributing to it, although I haven't confirmed this.)

If you say so. I hope you do appreciate, however, how the fact that this vandalism occurred only 5 minutes before your first constructive edit from the same IP address (4 minutes after the prior vandalism was reverted) has made the process rather harder than it might otherwise be. (If it is the doing of your friend, I hope you'll explain to him or her that this isn't an appropriate use of WikiPedia.) Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

You suggest my interpretation is "completely unsupported by the text", without, of course, addressing my most detailed points regarding it. Leaving this aside, you have several times alleged that this interpretation is unique to me and hence "original work".

One difficulty with this is that, as you know (because you claim to have gone "digging" in Mullarkey's article, for one), I am far from the only one of her readers to interpret her work as being against vaginal sex. It is therefore not "original work" to include this interpretation. The other is that her words themselves as quoted here strongly imply that she is anti-vaginal sex. Until you succeed in explaining to me how mention of muscled vaginas, etc. pertains to patriarchal depiction, I'll continue to take the most obvious view - the view I share with Maureen Mullarkey and Cathy Young, among others: that she is against penetration of vaginas.

Stuarta 23:52, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm not here primarily to convince you of what I take to be the right way to read Intercourse. Nor do I think that the article should not discuss the published views of specific critics of Dworkin. What I characterized as original research (and continue to regard as such) is your unsourced editorializing. It is disingenuous of you to suggest that you are merely including the interpretation of other readers, since you previously made no attempts to cite those readers or characterize their specific views. That would be a responsible way to help present an NPOV discussion of the controversy. A personal argumentative essay on what you think the upshot of those parts of Intercourse that you have read or found quoted elsewhere is, is not. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

"Wrote that," "said that," "alleged," etc.

Moink, I appreciate your work on some of the awkward wording and trying to move this article closer to NPOV. However, I have to repeat my objections to the repeated qualification of autobiographical claims, with direct citations to Dworkin's writing, in terms of "Dworkin wrote that," "said that," "claimed that," "alleged that," etc. when there is no sustained, published controversy over these autobiographical statements. Whether this is your intent or not, this kind of distancing language generally has the effect of pointedly emphasizing the source, and tends to suggest that the statement is not credible. If there are published doubts about specific elements of Dworkin's autobiographical statements (as there are in the case of, for example, the claims of being raped in Paris in 1999) then of course we need to qualify the statements as Dworkin's claims and discuss the controversy. But without any mention of controversy over Dworkin's account of her injuries from the internal examination at the House of D or of her life as a battered wife in the Netherlands, there's no reason to use this sort of distancing language. If the worry is merely that the source for the statements should be made clear (that this is from Dworkin's autobiographical writing), then that is already done by the explicit citations of her books attached to specific statements.

I'll repeat what I said above (which was seconded by The Literate Engineer) in December to Seminumerical, since it's somewhat buried in the midst of a long and contentious thread.

As with anyone else's autobiographical statements, there is a presumption in favor of taking her at her word unless there is some specific reason not to believe what she tells you. If you have specific, documented reason for raising doubts then feel free to qualify her statements about her own life in light of those reasons; but barring that, it's unclear what grounds you would have except for the tendentious claim that you are a more trustworthy authority on what happened to Andrea Dworkin than Andrea Dworkin is.

For comparison, I'd like to note that other articles draw heavily or exclusively on autobiographical information volunteered by the subject. But we are not told that John Stuart Mill "wrote that" he had read Xenophon in the original Greek by the age of 8, or that Malcolm X "alleged" that an admired teacher told him being a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger" or that Benjamin Franklin "claimed" to have taken various printing jobs after leaving home for Philadelphia, in spite of the fact that the primary source for each of these claims is, or traces back to, a famous autobiography. Where there is no documented standing controversy over particular statements, I don't think that Dworkin deserves to be singled out for special treatment on this point. I hope this helps explain the edits. Radgeek 19:25, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I understand your point, and I'm willing to leave some of the statements standing. However, not all of them are the same category as the biographical information in Malcolm X or Franklin. When someone alleges something that would be considered a criminal act, such as an internal examination so rough as to cause bleeding for days afterwards, and there is no criminal conviction, it is appropriate to state that it is an allegation. moink 19:37, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

OR ISN'T IT BETTER TO JUST KILL THIS PIECE? Radgeek can continue as usual on his Dworkin fansite and then nobody here would question it. Mare Nostrum 20:20, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Mare, I'm sorry that you're frustrated with the editing process on this article, but you are at this point merely trolling and wasting other editors' time. I am sure that you have something better to do. Radgeek 20:46, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

THIS PIECE WILL NEVER APPROACH BEING BALANCED given the tireless, missionary devotion of its main author, a semi-professional Dworkin campaigner, to his prize subject, so let's just delete it. Simply put, it has virtually zero chance of ever being an even-handed encyclopedia article under these circumstances. Okay, its propects for success are not as utterly absurdist as Dworkin's prospects for the [Nobel Prize in Literature] (**literarture**, huh? should we edit the Nobel section of Wiki to say that she is a candidate since we reference it here?) -- but it amounts to the same thing. Cheer up, that's not defeatist, that's just the reality. There are lots of other articles that can be worked on. Oh, don't like me saying this? Too bad, just drop this hopeless article and we'll all move on to non-ridiculous pursuits for a change. Mare Nostrum 21:58, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

To-do list

In the interest of keeping work on this article moving, and to help it continue to improve while arguments over other sections are being hashed out, I'd like to suggest a few gaps in the narrative of Dworkin's life and work that could stand to be filled in, using research from printed works, public records, and the Internet. These are just three things that I thought of off the top of my head that aren't covered. Please feel free to add your own ideas, or to make suggestions about how these can be approached. So, how about:

• A discussion of Dworkin's legal conflicts with Hustler in the 1980s and early 1990s (these are mentioned only briefly, in the section on "Legacy and Controversy")
• An NPOV discussion of the relationship between Dworkin in particular and the development of so-called "sex-positive feminism," probably under the "Legacy and Controversy" section; Susie Bright, for one, claimed to be directly and deeply influenced by Dworkin (while also viewing Dworkin as one of her chief adversaries); Nina Hartley and others have claimed a more directly oppositional relationship
• A mention, probably under "Illness and Death," of the way in which her death was reported and verified through WikiPedia (and elsewhere online) before it was reported in the mainstream media. (moink was involved with editing this page at the time and so should have some immediate experience; cf. the archives of this Talk page and The Guardian's weblog (2005-04-12)). Of course, if this is done, it should be done consistently with the guidelines at WP:SELF.

Anything else? —Radgeek 20:43, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree strongly that the first two points need to be covered. That will really help with the POV issue, by balancing out the article as a whole. This is better than my little fiddling with language. I don't think the third point (her death and Wikipedia) is relevant. In my opinion, that just comes across as the editors navel-gazing. moink 21:10, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

• Find a better Andrea Dworkin Quotes webpage. The advertisement to quotation ratio of the current External Link is so high, it is uncomfortable to look at. Just looking at the current link "above the fold" shows non-quote material takes up 75% of the page.

Dworkin's critics

Thanks for your reply, Radgeek. It’s nice to see a slightly less aggressive tone. Rather than go through line by line, I want to set out my view of how the article should change in one coherent whole. That doesn’t mean I don’t disagree with much of what you just wrote; it just means I want to move to something more productive than point scoring.

(For the record, yes I do possess “Intercourse”, and yes I have read it. As it happens, I didn’t have access to it when I made the initial changes, hence I relied on Mullarkey’s review. I don’t want to go against what I just said above, but I find it irritating that you emphasise repeatedly that your “digging” revealed that I’d “nicked” quotations from that review: I told you before you mentioned “digging” where I got them.)

My contention is that the articles as they stand present a sanitised and arguably distorted view of Dworkin’s work. One area in which this is the case is her attitude to heterosexual intercourse. Someone reading the article would not have a clear picture of why Dworkin has been the focus of criticism on this subject, or why she has been characterised as being anti-sex and anti-men.

Much of the problem is that critical views are generally not present at all in the article, but I also believe that what is present is on occasion misleadingly one-sided. An example of this that I’ve already given is the paragraph preceding the long quotation in the “Intercourse”. You say it isn’t a preamble, and perhaps it isn’t intended to be, but nonetheless it ends “Dworkin describes the view of intercourse enforced [by literary depiction] by saying:” The positioning, language and punctuation do, in my view, make this paragraph act as a framing device for the quotation.

The problem with promoting this understanding to the exclusion of others is that other people have interpreted the passage, and “Intercourse” as a whole, differently. As we already know, Mullarkey immediately follows her citing of the “vagina itself is muscled” quotation with the comment that “Heterosexuality is on trial in a kangaroo court, and the judge talks dirty.” She clearly does take Dworkin’s “brutal and lewd” description of vaginal intercourse to be part of an attack on intercourse itself, not its portrayal by DeLillo et al. (see below about portrayal versus reality). This view of the quotation was echoed by Moira Gatens, who took it to mean that “sex can only ever be ‘violation’ for women” (Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, Moira Gatens, 1995, page 78). We also know Cathy Young detected in Dworkin’s work “demonization of men and male sexuality”.

Helene Myers’s view (Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience, Helene Myers, 2001, page 11) is probably worth quoting at greater length, given that you rejected mention of penetrable organs consigning their owners to suffering as “original work”. With specific reference to the same quote – a key quote for critics – she said:

“The penetrability of the female body as it is hypostasised in heterosexual intercourse seems destined to ensure female vulnerability and male predation. Indeed, for Dworkin, heterosexual sex is war; the penis, metonym for the man, is the invader, and the vagina, metonym for the woman, constitutes occupied territory.

…

“For Dworkin, intercourse is a Gothic crime of transgression; heterosexual activity and rape become indistinguishable from one another, and women who willingly have sex are ‘collaborators’ in their own occupation. Read as a symptom of specific anxiety about female vulnerability, female subjectivity, female independence, and heterosexuality as institution, ‘Intercourse’ is fascinating. However, as a theory of female victimization, it makes all women into Gothic heroines, virgins awaiting, fearing, and, perhaps, desiring their defilement.”

Elsewhere (ibid., page 41) she says, “In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin argues that female subordination and vulnerability are inherent in the sexual act”.

Ann Snitow read “Intercourse” to mean that “in sex women are immolated as a matter of course, in the nature of things” (Pages from a Gender Diary: Basic Divisions in Feminism, Ann Snitow, Dissent, spring 1989, page 222). Patricia Collins understood her to mean “’men oppress women’ because they are men” (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Collins, 1990, page 173). This latter view coincided with a belief that Dworkin was a biological determinist or essentialist, which is itself contentious (see below).

Jane Juffer (At Home With Pornography: Women, Sexuality, and Everyday Life, Jane Juffer, 1998, page 10) said Dworkin and MacKinnon “are firmly committed to an ahistorical politics of victimizer and victimized, in which men and women are ceaselessly confined to play out the roles to which pornography, seemingly, has the sole power to confine them.” (I would point out here that Dworkin’s definition of “pornography” is so ductile that this by no means implies pictures of naked women. For instance, she uses the term “social pornography” in the context of “Satan in Goray” to mean the sexual subordination of Rechele.)

It’s possible to go on. In her book “Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics” cultural critic Laura Kipnis states that for Dworkin “all heterosexuality is violence” (Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics, Laura Kipnis, 1993, note 21, page 300). She also draws attention to Dworkin’s views of seminal pollution and its relation to male desire to violate: “[h]er point seems to be that men prefer that semen be a violation of the woman by the man, as the only way they can get sexual pleasure is through violation” (ibid., note 26). Marjorie Garber (Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber, 1997, page 217) avers that Dworkin “regards heterosexual intercourse as an instrument for the enslavement of women”. Stanley Aronowitz has this to say on the Dworkin/MacKinnon view:

“According to antiporn feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, for example, masculinity and its cultural forms—pornography, sexual intercourse, let alone more subtle symbolic discourses such as science—are violence against women, a sin that can be restrained only by law and the police power that enforces it. For them, with few exceptions, reason lies outside the purview of gender relations. Men are inescapably aggressive, whether because of socialization or testosterone. Dworkin holds that all sexual intercourse is rape, and that sexuality, which men trumpet as a universal desire, is merely another symptom of male domination. As a result, all men are to be held responsible for the oppression of all women.” (Constructing Masculinity, Berger, Watson, Wallis eds., 1996, page 314)

I would point out that here, as with everywhere else I’ve seen the “sex is rape” allegation, it is not contended that the phrase itself appears in her work; rather it is an interpretation of her work as a whole.

Others with a similar take include Kriss Ravetto - “Dworkin implies that men are carnal violent beings who look at every form of interaction as an act of murder, while women are asexual lesbian beings.” (The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics, Kriss Ravetto, 2001, page 258, note 12), Malise Ruthven - “For feminist ultras such as Andrea Dworkin, all penetrative sex is deemed to be rape.” (Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning, Malise Ruthven, 2004, page 32) and Aida Hurtado - “Interestingly, Andrea Dworkin… conceptualizes sexual intercourse as violation.” (The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism, Aida Hurtado, 1997, page 64).

I don’t believe we can reasonably insert anywhere near this amount of material. Rather, some accurate summary of the critical position should be included. This was what I was trying to do, with direct reference to her words. You’ve objected that any criticism must be linked to some controversy regarding her, which is not a position I accept (at least as far as I understand it), because we can’t insert a literature review.

It’s my view that, as things stand, there is a certain reading of Dworkin’s work implicit in the articles – not in her words, but in yours and other people’s. This is “unsourced editorialising” just as much as what I added. For instance, at the top of the “Intercourse” article, we read that “Intercourse” argued “sexual subordination was central to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse in a male supremacist society”. The key qualifiers “experiences of” and “in a male supremacist society” are frequently not present in Dworkin’s own discussion of sex, and it isn’t clear (to me, or, apparently, many other readers) whether they can be inferred. Yet we’re told that “Dworkin argued that the depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture consistently emphasized heterosexual intercourse as the only or the most genuine form of ‘real’ sex”.

Firstly, I don’t agree that by any means all or most of the works discussed in “Intercourse” are “mainstream” – “Satan in Goray” and James Baldwin’s essays are not “mainstream” by most definitions, and nor for that matter is Tolstoy’s largely unread “Kreutzer Sonata”. This is important, because if the significance of the works examined in “Intercourse” is that they “emphasize” certain sexual norms then it can only be through widespread influence – i.e. from being “mainstream” – that they actually influence behaviour. Since they aren’t, I conclude that this argument is mistaken.

Maybe you have misinterpreted her; maybe her argument was flawed. But actually I don’t think you have much evidence to suggest this was her argument in the first place, because she leaves open the question of whether she’s talking about the reality of sex or its literary depiction. What we’re presented with in “Intercourse” is a detailed rundown of all the most unpleasant sexual scenes in works that set out to portray dysfunctional relationships. Tolstoy is deliberately blurred with the narrator of “Kreutzer Sonata” (on the basis of this work and her biographical reading, Dworkin concludes that Tolstoy exhibits a “goose-stepping hatred of cunt”), much as Dworkin herself is blurred with “Andrea” in her novel “Mercy”. Typically we begin with some talk of this or that depiction in whichever work she’s examining, but then slip quietly into bald assertion, the strong implication being that we’ve moved from the fictional to the real world.

As Roz Kaveney wrote of “Mercy”:

“By disavowing specifically autobiographical intent here, Dworkin does not so much remove the implied authenticity of the personal, but add to it a claim of even more generalized authenticity: this is the biography either or at once of a fictional character, of Dworkin herself, or of Everywoman remade, by literary technique, in Dworkin’s own image. One could choose to regard this as a postmodernist deconstruction of a particular feminist literary technique, but, given the more specific denunciation of postmodernism in the text, it seems more likely that this is an old-fashioned matter of having one’s cake and eating it. It might also, by the not especially trusting naïve reader, be taken as an abuse of the reader’s sisterly trust.”

Because so much of Dworkin’s case is unstated people inevitably fill in parts. Another good example is the debate over biological determinism. Currently we have no mention of it. We should in my view. But it won’t be good enough to say “Dworkin denied she was a determinist”. The reason why so many people (yes, I’ll supply the sources if necessary) viewed her as such was because little of what she said about sex made any sense unless this was assumed.

Finally, I don’t think the controversy over Dworkin’s anti-pornography work is represented nearly well enough. There were more credible critics than Hustler! There was a huge debate within feminism about censorship, and the possible positive role of sex in feminism, but I see none of that expressed – instead we have a lengthy discourse on incest with Larry Flynt the principal opponent. Since I don’t want to go on forever I’ll stop there, after raising this, but it does need to be addressed.

(On an unrelated, factual note, I believe the account of the Ginsberg/Dworkin dispute on incest/paedophilia perhaps does Ginsberg a disservice as it stands. By his own account, he mentioned sex with 16 year olds and she said he should be shot for it.)

Stuarta 15:07, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

P.S. I notice now the "sex-positive" intra-feminist debate has already been raised, so I'm glad we agree this needs dealing with.

Stuarta 19:40, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Stuarta, thank you for providing the explicit citations of the critical views that you have in mind. I'm familiar with the views that you're citing, and I agree that some of this material is well worth incorporating into the article on Intercourse, and a very careful gloss of it would be a good addition to the section on Intercourse in this article. What I disagree with is the way that you've heretofore gone about trying to add it (not just because I think that critics need to be named and the source of the criticism cited in order to be fair to Dworkin, but also because this is an important part of being fair to the critics). I also agree that the Controversy section needs more on the debate between Dworkin and self-identified "sex-positive feminists", self-identified "free speech feminists," and also the debate between Dworkin and fellow anti-pornography feminists over legislative activism (cf. Anti-pornography movement, antipornography civil rights ordinance, and the chapter on "The Pornography Wars" in Brownmiller's In Our Time for some of the relevant material on the latter).

I also think that the passage on the allegations of supporting incest is unfortunate (this was originally inserted by put in by Mare Nostrum with no sources named inline, and a link to an obscure Marxist-Leninist sect's newspaper as the only citation; I tried to refer the debate to more well-known sources and added material from Woman Hating and later works). Frankly I do not consider the debate to be a matter of controversy or interest, at least so far as I know, in any credible sources on Dworkin, and I completely agree the Controversy section would be better served by having more information on arguments among credible interlocutors. My energies have just been focused elsewhere for the time being.

Sourced claims that she was a biological essentialist would be a good addition to the Controversy section, since this was something she has been repeatedly criticized for within some wings of Women's Studies, Queer Studies, and elsewhere, and many of the critics have notable positions within the academy. However, you need to be careful about how to present these. They should make sense in the context of reading the article but they should not depend on converting large sections of it into an argumentative essay about her meaning in Intercourse or elsewhere. I realize that this is difficult to do, but it's also important as per WP:NPOV and WP:NOR. The section should also include a mention of Dworkin's 1975 "The Root Cause" (speech 9 in Our Blood) and 1977 "Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea" (Letters from a War Zone 110-116). In the prefatory note to the latter in Letters, Dworkin specifically complained that:

One of the slurs constantly used against me by women writing in behalf of pornography under the flag of feminism in misogynist media is that I endorse a primitive biological determinism. Woman Hating (1974) clearly repudiates any biological determinism; so does Our Blood (1976), especially "The Root Cause." So does this piece, published twice, in 1978 in Heresies and in 1979 in Broadsheet. The event described in this piece, which occurred in 1977 [a conflict at a panel on lesbian feminism between Dworkin and an essentialist sub-group of lesbian separatists--R.G.], was fairly notorious, and so my position on biological determinism--I am against it--is generally known in the Women's Movement. One problem is that this essay, like others in this book, has no cultural presence: no one has to know about it or take it into account to appear less than ignorant; no one will be held accountable for ignoring it. Usually critics and political adversaries have to reckon with the published work of male writers whom they wish to malign. No such rules protect girls.

— Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, 110

That's an unfair characterization of who the writers who allege this are (they include pro-pornography feminists but are not limited to them). But Dworkin's stated views about this criticism of her are relevant and ought to be included.

In re: Ginsberg, Dworkin claims in Heartbreak that Ginsberg pointed out friends of their godson at a bar mitzvah, who were 12 and 13 years old, and "said they were old enough to fuck." If Ginsberg claimed that something different happened then sourced references to his claims would be a good addition (although if there is any lengthy mention of The Fight, it should get its own paragraph at least, rather than being tacked on as an addendum to the Hustler/Healy/incest discussion).

I hope this helps. There will probably be some more comments shortly, after I've gotten back from work. Radgeek 21:20, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

We agree, then, on more critical points of view being represented, and a discussion of essentialism.

What I believe we disagree on still -- and what I was hoping you would address -- is the depiction-focused take on "Intercourse" promoted in the article. I haven't seen anything in the text of the book, or Dworkin's introductions, that explains that she is talking about the depiction or portrayal of sex in literature; whereas I have seen much that points in the other direction.

While she certainly implies that literary portrayal is connected with sex (by discussing literature at such length), there's no suggestion I'm aware of that literary portrayal *influences* attitudes to sex. If this was her case then her choice of examples, as I've already said, would seem to be very poor, and the term "mainstream" is not justified as a description of them. It seems at least equally possible, unless you can show me something contradictory in what she said, that she viewed the causal relation the other way round.

Regardless of this general question, the "vagina itself is muscled" quotation, which as I've pointed out has more than once been interpreted by critics as attacking the sex act itself, does not come in the context of a literary analysis. It appears at the beginning of a chapter, introducing a selection of paratactical, oracular pronouncements regarding the nature of intercourse.

In the following paragraph she says the "discourse of male truth" (which I regard as ill-defined, particularly given her apparent dislike of postmodernism) has caused penetration to be "taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use". She immediately goes on to say that "use and abuse are not distinct phenomena" and "[i]ntercourse in reality is a use and abuse simultaneously". One interpretation of this is that penetration *is* at least partly an "abuse", but the "discourse of male truth" has rendered it a "normal use". Indeed, I don't know how else you could link the two claims -- maybe you have a different view?

When on the next page (145) she says "[b]y definition, as the God who does not exist made her, she is intended to have a lesser privacy, a lesser integrity of the body, a lesser sense of self, since her body can be physically occupied and in the occupation taken over" I am at a loss to understand what she means, although I can see why people took this type of remark to mean she was an essentialist.

Firstly, just previously she admitted that "a man has an anus that can be entered", so presumably a man can also be "occupied and in the occupation taken over" as well, so what's the unique problem for women?

Secondly, I don't know what she means by "the God who does not exist". Does she actually mean the "discourse of male truth", or does she just mean biological reality? If it's the latter then she's seemingly an essentialist -- but she denied that. If it's the former then she's either saying men should not have penetrative sex with women (thus avoiding the "occupation" and "violation" and so on) or that the "male discourse of truth" has in some way made vaginal intercourse into an "occupation" or "violation", and if it were abolished then vaginal intercourse might become acceptable.

The difficulty I have with this last idea (apart from its epistemological implications) is that it seems to directly contradict the quotation that started this off, because that says, without qualification or reference to this "male discourse of truth" that "[t]here is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered". So my conclusion is that she really is saying penetrative vaginal intercourse is a violation.

At the very least, I don't believe one can, without being misleading, introduce the "muscled vagina" quote with talk of depiction. The context is just too ambiguous.

I'll dig out the source on Ginsberg.

I think there is value in having mention of the Hustler dispute. It illustrates Dworkin's practical attitude towards freedom of speech, for a start. I'm not sure if it needs so much coverage, though, and as things stands the absence of other sources of criticism makes it appear Hustler was her primary critic.

Stuarta 22:18, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Grammar

The quote in the first section about birth control and abortion needs to be checked; the grammar is wrong and I can't copy-edit a quotation. --Slashme 07:17, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Also, there is something wrong with "a faulty interpretation of a placed into the "marketplace of ideas" did not amount to defamation in the legal sense" - something's missing here. --Slashme 09:11, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

These have been fixed. The bit from Heartbreak about her mother's support for birth control and abortion was missing a "were;" the bit from the end about faulty interpretations was missing a "work." Radgeek 16:23, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

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