Hmm. I'm not what you'd call a big fan of Andrea Dworkin, but I have read her work, and unless my memory is faulty, I don't recall her writing much about Ryan Gosling, lip stain, or baby giraffes.
So here's a little quiz to see if you can tell the difference between Jezebel and Andrea Dworkin. Some of the quotes below come from recent Jezebel articles; some come from Dworkin. I also threw in a quote from Ryan Gosling as well, just for the hell of it. So who said what? (Answers below.)
a) Intercourse in reality is a use and an abuse simultaneously, experienced and described as such, the act parlayed into the illuminated heights of religious duty and the dark recesses of morbid and dirty brutality.
b) I freely admit that I watch some shitty, shitty television, and if it weren't for my sense of shame, I'd probably watch a lot more of it. I can't get enough of The Bachelor, which combines the most terrible aspects of dating, the weirdest aspects of arranged marriages, and sociopaths.
c) The sexual colonialization of women's bodies is a material reality: men control the sexual and reproductive uses of women's bodies. In this system of male power, rape is the paradigmatic sexual act.
d) Women's bodies are possessed by men. Women are forced into involuntary childbearing because men, not women, control women's reproductive functions. Women are an enslaved population--the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses.
e) Pie is just fine as a partner for the weak coffee of church basements, for Thanksgiving, for dessert at a roadside cafe in Harmony, Minneosta, but for high falutin' snacking, you cannot beat the elegant convenience of the cupcake.
f) If I eat a huge meal and I can get the girl to rub my belly, I think that's about as romantic as I can think of.
ANSWER KEY: What, are you a fucking idiot? Oh, ok, the last one is the Ryan Gosling quote. I really, really, really hope you can figure out the rest on your own.
But come on. They're pretty much identical when you think about it. Except that Andrea Dworkin never published an article about how that one time, when she was in Paris, she realized that frigid American women had their panties in a knot about the idea of consent, while in France men could empower wimmen by feeling them up on trains n' stuff.
ReplyDeleteWhoops, my bad. Jezebel is actually nothing like Andrea Dworkin...
Andrea Dworkin was an amazing orator, she really knew how to get her point across.
ReplyDeleteTo say Jezebel is anything like her is simply insulting to Dworkin. Jezebel has so much sexism going on these days; all the pinkness and talk of fashion and babies is enough to make one want to puke. Jezebel is like a trust fund socialite clinging on fashionably to feminism when Dworkin is a rape survivor.
To be perfectly fair, I'm sure Dworkin had her opinions on the cupcakes vs. pie debate, even if she never committed them to paper.
ReplyDelete@Amanda: Bwahahaha. I wish I could bake Dworkin some cupcakes.
ReplyDeleteMy stance on pie and cupcakes is: both.
ReplyDeleteThis exchange is the only thing that comes to mind when I think "Andrea Dworkin" these days. Good ol' Venture Brothers.
ReplyDeleteBilly Quizboy: I was a boy genius. I was the only 12-year-old at my prom, so my date was my mother.
Dr. Venture: Mine was worse. My prom date was to have been Miss Linda Lovelace.
Billy Quizboy: Deep Throat Linda Lovelace?
Dr. Venture: The same. She, of course, by that time was a vocal anti-pornography advocate—thanks, Dad—and sent her friend Andrea Dworkin as her proxy.
Billy Quizboy: Was she hot?
Dr. Venture: Google "Andrea Dworkin" on an empty stomach one day. Anyway, because my dad brought, like, ten Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders as his date, he didn't care that my date was a huge, angry, "way smarter than a 16-year-old me" woman who called me "little half man."
To the commenters thus far:
ReplyDeleteIt's easy, isn't it, to pick on deceased writers, and never substantively engage their ideas, their chapters, their whole books, the way we know some men and women do with male writers, especially and almost only the white ones.
It's easy to pick on people who are fat, isn't it. This is what dominant society encourages: people being very simple-minded bigots, and supporters of the status quo including its rampant ignorance of what feminists said and did, say and do.
Ah, to be so ignorant, one must also be very, very privileged. Only the most powerful in society can afford to be so ignorant about the harm men and whites do to women of color across the globe.
Trafficking? Slavery? Rape? Poverty? Genocide? Andrea Smith's book "Conquest"? Catharine MacKinnon's book "Are Women Human?"
Are these really not worth discussing? Is it really intellectually and socially wiser to discuss a deceased writer in the ways some people do above?
Just to be clear, I was picking on Jezebel. And Edward Pasteck, but mostly Jezebel.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I criticized Dworkin when she was alive, and I treated her no differently than any male writer whose writings I strongly disagree with.
ReplyDeleteDworkin was a psychopath! David could have dedicated his entire website to her and her similarly outlandish claims.
ReplyDelete@Julian Real
Yes women are humans (So Are MEN).
Those psychos at Jezebel have an entire thread boasting about their physical abuse of their partners.
ReplyDeleteThose broads are a real class act!
@Julian: in case it's not clear, I wish I could bake Dworkin cupcakes because I like her, not because she was fat. I myself am quite fond of cupcakes (and pie, for that matter).
ReplyDeleteDworkin did a lot of shit wrong (siding with the right wing to ban porn; hell, trying to ban porn at all. As someone who sees her point about porn, the answer is never censorship) but she is way way way oversimplified. People like to believe they know everything about her when a quick perusal of Intercourse (her most controversial work, that even still does NOT say all het intercourse is rape, and nor does it suggest gay/lesbian sex is somehow better) or even her fucking wikipedia page would disprove half the common myths about what she said.
ReplyDelete