The recent death of Andrea Dworkin didn’t even make the small print news in Russia. Feminism, at least the feminism of the kind Westerners take for granted, never caught on. Patronizing Westerners often see that as a sign that Russians are culturally too primitive. Russians, particularly Russian women — and particularly the Russian female intelligentsia — literally laugh and roll their eyes when you mention feminism of the American or West European brand. The reason is fairly simple: Russians haven’t quite learned the Western art of sloganeering for radical philosophy without meaning a word of what they say. A Russian woman would assume that if you’re a feminist, you’d actually have to live out the philosophy. In that sense, Andrea Dworkin was, in her own way, the only “Russian” feminist in America — and that is why she was so hated.
There was a strange undertone of smug satisfaction in the obituaries for Andrea Dworkin. The fact that she died relatively young, at 58, got a lot of space, followed by long descriptions of her obesity and the medical problems that supposedly resulted from it. In other words, she was fat, fat, fat. Case closed.
Then there were her stories of rape and abuse, which theLondon Times called “probability-defying.” American papers were more sly and cowardly, of course, but managed to imply that she was crazy as well as fat.
Feminists more comfortable in the meanstream had some very strange comments on her. Elaine Showalter, a sleek Princeton gender commissar, said, “I don’t wish Andrea Dworkin any harm, but I doubt that many women will get up at 4 am to watch her funeral.”
If you know anything about the verbal habits of upper-echelon academics, this is easy to translate: “Die, you bitch! Shut up and die so I can dance on your XL grave!”
I can’t recall so much barely-concealed delight in a celebrity death since Sam Kinison was wiped out by a couple of drunken kids in a pickup. He had it coming, the papers of record informed us; he too was fat and crazy and said things you’re not supposed to say about women.
Dworkin’s fatness and madness hardly disqualify her from intellectual distinction. If we excluded the fat and/or crazy from recent intellectual history, we’d be left with a very bland, Clinton-style consensus. And that, of course, is the goal, the point of these non sequiturs. They’re great for dismissing loud, unbroken voices. American academics have a habit of skipping to the slur with disconcerting speed, as I found out a couple of years ago when I mentioned my love for Wallace Stevens’ poetry to a Film professor. She winced, then said, “Wasn’t he a racist?”
She didn’t really know or care whether Stevens was a racist. As I realized later, that wince meant that she hadn’t read Stevens, didn’t want to be shown up and so had simply reached for the nearest available non sequitur. The notion that Stevens might be a racist AND a great poet, just as Dworkin might be a fat loon AND a crucial figure in feminist intellectual history, is simply beyond our Beige compatriots.
The habit has sifted so far down it’s affected the dialogue of disaster films, as I noticed while watching a bunch of unconvincingly attractive pseudo-nerds try to survive the fastest Ice Age ever in theDay After Tomorrow. There’s a great scene where a male and female nerd, stranded in the NYC Public Library, are arguing about whether to burn Beyond Good and Evil for warmth. The guy says, “Nietzsche was the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century!” The woman replies, “Nietzsche was a chauvinist who was in love with his sister!” It gave me a nightmare vision of what Lite Beer Super Bowl ads will be like in a few years, after everybody and their dog has been to grad school.
In the mating rituals of healthy people — that is, people who aren’t like Andrea Dworkin — these stylized collisions about ideology, usually personified by clashes about an historical figure, are usually no more than flirtation. That’s literally true in Day After Tomorrow; in the last scene of the movie, the male and female nerd are holding hands in the rescue helicopter, their Nietzsche dispute remembered, if at all, as the first scene of a third-hand screwball comedy they’re using as their romance template.
We’re supposed to know that you don’t take it seriously — you don’t live as you speak. What I revere about Dworkin is that she never realized that. Dworkin is hated so intensely simply because she accepted first-wave feminism fully. She blurted naively the implications of that ideology. And that appalled and embarrassed millions of smoother women, who liked the cool, fashionable tune feminism gave their bitching but had never had any intention of letting it get in the way of their romantic career plans.
I remember, ladies. I was there — at Berkeley in the 70s. And I was like Dworkin, a naive loser from a family which actually lived the ideology it claimed. Hers was the classic east-coast Jewish progressive tradition; mine was the most severe, self-flagellating brand of Irish Catholicism. The common denominator was the lack of compromise. Dworkin had a great line on this: “I don’t find compromise unacceptable, I find it incomprehensible.”
When she came of age, feminists like Steinem were speaking in the rhetoric of third-world national-liberation movements. Their case was simple and unassailable: women were oppressed, the biggest and most deeply, ubiquitously abused ‘minority’ on the planet. It was a view so simple that an intellect as subhuman as Yoko Ono was capable of absorbing it and translating it into “Woman is the nigger of the world.”
The difference is that Yoko would never have dreamed of letting her revelation get in the way of her relationship with that mangy meal ticket of hers, John. He was the reason she was able to get her 20-minute yodels on wax, baby. No way was she going to ditch him. Being the ultimate groupie, trading sex (let’s just move right along rather than get into what “sex” meant for John and Yoko) for money and fame had nothing to do with that line about women as niggers.
But there were people like me who’d been raised all wrong, who didn’t know any better, who actually believed that Steinem’s essays, which we had to read in our Norton Anthology, implied a code of conduct. And above all, that meant that man/woman mixing was going to come to a grinding halt. It was, according to the national-liberation model, fraternizing with the enemy. People were garroted for that kind of thing in places like Algeria, and Frantz Fanon had told us all how glorious it was that revolutionary piano wire was used to enforce this Spartan revolutionary separatism.
In my book Pleasant Hell I describe at length how I drifted sadly around the Berkeley campus in the 70s, convinced that everyone there was as bitterly lonely as I, and that this was simple historical necessity. And how shocked I was, happening to walk across campus at a later hour one night, to realize that men and women still fraternized with a vengeance once the sun went down. This may sound silly, but it was the biggest surprise of my life, and my introduction to the sleazy agility with which normal Americans dodge the inconvenient implications of the ideologies they mouth during the day.
Dworkin took the same Norton Anthology truisms to their obvious, clear, unbearable conclusions. If women were an oppressed group on the model of Fanon’s Algerians, Ho’s Vietnamese or Yoko’s “niggers,” then the steps to a revolutionary cleansing were simple:
1. The oppressed minority must re-learn history and re-evaluate society in order to see the horrors beneath the facade of normalcy.
In 70s campus feminism, this meant getting excited about footbinding, bar-b-que’d witches, and then acquiring a proper alienation from standard male-female interaction. In other words, learn all of the horrible oppressions males have unleashed upon women, and then cite the examples as reasons why you hate men and demand a fundamental change in the relationship.
This, comrades, was the tricky part. What Dworkin’s simple, loyal, canine mind could never grasp was that for a sly player like Steinem, this first stage of the process was fine, no matter how violent the denunciation of men and patriarchy became. Why not? As long as one didn’t let it interfere with one’s life (Steinem’s relationships with a series of male billionaires, for example), then Hell — the more violent the denunciation, the better!
Because — and this was another wrinkle I, like Dworkin, was far too naive to grasp — most meanstream men were in on the joke too. They were, in fact, more aware of what a joke it was than the young women students who in many cases, truly thought they believed their own clenched-fist chantings. The male response to 70s feminism was horror from old fools like Mailer, but a tolerant smile from the cool dudes whose job it was to disarm and fuck the feisty ladies. Their stance was a slightly more subtle, coy version of “you’re so cute when you’re mad, honey.”
2. The oppressed minority must mobilize, replacing its colonial relationship with the oppressors with ties to comrades among the oppressed.
What this meant for a “sane” or normal 70s woman depended on the degree of identification with the movement. At least, it meant lip service to a female version of “bros before ho’s” — high-profile socializing with female friends, during which male company was noisily disparaged. (This type of socializing, of course, was already a common habit of middle-class female socializing; giving it an ideological cast was simply a matter of replacing a few jargon terms.)
At most, it meant lip service of another sort: the big plunge into lesbianism. If you wanted to be a professional activist, you had to make the jump. A Women’s Studies lecturer I knew said a colleague once told her outright, “You’ll never have any street cred, Jennifer, because you don’t sleep with women.” For meanstreamers, the lesbian allegiance was all anyone could ever be asked to give; it was, in fact, more than most were willing to make. All you really needed to do was grit your tongue and give it a try — a rite of passage, a gesture of solidarity. After that you could get back to planning your wedding. That’s why the university lesbian interlude has been compressed into mock acronyms like BUG, “bisexual until graduation.”
But even full-time dyking around had little to do with the original model, the Fanon national-liberation rhetoric. He and Ho and Che didn’t advocate fucking other proletarians; they were in favor of wiping out the Other, the Oppressor. Fucking other revolutionaries was, if anything, a dubious way to spend time owed the Revolution.
Which brings us to Dworkin’s sexual orientation. If she was a lesbian, she was the worst I ever saw. And I should know — read my book. She called herself a lesbian, but then she also called herself a celibate. Even Morrissey would be scratching his head at that point. And besides, once the term acquired a positive connotation, everybody was a lesbian — Jane Fucking Austen was a card-carrying dyke, according to the ideologically-correct journals. Men at UC Berkeley who were cool but still wanted to fuck women took to calling themselves “male lesbians.” I don’t want to dwell on this; it wasn’t a great moment in American culture.
The point is that Dworkin never offered the world a significant other of the proper gender. Instead, she lived openly with…a man. I don’t mean to dwell on such sordid things, but it’s a matter of public record. The point was that they didn’t fuck.
And in this, once again she was a good orthodox Fanon/Guevara feminist. For the revolutionary, the point is not to screw in your own class but to stop getting it on with the enemy. And this was something America’s avid, proud young lesbians-until-that-first-big-job never, never promised to do. They’d made their point by licking girls; after that, they had every intention of fucking, or as Dworkin would insist, getting fucked by men.
For Fanon and the rest, any interaction between the Oppressor and the Oppressed is to the disadvantage of the Oppressed. That’s axiomatic. What that means in Dworkin’s simple, obvious reading of the Revolutionary Scriptures is that when men fuck women, it’s always an act of oppression.
That was where she went too far in the views of her more flexible colleagues. They didn’t like having their options reduced. That, in the view of an American striver, was the worst thing you could do to anybody.
Dworkin didn’t know a thing about her audience. Didn’t know they were talking career and fun when she was talking sacrifice, martyrdom. (It’s no accident her heroine was Joan of Arc. Dworkin was a Catholic without knowing it, an old-time Catholic who never suspected it of herself. She and J. K. Toole, another fat loser who died young, are the only Catholic writers to survive, for a while, in modern America.)
Dworkin maintained this strictly orthodox view in her most-hated book, Intercourse (1987), arguing that heterosexual intercourse was rape. Oh, and please, don’t tell me that’s not her argument. I not only read and reread that book but taught it to a group of horrified Berkeley students in 1990. That damn well is what she said. You could tell it by the expression on their little faces — a great moment!
Even the reviewers who praised Dworkin did it in ways intended to alert their readers that they were encountering a nut, someone who was to be admired rather than listened to. Intercourse was “daring,” “radical,” “outrageous” — in other words, beyond the pale. It was something to have on your shelf, or your reading list, as ballast, another sort of street cred. It was never meant to accuse women who fucked men of, to coin a phrase, sleeping with the enemy.
But that was exactly what Dworkin meant, and all she meant. It was so obvious; the real shock is that it took so long for someone in the women’s movement to say that and get noticed for it.
The last stage in Fanon’s and Guevara’s blueprint was the one that put Dworkin out of play forever:
4. Kill the oppressor.
That’s what the revolutionaries said, and they didn’t mean it figuratively. They meant get a fucking machete and kill a cop, take his gun and use that on as many of the oppressors as you can get. They were pretty damn clear on this, as clear as a Calvinist ruling out salvation by works. You could not overthrow the oppressor with harsh language, or the evil eye, or moving depictions of slum conditions. You had to kill the bastards. Are we clear?
And Dworkin, as loyal and dumb as the horse in Animal Farm, trotted along to this fatal fourth step — and found herself alone.
She said it, as usual, with simple clarity, in the language of Che Guevara. It must have amazed her that she even needed to say it; it had been so obvious from the start. Her pleas for resistance are couched in a wonderful diction, mixed of Catholic martyr-cult and Fanon’s call to jacquerie: “I’m asking you to give up your lies. I’m asking you to live your lives, honorably and with dignity. I’m asking you to fight. I am asking you to organize political support for women who kill men who have been hurting them…They resisted a domination that they were expected to accept. They stand there in jail for us, for every one of us who got away without having to pull the trigger.”
In the end, the most remarkable thing about Dworkin is that there was only one of her. Hundreds of millions of women more sly, raised with the notion of compromise and an immunity to ideology, scrambled away from the inconvenient implications of liberation rhetoric. She alone stood their on her famously arthritic knees, doing her simple best to fight the jihad she’d been fool enough to believe would actually take place.
What if they held a war and only one fat lady sang? You don’t need to ask; you’ve lived through it.
This article was first published in The eXile on April 22, 2005
Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).
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39 Comments
Add your own1. Sn1789 | September 29th, 2013 at 9:55 am
Er, oppression can take different forms. Racial oppression and national oppression are different. Racial oppression is binary and national oppression is variegated. Same thing with gender oppression. Gender oppression simply doesn’t work in a binary manner. It is more complicated. Too complicated for Dworkin to wrap her dogmatic head around. Dworkin was a piss poor thinker. Just because mainstream academic feminism dances on her grave doesn’t mean her ideas are worth a shit. Compare Dworkin with Mairéad Farrell. Farrell was an actual revolutionary and a feminist, Dworkin was merely a loon.
2. COCKZONE | October 3rd, 2013 at 9:08 pm
And who — or what — are you?
3. The Himmler Maneuver | October 9th, 2013 at 11:54 pm
Camille Paglia:
“Dworkin…has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera. She publicly boasts of her bizarre multiple rapes, assaults, beatings, breakdowns and tacky trauma, as if her inability to cope with life were the patriarchy’s fault rather than her own. Dworkin’s shrill, kvetching, solipsistic prose has a sloppy, squalling infantilism.”
Because if there’s one thing feminists hate more than the patriarchy, it’s other feminists.
4. LOL | October 11th, 2013 at 7:02 pm
Thanks for this.
5. LegitSource | October 14th, 2013 at 11:55 pm
I have never heard of Dworkin, but she seems hardcore; I can picture her beating the shit out of some at a bar, or maybe sitting on someone.
Alss, I could like her IDEAS but not the practice…I like fucking.
Cockzone, “And who — or what — are you?” if I may ask the same?
Sn1789, since I don’t know either, and you seem the scholar, would you mind enlightening the rest of the Exilees and give us that Comparison?
6. Mr. Bad | October 20th, 2013 at 3:40 pm
Dear John,
You’re a god.
I’m a troll.
Bye bye
7. Evan Thomas | October 21st, 2013 at 3:06 pm
A little research would help. Yoko was a rich-ass bitch who already had climbed fame tower. Ever consider that she and John loved each other, as fucked up as it might have been?
8. Homer Erotic | October 21st, 2013 at 8:35 pm
The sort of people who glom onto Dworkin’s philosophy tend to be ridiculous prats who want to be losers for the rest of their lives.
9. Adam | November 1st, 2013 at 7:28 am
Hi, Ames, I’m a lifelong suckup to the Kochs and to Greenwald; now that he’s hooked up with a billionaire I really want to suck up to him even more. The fact that I’m still posting comments here shows how irrelevant you are, because this is how irrelevant people are treated. Thank you AEC for improving my retarded thoughts. I owe you.
10. Scott Severin | November 19th, 2013 at 3:15 pm
“The recent death of Andrea Dworkin didn’t even make the small print news in Russia.”
Recent? Been over 8 years.
Of course, if i wasn’t a total fucking retard I’d’ve seen that this article is reprinted from 2005. If I knew how to read, I’d’ve read this note at the bottom of the article:
But like I said—dumbshit on board here.
11. Galtic Warrior | November 24th, 2013 at 9:29 pm
Mark Ames, I still don’t know when to write “you’re” or “your” because I’m an inbred fucking retard. Some day I’ll learn 3rd grade grammar, but in the meantime I’ll be a Nietzschean superman on Second Life.
12. Daniel | November 29th, 2013 at 7:33 am
I can’t say I feel any pity for her or any sympathy for the whole left-wing revolutionary tradition, with its obsession with identifying and destroying sin (and everything that stems from this obsession: the sophistry, the separatism, the discipline, the “with us or against us” mentality). It seems like the worst kind of religious extremism to me, without even the promise of Heaven or concern for other people’s souls in the end.
At the same time I do feel more respect for people who at least live up their own insane, inhuman dogmas than for the more common type of American progressives you’ve described here. The latter may be more human and humanly understandable and likeable, but on another level they are indeed contemptible. But this is because they don’t practice what they preach. When they simply don’t subscribe to someone else’s political fundamentalism, that is not really a strike against them.
13. Hazel | December 11th, 2013 at 8:30 am
It is clear you haven’t read her. I think it is hilarious that in this website about (among other things) journalistic integrity, they’d have a man who hasn’t read any Dworkin write about Dworkin.
“I came here today because I don’t believe that rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.” from I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce
During Which There Is No Rape http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html
The goal of radical feminism and Andrea Dworkin was to destroy patriarchy not kill all men.
It is in a way, sort of marvelous to see a person be so wrong about so many things in such a short space.
14. John George Archer | January 22nd, 2014 at 1:52 am
Fascinating! Sly women and men: we do get on don’t we? Despite the battles.
15. Sam | January 30th, 2014 at 1:38 am
The comment I was going to write is a very indulgent one that has no right polluting Dr. Dolan’s brilliant article. You’re an intelligent man but your prose is too brilliant.
16. OMG Hoss!!! | February 18th, 2014 at 8:49 am
Patricia Petibon – Greensleeves
Alas, my love you do me wrong,
to cast me off discourteously.
And I have loved you so long,
delighting in your company.
Greensleeves was all my joy,
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
and who but my lady Greensleeves.
I have been ready at your hand,
to grant whatever you would crave,
I have both wagered life and land,
for love and good-will for to have.
Greensleeves, now farewell, adieu,
to God I pray prosper thee,
for I am still thy lover true,
come once again love me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hTVoplsL0E
17. The Gubbler | February 18th, 2014 at 8:51 am
Come on now, buck up OMG Hoss!!!
18. Jimmy Rustla | February 19th, 2014 at 9:43 pm
LOL LOL LOL, holy fuck she is fat and lovely! Even guys that aren’t into fat chicks would snuggle up with her. touch that!
She never forced young adults to here her crap under the guise of “equality”…
She never lied about being raped and someone caught her out on her bullshit.
good thing she is dead, because I’d have to track her down and propose to her if she weren’t…
Your article though well written produces a point of view so awesome that even my feminazi boyfriend liked it.
19. Ian Coleman | April 4th, 2014 at 9:49 pm
I despised Dworkin because she was a liar. That woman couldn’t write an honest paragraph, or speak more than four truthful sentences without lapsing into a lie.
She was capable of saying that she chose to be celibate, as if she could have chosen instead to take lovers. She was capable of saying that her health problems were the result of working too hard to write Scapegoat, and dismissed out of hand that they were the result of her obesity. It’s the breathtaking shamelessness of her dishonesty that most grates.
Notice that her claims of having been sexually active cannot be verified or falsified, because her prostitution (what?) and years-long marriage to a man who beat her unconscious (which produced no brain damage) and burned her with cigarettes (which produced no wounds) ostensibly happened in Europe. She didn’t have sex with anyone in North America, apparently. I doubt that she had sex with anyone in Europe either. She was a virgin, whom no one had ever asked out on a date. That’s pretty much the basis of her take on sex.
The woman was insane in the sense that she was unencumbered by any commitment to reality. She was a bad woman, for she was a liar and a hater. She ate herself to death, for she was as self-indulgently hurtful to herself as she was to other people.
20. Edwin Carpenter | July 7th, 2014 at 12:20 am
Is feminism dangerous? Is there any possibility that feminism can destroy Russia?
21. marya | August 6th, 2014 at 11:27 pm
Loved this article. Really get it. What I felt about her work too, just re-reading it recently. Thank you.
22. marya | August 7th, 2014 at 4:20 am
but wasn’t sure about the Catholic thing. I get what Dolan is saying about “conviction”, but Dworkin actually made a couple of anti-Catholic comments in her book Heartbreak I thought. Just sayin’. But still loved the article, it really honoured and clarified her life and work.
23. marya | August 8th, 2014 at 11:09 am
Moderators: if you can merge my 3 comments!
I have re-read this article many times now – it is truly brilliant. Soooo appreciated, like looking at the world with fresh eyes.
24. gwbnyc | October 12th, 2014 at 12:28 pm
That’s a photo of John Goodman.
25. Max | January 9th, 2015 at 10:57 pm
I’ve never liked Andrea Dworkin – and in fact, I’ve always been repulsed by her.
But having read several interviews with her and portions of her books – I do think she was very intelligent and a good writer.
Unfortunately, the signs of her mental illness are obvious all throughout her works.
It’s sad that there are young women who read Dworkin’s work and believe that she is saying anything useful or true.
Feminism itself is not a bad thing, in fact, it’s a very good thing. The notion of equality of the sexes is a noble idea.
The problem is that somewhere along the way the ideals of Feminism got hijacked by extremists, who labelled males as the eternal enemy and that true freedom could only be achieved by excluding males forever and living in a female only society.
There were even attempts at creating female-only communes – all of which disintegrated in an emotional mess of hysteria, rage, manipulation and jealousy.
Dworkin was the most extreme of the extreme feminist ideologues – so extreme in it’s hatred of males that it drove away many young women who didn’t share in that toxic rage.
For all her notoriety as a feminist, Dworkin seems to be disliked by most prominent feminists except the fringe extremists, who probably also have various emotional and mental disorders.
26. Ian Coleman | January 18th, 2015 at 10:01 pm
Anyone who thinks that Andrea Dworkin actually believed her own writing is being very naive. Dworkin’s style was to write shocking things that seemed profound but that were unfounded in reality. They were just things she wrote, and she didn’t care that they were wrong, as long as they were plausible enough that people would believe them. I mean really, what would a woman that ugly know about the sexual feelings of women who could attract mates that they themselves loved and admired? Come on. Her area of expertise was pornography. Can you really deduce that much about normal sexual feelings from pornography? Dworkin thought you could.
27. Matt | January 31st, 2015 at 8:35 pm
This still holds up.
That being said, the reason she is alone on four, is because in part. That is a risky proposition.
Every revolutionary finds when they come to power, they have no idea how to operate the apparatus that was previously being used to exercise and maintain power, and that is problematic.
Stalin purging the Red army of “trotskyites” Vs the French Revolutionaries keeping the army pretty much intact. Them and the laws and Civil Law Vs USA and the Common Law after our revolution.
starting from scratch and outright killing all of your oppressors can be risky.
28. Buck Turgidson | March 6th, 2015 at 9:38 am
Obviously, the person who wrote this is just as out of touch with reality as A.D. was. Listen up: men and women actually LIKE each other. Sex is not rape. Men and women like having sex with each other–it does not need to involve oppressing anyone. Oh, and by the way, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA–the ultimate “boys club,” and they gave her the money to start “Ms.” magazine, and become its first editor. So, her credibility as a feminist is…shall we say in doubt? So, when you’re worshiping at the altar of feminism, just remember that set of facts…and the fact that Betty Friedan pretty well swore off of N.O.W.–the organization she founded–in the 1970’s because it had become way too radical…you know the “Let’s go out and kill all the men!” radical…just like you and Dworkin.
Again, and for the record, men and women LIKE each other. Men and women enjoy fucking. Men and women have successful relationships without having to discuss “oppression” because there really aren’t many men who get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say to themselves “Hmmm, I wonder how many women I can oppress and rape today?” Reference whoever wrote #25–this person obviously knows what it’s all really about…
29. Krishi Medhi | March 19th, 2015 at 4:35 am
The thing is that she genuinely hated men…a mental ilness perhaps like misogyny…she even forbid her male partner(whatever he was) to interact with other males…maybe she even ordered him to castrate himself…this might sound like fantasy to some perverted men and women…she is a spearhed for some insane feminists who clearly think matriarchy is the future instead of a unisexual society which no gender dominates…we do need to finish patriarchy but not establish a matriarchy…i have seen some matriarchial comunities where men go estranged, druggees or marry off in to other comunities…we have insane people like the femetheist who wants to clear off 90% of the male population…andrea dworkin did empower women but some go crazy…and the crazy ones are out there…being a hindu and a pagan in christian terms i hqve seen some crazy female supremacy neo pagan sites…in hinduism the male and female form are side by side…but these neo pagan and godess sites are crap …the amazonian warrior women were real…they were probably slavic community who fought alongside their men…buried together in warrior graves…not so man hating fierce as writers paint it..im ok if these fools live in their utopian worlds as long as it dosent affect me…these fools include manhating bigots and some fetish femdom obsessed horny men..
30. Cheap Ravens Jerseys | October 6th, 2015 at 9:09 pm
look here Exterminate The Men: Honoring Andrea Dworkin, A Feminist Who Meant It and Paid – By John Dolan – The eXiled
31. Joe | November 6th, 2015 at 12:30 pm
Following people who are clearly highly mentally unstable is a very bad idea. You would not want to make government policy biased on these people.
Like Charles Manson and his family, he did not actually kill anyone he got other people to do it. That’s why he is in prison.
The same with Andrea Dworkin, you would not use Andrea Dworkin’s ideas on male/female and family relations. Like Manson there ideas are guaranteed to be highly dysfunctional and destructive.
32. Axauv | January 6th, 2016 at 11:38 am
People like her give us a preview of a fictitious world where love is a myth and hatred is the only power. I do believe in eternity and i hope she’s found some peace.
People that sell hate and criticism as a way of life are the most unhappy souls on earth, and frankly they deserve our sympathy- or as much understanding as we can muster. Societal changes rooted in fear will never work.
33. Sina | February 7th, 2016 at 3:53 pm
This article was a whole lot of ego-speak presented as thought. You used a lot of words and didn’t say anything.
34. ryan | August 14th, 2016 at 10:42 am
Kill all men you dumbass shits say despite the only reason you can stuff your faces till you are land whales is because men maintain the entire world you so hate yet can’t help but love like ungrateful useless fucks.
[THE A.E.C. DECIDED NOT TO EDIT THIS COMMENT]
35. azerty | February 25th, 2017 at 12:44 pm
The Dwork was a mentally ill extremist. Her extremely improbable rape story hurt real rape victims. Her real legacy is that girls today would rather catch a social disease than be associated with what feminism has become.
36. Ian Coleman | April 16th, 2017 at 5:13 pm
The books Intercourse and Woman Hating (which I have not read) are largely literary criticism. They contain essays on works by Tolstoy and Tennessee Williams. (Also Flaubert and Henry Miller, I think, although I’m really not sure.) My point is, Dworkin presumed to base her theories about men and women on works of fiction. She didn’t actually go out into the world and interview real women. How is that accepted as valid research?
Had Dworkin ever held a job where she was paid a wage? There is no evidence of it. This woman was profoundly socially isolated.
If you’ve been to university, you probably met people like Dworkin while you were there. Brainy, diligent students, but unpopular, socially inept and lonely, and therefore prone to directing their anger into social causes.
Notice that Dworkin had almost nothing to say about motherhood. She seemed to have no interest in it, and you wonder if he had any friends who had borne and raised children.
If Dworkin really did have sex, she would have had it with men in her erotic class, which is to say, unattractive losers. Erotic love for her was an impossibility, because she didn’t have the basic physicality to acquire it. Of course she couldn’t ever admit this, and so she adopted the pathetic pose that she could have had lovers if she wanted, but chose not to because of her wise awareness of the imbalance of power between men and women. What a phony.
37. Eric | May 25th, 2017 at 7:15 pm
I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind. That the male of our species has become dominant politically, militarily, economically, socially, and religiously across all cultures throughout time is a puzzle that strikingly remains a problematic mystery. Obviously women are not less intelligent, many are equally or even stronger than (albeit some) men, and women live longer, have greater stamina, better intuition, and can multitask better than men. Why men got the better deal is not an easy question to answer satisfactorily. That dehumanizing inequality exists explains the many waves of feminism. Dolan’s fantastic article is a wonderful introduction to Dworkin, whose extreme worldview I don’t share, but I can see how her position needed to be explored. If the shoe were on the other (bound) foot, I would consider taking up arms – preferably to dance with, however… Extremists are valuable to me, because they help me clarify my own view by opposition. Dworkin’s is a crucial and understandable point of view.
38. Ian Coleman | November 5th, 2017 at 8:07 pm
Well, Eric men have a clear and insurmountable physical superiority. You’re a man, so you must know well that strong, athletic men have a huge advantage over men less gifted with physical prowess. Of course this physical superiority over women is going to be manifest in who acquires power. If you have two people who are twenty, and one of them is eight inches taller and can run faster and kill more wolves with a club, it is simply irrelevant that the other one has the potential to live longer.
Most women just don’t have much in the way of personal authority. I’ve had women bosses and I do what they say just to be polite, but I secretly think, I’m stronger and tougher than this person. Women who act tough are just posturing, and seem to think that just being cruel counts. It doesn’t.
39. Ian Coleman | November 11th, 2017 at 10:03 pm
Notice that Dworkin had no stories about workplace sexual harassment. This may be because Dworkin doesn’t seem to have ever had a job that required her presence and efforts in a specific place at a specific time. But whatever he work history, she had no stories of being made to hear lewd comments or being pressed for a date or anything like that.
Just brutal beatings and rapes. Doesn’t that seem a little odd? A woman whom no one would even flirt with get raped, or was able to work as a prostitute? This woman was lying. She was plagiarizing some other woman’s sexual history and claiming it as her own.
No one who wrote so negatively about sex could possibly have had sex, at least with somebody to whom she herself was attracted. So why is anyone taking her diatribes about how oppressive sex is seriously?
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