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Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Reactions to Andrea Dworkin's Death
Andrea Dworkin died on Sunday and reactions are being expressed throughout the adult industry. But how does one react to an enemy, to one of the most strident anti-porn crusaders in the feminist movement? AVN has weighed in with a respectful statement and Fleshbot has a one-liner. Susie Bright has a remarkable blog entry on her very mixed feelings towards Dworkin, placing her work in a larger feminist context.
I've never read Dworkin, not even out of curiosity for what exactly she says and why. When you begin with the basic premise that all heterosexual penetration is rape (a simplification of Dworkin's theories, but one correct enough that nobody's tried seriously to refute it), I don't see where enough common grounds can be reached to agree on anything further. It's not that I found her ideas loathsome as so willfully out of touch. Of course, being a man, I may simply not get it. But I'll give myself the benefit of the doubt here.
The adult industry has lost one of its greatest boogey-women, someone whose views were so extreme that others who hated pornography would have to stop and consider what it meant having such a person on their side. To agree with Andrea Dworkin's anti-porn stance was to implicitly agree with the underpinnings of that stance; to try to extricate oneself from certain premises while endorsing others would be too complicated and take too much time. As a result, anti-porn crusaders of a different stripe (either religious or of a different feminist strain) would simply not credit Dworkin at all. But her presence was there, her ideas were there, and were useful as a marker for extremist thinking, a potent rhetorical straw-man.
The financial success of the adult industry - growing in sales, consistently utilizing new technologies to broaden its market - is one indicator of who won the battle, whose attitudes are more valued by people. Dworkin would see this as confirmation of patriarchal domination; the adult industry would cite this as the triumph of the free market of ideas. The two views aren't necessarily mutually exclusive - but the contrast speaks for itself.
I've never read Dworkin, not even out of curiosity for what exactly she says and why. When you begin with the basic premise that all heterosexual penetration is rape (a simplification of Dworkin's theories, but one correct enough that nobody's tried seriously to refute it), I don't see where enough common grounds can be reached to agree on anything further. It's not that I found her ideas loathsome as so willfully out of touch. Of course, being a man, I may simply not get it. But I'll give myself the benefit of the doubt here.
The adult industry has lost one of its greatest boogey-women, someone whose views were so extreme that others who hated pornography would have to stop and consider what it meant having such a person on their side. To agree with Andrea Dworkin's anti-porn stance was to implicitly agree with the underpinnings of that stance; to try to extricate oneself from certain premises while endorsing others would be too complicated and take too much time. As a result, anti-porn crusaders of a different stripe (either religious or of a different feminist strain) would simply not credit Dworkin at all. But her presence was there, her ideas were there, and were useful as a marker for extremist thinking, a potent rhetorical straw-man.
The financial success of the adult industry - growing in sales, consistently utilizing new technologies to broaden its market - is one indicator of who won the battle, whose attitudes are more valued by people. Dworkin would see this as confirmation of patriarchal domination; the adult industry would cite this as the triumph of the free market of ideas. The two views aren't necessarily mutually exclusive - but the contrast speaks for itself.
