This recurring feature, curated by Pilgrim Soul, directs Harpy readers to important feminist thoughts and concepts as spoken by some of her favourite feminists on and off the web. The appraisal of the value of these snippets is, of course, entirely Pilgrim Soul’s, and does not necessarily reflect the views of other Harpies. Feel free to discuss in the comments here.
Today’s Feminist Food For Thought comes to us from Andrea Dworkin. If you haven’t read Dworkin before, you are likely most familiar with her name as a sort of feminist swear word that gets tossed around whenever issues related to sexuality come up in feminist discussions. Here is what I would say to those of you who immediately experience a shiver on hearing the name of the woman who allegedly said all intercourse was rape (n.b.: she said no such thing): read Dworkin before you dismiss her. You may not like everything she has to say. But she does not say what most people assume she does.
In that vein, for our first Dworkin Food For Thought (there will be others) I have chosen a passage from a 1983 speech in which she addresses a conference of anti-sexist men. Full disclosure: this is a piece I would call Dworkin for Beginners, because she doesn’t get quite so deep here into her views on say sexuality or prostitution. And she’s a little less polemical than usual probably mostly because she feared for her safety if and when she spoke her mind frankly in a group of men. But I wanted to give people a way in. And also to prove that she wasn’t completely averse to giving men a way out of sexism.
I have heard in the last several years a great deal about the suffering of men over sexism. Of course, I have heard a great deal about the suffering of men all my life. Needless to say, I have read Hamlet. I have read King Lear. I am an educated woman. I know that men suffer. This is a new wrinkle. Implicit in the idea that this is a different kind of suffering is the claim, I think, that in part you are actually suffering because of something that you know happens to someone else. That would indeed be new.
But mostly your guilt, your suffering, reduces to: gee, we really feel so bad. Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to do, what you don’t want to want to do but are going to do anyway. I think most of your distress is: gee, we really feel so bad. And I’m sorry that you feel so bad–so uselessly and stupidly bad–because there is a way in which this really is your tragedy. And I don’t mean because you can’t cry. And I don’t mean because there is no real intimacy in your lives. And I don’t mean because the armor that you have to live with as men is stultifying: and I don’t doubt that it is. But I don’t mean any of that.
I mean that there is a relationship between the way that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like that woman went through Larry Flynt’s meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn well better believe that you’re involved in this tragedy and that it’s your tragedy too. Because you’re turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live. It is also part of the economy that you frequently claim to protest.
And the problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you. The pimps and the warmongers speak for you. Rape and war are not so different. And what the pimps and the warmongers do is that they make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard. And they take that acculturated sexuality and they put you in little uniforms and they send you out to kill and to die. Now, I am not going to suggest to you that I think that’s more important than what you do to women, because I don’t…
But as long as your sexuality has to do with aggression and your sense of entitlement to humanity has to do with being superior to other people, and there is so much contempt and hostility in your attitudes towards women and children, how could you not be afraid of each other? I think that you rightly perceive–without being willing to face it politically–that men are very dangerous: because you are.
What’s funny to me is that even now men are STILL defending aggression as part of their sexuality – see the comments thread here. So what’s Dworkin’s prescription for What Men Can Do?
The men’s movement seems to stay stuck on two points. The first is that men don’t really feel very good about themselves. How could you? The second is that men come to me or to other feminists and say: “What you’re saying about men isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.”
And I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues. Tell the novelists who think that rape is wonderful. Tell Larry Flynt. Tell Hugh Hefner. There’s no point in telling me. I’m only a woman. There’s nothing I can do about it. These men presume to speak for you. They are in the public arena saying that they represent you. If they don’t, then you had better let them know.
Then there is the private world of misogyny: what you know about each other; what you say in private life; the exploitation that you see in the private sphere; the relationships called love, based on exploitation. It’s not enough to find some traveling feminist on the road and go up to her and say: “Gee, I hate it.”
Say it to your friends who are doing it. And there are streets out there on which you can say these things loud and dear, so as to affect the actual institutions that maintain these abuses. You don’t like pornography? I wish I could believe it’s true. I will believe it when I see you on the streets. I will believe it when I see an organized political opposition. I will believe it when pimps go out of business because there are no more male consumers.
You want to organize men. You don’t have to search for issues. The issues are part of the fabric of your everyday lives.
Any Harpy readers um, know men like this? Who speak up in their daily lives when they hear sexist/racist slurs from their friends? I know a few, myself, but I can’t say they seem that common to me. But these men will get all up in arms at the slightest vague implication that they might be sexist.
But more fundamentally, what I think Dworkin (and Mackinnon) contributed best to the movement was beginning to talk about what equality might look like in something other than totally base and empty terms like “the equal duty to do the dishes”:
I want to talk to you about equality, what equality is and what it means. It isn’t just an idea. It’s not some insipid word that ends up being bullshit. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with all those statements like: “Oh, that happens to men too.” I name an abuse and I hear: “Oh, it happens to men too.” That is not the equality we are struggling for. We could change our strategy and say: well, okay, we want equality; we’ll stick something up the ass of a man every three minutes.
You’ve never heard that from the feminist movement, because for us equality has real dignity and importance–it’s not some dumb word that can be twisted and made to look stupid as if it had no real meaning.
What say you, readers?
I fucking love this, and I’m even going to send the link to The Dude (which I never do). Love love love.
I mean that there is a relationship between the way that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like that woman went through Larry Flynt’s meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn well better believe that you’re involved in this tragedy and that it’s your tragedy too. Because you’re turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live.
THIS. THIS. THIS.
Wow, I need to read more of her work now. I’m forwarding this to so many male friends who never seem to get it.
—Send to printer—
Honestly, I don’t know any men that would speak up….at least I don’t think they would, *especially* when it comes to telling it to their friends.
This is exactly what needs to happen. I’m always happy when someone offers solutions.
I really really like this part:
And I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues. Tell the novelists who think that rape is wonderful. Tell Larry Flynt. Tell Hugh Hefner. There’s no point in telling me. I’m only a woman. There’s nothing I can do about it. These men presume to speak for you. They are in the public arena saying that they represent you. If they don’t, then you had better let them know.
I really wish more men felt free to speak up at this kind of stuff. Supply and demand has sooo much to do with this thing.
I’m tired of hearing the morning DJ’s treat any women like a piece of meat, claim that anyone that complains about it is fat, because the only people that complain about it is women and all you have to do to invalidate a woman’s complaint is call her fat and jealous. Then all my guy friends just shrug and say well they’re shock jocks what do you expect?
So I turn the radio off, I turn the tv off a lot too. It’s wierd I find my self opting out of sooo much pop culture that I’m starting to feel like a hermit.
“And I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues. Tell the novelists who think that rape is wonderful. Tell Larry Flynt. Tell Hugh Hefner. There’s no point in telling me. I’m only a woman. There’s nothing I can do about it. These men presume to speak for you. They are in the public arena saying that they represent you. If they don’t, then you had better let them know.”
OMG yes yes yes.
I still don’t agree with a lot of the conclusions she weaves into her arguments, but I do agree with a lot of the rationale she uses to arrive at them.
@sarahmc: YES.
imagine a group of men getting together would actually react and organize based on the statement “these men presume to speak for you. they are in the public arean saying that they represent you. if they don’t, then you had better let them know”. JUST IMAGINE!
@sarah.of.a.lesser.god: have you ever seen a man try to wrap his head around this idea? i mean, actually watch him think about it and really understand what it truly means?
yeah, me neither.
I have always really liked her writing. It’s sad that she’s considered such a taboo member of the feminist movement. I actually prefer a lot of her writing to Gloria Steinem (don’t kill me!).
And let me say that I love this feature. A nice power bar of thought to snack on midday.
I love Dworkin. My favorite moment I have ever had in school in oh my god nineteen years since I started going to a learning institution every day was when I piped up to defend something she said against Judith Butler’s critique. I started “Even if you believe Dworkin’s argument is problematic…” at which point my professor interrupted me to inform, “you don’t have to say that.” I haven’t second guessed myself that way in front of 50+ people since. I could have tongue kissed that teacher that minute.
Thanks for this, PS.
I really wish every self-identified progressive male would read this. They want us to know they’re not misogynists (like those evil conservatives), but they won’t let their guy friends in on the secret. It reminds me of white people who ask, “But what can I doooooooo about my white privilege!? Apologize to black people for slavery!?” How about telling your fellow whites you won’t tolerate racism?
@SarahMC: You know who actually grasps this kind of concept? Germany. They realize what happened in the Third Reich and have stringent laws in place to try and keep Holocaust denial from happening so that shit doesn’t happen again. They understand the oppression that was inflicted and say that it won’t be tolerated again. Check and mate, anti-Semitism.
Butler is my bugbear, kithkin. I get so mad at her, all the time.
Like I said in the piece, this is pretty mild Dworkin, but glad to see people liked. You’ll get something from Intercourse next time, probably, to think about.
It’s funny, I picked this because I was over at Ta-Nehisi’s yesterday getting in a fight with some men about TVOTR’s lyric about “breaking your back” (with sex), which of course all the men were like “I’ll have you know I would say this and I have never beaten a woman,” and of course as soon as I said anything that threatened their ability to dominate it freaked them the fuck out.
When I say I’m gonna twist your dick ’til it snaps what I mean is I’m gonna lovingly stroke it ’til you come. What?!
I haven’t read much of her work, but whenever I do, it seems very rational and persuasive–hardly what her reputation would indicate.
The most shocking part of this post is the description of the speech’s audience. I wonder when the last conference for anti-sexist men took place…
Here is the link to Ta-Nehisi’s comments, which I meant to put in this post anyway. The comments that followed it, to me, were basically paradigmatic of how men react when confronted with the idea that their vision of sexuality as a sort of primal aggressive contest of wills might not be the only view out there.
Spark, I can’t find the link now, but there was one recently in Chicago. However, objects in the mirror are sometimes further than they appear, if you catch my drift, given that many men seem to think the most pressing question for inquiry about sexism is “how can feminists quit hurting men’s feelings?”
Dworkin herself was threatened by a few men at this conference, IIRC.
Also, ladies, keep in mind that this speech was made 26 YEARS ago.
Google tells me there is/was a group called Real Men that functioned up until at least 1998, based in Boston. The founder, Jackson Katz, now runs MVP Strategies, which teaches violence prevention to men and boys.
The Ta-Nehisi Coates thread is distressing. How can people deny the violence inherent in the statement “break your back,” even if they still want to defend it as a metaphor? Also, this: “I guess it’s possible that we’re socialized in certain terrible ways about sex.” Really, could it be possible, really?
“And the problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you. The pimps and the warmongers speak for you. Rape and war are not so different. And what the pimps and the warmongers do is that they make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard.”
That’s a quote I want to remember.
“When I say I’m gonna twist your dick ’til it snaps what I mean is I’m gonna lovingly stroke it ’til you come.”
That’s a quote I also want to remember, but for different reasons…
That’s a great post, PS. But I want to comment on your preface (which was awesome).
Here is what I would say to those of you who immediately experience a shiver on hearing the name of the woman who allegedly said all intercourse was rape (n.b.: she said no such thing): read Dworkin before you dismiss her. You may not like everything she has to say. But she does not say what most people assume she does.
My fucking philosophy teacher used that misquote of Dworkin (and he threw Mackinnon in there too) while talking about radical feminism. I haven’t read much of either of them (certainly not enough to feel comfortable correcting him!), but I knew enough to catch that it was, in fact, a misquote. I was pissed, and when I’m angry, I very quietly boil over. So the entire class, encouraged by the professor, completely dismissed the whole of radical feminism based on utter bullshit. Most frustrating, to say the least.
This hits home for me right now after a friend on twitter made comment about the last episode of Damages and how much he loved watching a dude (Kendrick) beat up a prostitute (or “ho” as the friend put it). It pissed me off, but I didn’t respond because I felt weird about a public call out like that. Which is silly given that he felt totally ok with making a comment like that to all of his twitter friends, obvs. It’s a small thing–a twitter comment–but for whatever reason I find it harder to call that sort of online thing out compared to something from a face to face conversation.
This speech (which I firat came across in 1989) changed my life. The title of this speech is @I want a 24 hour truce without rape’ and concludes like this:
As a feminist, I carry the rape of all the women I’ve talked to over the past ten years personally with me. As a woman, I carry my own rape with me. Do you remember pictures that you’ve seen of European cities during the plague, when there were wheelbarrows that would go along and people would just pick up corpses and throw them in? Well, that is what it is like knowing about rape. Piles and piles and piles of bodies that have whole lives and human names and human faces.
I speak for many feminists, not only myself, when I tell you that I am tired of what I know and sad beyond any words I have about what has already been done to women up to this point, now, up to 2:24 p.m. on this day, here in this place.
And I want one day of respite, one day off, one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for less–it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.
I dare you to try it. I demand that you try it. I don’t mind begging you to try it. What else could you possibly be here to do? What else could this movement possibly mean? What else could matter so much?
And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can’t begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing because it is nothing: it is not real; it is not true. But on that day it becomes real. And then, instead of rape we will for the first time in our lives–both men and women–begin to experience freedom. If you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong. You cannot change what you say you want to change. For myself, I want to experience just one day of real freedom before I die. I leave you here to do that for me and for the women whom you say you love.
I cried when I read this because I had never before realised how much the patriarchy had colonised my mind to the point where the very concept of a 24 hour truce – sheesh – 24 hours! – had never occurred to me as a possibility. Andrea taught me daring and imagination in my feminist activism and for that I will be forever grateful.
I love this essay. I love Andrea Dworkin. I just took a facebook quiz thing and it turns out that Andrea Dworking is the “Historical Feminist I’m Most Like!” Which is nice for me.
And this? “Do you remember pictures that you’ve seen of European cities during the plague, when there were wheelbarrows that would go along and people would just pick up corpses and throw them in? Well, that is what it is like knowing about rape. Piles and piles and piles of bodies that have whole lives and human names and human faces.”
This is so true. It’s hard for me to explain to people who presumably understand what it’s like–why I get so angry so quickly, why I won’t stop talking about it after everyone else has moved on, why I see rape in commercials and in magazine ads and in conversation. It’s just that in my mind are piles and piles of bodies of women who have been raped. And I’ve never even been sexually assaulted, but it’s like–knowing about it as a woman, knowing women, knowing how many women, it’s wheelbarrows-ful. And my MaleFriend, who is the best manperson I’ve ever met, and who is super supportive and talks to me about feminism and is super radical, still doesn’t have the visceral understanding of the sheer number of women. It’s sad.
Actually I am going to have to rethink this relationship. His best friend is getting married, and when all the men in the wedding were talking about where to go for the bachelor party, my partner was like, “I won’t go to strip clubs, but I do like steak. But, strip clubs make me uncomfortable so I won’t go to one.” Then last night he got an email from his friends that said that they were going to a strip club, and he was like “WTF!” to me, but then replied to the email that he wouldn’t be in town until after the party so he couldn’t go. He didn’t say anything about the problems inherent in consuming women’s bodies. It has conflicted me.
(Sample response to the original email, replied-to-all: “I’m up for steak and tits.” As if I needed to be reminded of how easy and casual it is for men to butcher and consume women’s bodies, like we’re steak made to be sliced apart fired up and ingested, to make the Men Folk Stronger and Manlier.)
God now I want to go lie down and cry.
@Cimorene: I wouldn’t sweat it about your MaleFriend. I know I’m just an Internet stranger, but for what it’s worth: he did the diplomatic thing. It wasn’t the righteous thing but he (a) opted out of the event and (b) he decided to refrain from making the event about him and kept the focus on the groom. As utterly repulsive a “steak and tits” party may be (and it IS. Eugh.), a bachelor party is an event that has a star. Like a birthday party. A public righteous email would have been a better thing to do, perhaps, but it would likely have had little effect other than to alienate friends just before the wedding. I doubt it would change any hearts or minds, especially given that this is part of a bigger Wedding Industrial Complex and not just some Saturday night. It sounds like you’ve got a pretty great MaleFriend, is I guess what I’m saying.
It’s sad that she’s considered such a taboo member of the feminist movement.
Sad ? It’s f*cking outrageous.
And it’s also very deliberate.
Wonder why a piece like this can be written 26 YEARS AGO, and still nothing has changed, that this piece applies perfectly today ? Why do people continue to either ignore or tell lies about women like Dworkin and her writing ?
Who benefits ?
my theorizing gender prof actually also tried to get me to believe dworkin had actually said that.. that all intercourse is rape. I got angry. It seems we’re all buying into right-wing backlashes against feminism… dworkin, I find, is radical – yet there is stuff that’s off the hook, really – I mean, what am I supposed to DO with Butler’s subversive bodily acts? Honestly? Get raped and killed for not performing my gender (like trans persons are)?