#dworkinposting

[jouissanceangel]

[T]he experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.

The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence.

- Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

[jouissanceangel]

Andrea Dworkin, “Life and Death: Unapologetic Writing on the War Against Women”

[jouissanceangel]

tw: rape

i’m reading and writing about Andrea Dworkin for a paper right now and find this speech, “I Want a 24-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape,” to be really excellent. it’s a talk she gave to an anti-sexist men’s organization on the profeminist end of the Men’s movement (an antecedent to modern day philosophies like Men’s Liberation). i think we could all benefit from reading this (very short) piece to help understand feminist critiques of the Men’s movement (which, Dworkin notes, was received with “considerable love and support and also with considerable anger” by the 500-odd men in the audience).

http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html

[jouissanceangel]

“MacKinnon and Dworkin are really making a claim for the realism of pornography. That is, whether or not we think of it as constitutive (rather than merely reflective) of an eroticizing of the violence of inequality, pornography would be the most accurate description and the most effective promotion of that inequality. Pornography can’t be dismissed as less significant socially than other more pervasive expressions of gender inequality (such as the abominable and innumerable TV ads in which, as part of the sales pitch for cough medicine and bran cereals, women are portrayed as slaves to the normal functioning of their men’s bronchial tubes and large intestines), because only pornography tells us why the bran ad is effective: the slavishness of women is erotically thrilling.”

- Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?