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I Bleed for This? 035
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---------------------------- I Bleed for This? ------------------------------
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Fucking Andrea Dworking
Appreciated by Jason Farnon
From Answer Me!: Issue 4
Goad2Hell@aol.com
You've seen the section in the bookstores - "Women's Studies," a jumble of
lesbian propaganda disguised as clinical research into straight sex lives;
the "blessed-be's" and hairy-legged tracts of so-called "white witches"; cunt
coloring books; coy celebrations of menstruation and other uterine mysteries;
spurious archaeology fabricating a golden, peaceful age of matriarchy; and,
most entertainingly, violent screeds calling for male gendercide. Very few
makes blunder into this "pedagogy of the oppressed," and fewer still actually
ingest the suffocatingly righteous blithering.
Not that they're invited to. Women's Studies are by women for women , a
gender-exclusive club appropriating the wardrobe of third-world rhetoric.
This is in the language of the victim, a screeching vocabulary of complaint
and revolt against the despotic tyranny of men. Male despots are not welcome
to enter into dialogue with the Women's Studies club unless they check their
testosterone at the door, guiltily accept the "bad guy" rap, and cluck their
tongues against the miscreants of their own gender who stubbornly deny female
moral superiority. These de-juiced specimens can be viewed to best advantage
in college towns, their concave chests cuddling the bastard offspring of
Birkenstock-shod mates who are busy passing out petitions for the removal of
Penthouse from convenience stores.
During my own college days, misspent in a feminist stronghold ninety miles
south of San Francisco, I observed backsliding impulses among even the
staunchest "sisters," a yearning, one might even say craving, for men who
weren't (I often heard them use the word) wimps. Gloria Steinem would go
ashen at the sight of this river of liberal-arts cooze virtually throwing
themselves at makes who hadn't succumbed to the program and were thus capable
of ardor in their fucking, men who were (by feminists definition) pigs. In
fact, the weak-willed males, hand-dog looking with scraggly beards and
wire-rimmed glasses, so sympathetic to the feminist struggle, received the
major share of female contempt. They were tolerated as toadies and taken to
be as cut-rate dildos.
A dozen years have passed since those disheartening days spent under the
specter of stentorian vaginas and pipsqueak penises. Since then, there seems
to have been a gradual return to make and female archetypes, to scenarios of
mystery and seduction. Of the former feminists, the more attractive of them
got down to the business of finding and keeping a mate, while, in most cases,
the less attractive grew more sophisticated and militant in their man-hatred.
Do not presume, amidst these generalities, the disappearance of victimized
rhetoric from the lip-glossed mouths of erswhile suffragettes. That would be
asking too much. A feminist litany remains ever at hand to badger and
browbeat husbands and boyfriends into sheepish admission of egregious
maleness.
The browbeaters are what I term the Intergrationist Feminists, those who like
their cock on call. The Segregationist Feminists are harridans who don't
like cock at all.
Pachydermlike Andrea Dworkin may be the uncrowned queen of Segregationist
Feminism in its present incarnation. Her book Intercourse has become the
touchstone of contemporary feminist theory. Part literary criticism, part
propaganda, and all elegant hysteria, Intercourse was written to further
simple program: to intellectually convince women to avoid the admittance of
the male generative organ into connective friction with the vagina. And
that's not all, fellas. Don't touch, but for God's sake, don't look, either.
Pornography, Dworkin's earlier tract, advanced her conviction that hardcore
pornography and softcore men's magazines together fuel homicidal violence
toward women. And for all her leftist caterwauling, Dworkin's authoring of
anti-pornography legislation with comrade Catharine MacKinnon has earned her
ovations on the dais with the likes of Edwin Meese and Phyllis Schlafly.
Don't make the mistake of confusing Dworkin's underdog vocabulary with
empathy for anyone but her own kind. In Intercourse, Dworkin bases her
equation of racism with heterosexual sex on the work of James Baldwin, a
black homosexual. (The phallic braggarts of the Black Panthers school she
must, of course, pass by without so much as a word.) This is the same Dworkin
who spells America with a "K" throughout her books, masking her own
tyrannical will to prohibit other people's happiness with the argot of the
oppressed. She descends to calling vital makes "National Socialists" and the
women who love them "collaborators." "That collaboration," she rants in
Intercourse, "fully manifested when a women values her lover, the National
Socialist, above any women, anyone of her own kind or class or status, may
have simple beginnings: the first act of complicity that destroys
self-respect, the capacity for self-determination and freedom - readying the
body for the fuck instead of for freedom." What Dworkin wants is an inversion
of loyalty, for women to run to the call of Sappho and Sisterhood and to tar
and feather their male oppressors.
It is clear that the abolition of pornography will not suffice as the end
goal of Ms. Dworkin's program. What will it take to calm Andrea Dworkin, to
quell her tirades, to fill the yawning chasm of her sense of injustice?
Men, flop your tube steaks on the chopping blocks. Dworkin wants your cocks
for mulch. Fucking, dilates Dworkin, annihilates the woman, overwhelming her
with a sense of possession that ultimately leads to degradation and death.
(That is, she allows, when the sex is good.) "That loss of self," writes
Dworkin in the chapter entitled "Possession," "is a physical reality, not
just a psychic vampirism; and as a physical reality it is chilling and
extreme, a literal erosion of the body's integrity and its ability to
function and survive... This sexual possession is a sensual state of being
that boarders on anti-being until it ends in death. The body dies, or the
lover discards the body when it is used up, throws away the old, useless
thing, emptied, like an empty bottle. The body is used up; and the will is
raped."
Intercourse invokes the propaganda technique popularized by Julius Streicher.
The enemy is portrayed as a vampire that is at once morally subhuman and yet
preternaturally powerful and dangerous. Dworkin's full-tilt fictions are not
some private exorcism of grief and rage, but rather bellows to fan the flames
of righteous hysteria in order to seize, ban, burn, and extirpate. Because
she plays the role of a violated victim, Dworkin is given license to practice
what she assails in the penised people, that is, the unleashing of sadistic
vengeance on an entire gender and sexual preference.
Remember that Dworkin contributed to the Meese Commission's inquest on
pornography and helped Catharine MacKinnon to enact Canada's Tariff Code
9956, to ban importation and sale of materials "which depict or describe
sexual acts that appear to degrade or dehumanize..." This incredibly broad
and subjective code could be interpreted in such a way as to proscribe most
books published, including the Bible and Dworkin's own screeds. (A Canadian
customs agent once seized a shipment of one of Dworkin's books for several
hours but then quickly released them, apologizing for the "mistake.") In
practice, Tariff Code 9956 anally penetrates publishers too penurious to
initiate costly lawsuits to fight government seizures, as well as pro-sex
lesbian bookshops that made a living selling the now-banned works of Pat
Califa and Susie Bright.
According to the blurbs of praise that fill Intercourse's book jacket:
"...Dworkin analyzes the institution [!] of sexual intercourse, and how that
institution, as defined and controlled by patriarchy, has proven to be a
devastating enslavement of women" (Robin Morgen); "Dworkin's prose is
elegant, her passion for truth profound, her longing for justice both lyrical
and unrelenting, her use of literature and history stunning, her
understanding of racism, antisemitism, and misogyny lucid, palpable" (Phyllis
Chesler); "The book is outstanding, original, and an act of forbidden
rebellion" (Shere Hite).
Shere Hite, perpetrator of The Hite Report on male and female sexuality, is
described by Dworkin in Intercourse as "the strongest feminist and most
honorable philosopher among sex researchers..." Dworkin is, of course,
grateful for Hite's statistics which claim that only three women in ten
attain orgasm during intercourse. Dworkin brandishes this statistic to
underscore the uselessness of cock for women's pleasure. Later, she again
quotes Hite's suggestion for heterosexual sex in which "thrusting would not
be considered... necessary... [There might be] more a mutual lying together
in pleasure...vagina-covering-penis, with female orgasm providing much of the
stimulation necessary for male orgasm."
Hite's prescription for thrust-free, "mutual lying together,"
"vagina-covering-penis" sex demands complete passivity from the male. As
Hite suggests in bold type in a later chapter of her Hite Report,
"Intercourse can become androgynous." No thrusting and exploring for Hite's
males, no sir, this is woman's eminent domain. A man is to lie on his back,
hold his breath, and stay perfectly still until the woman has squirmed her
way to a cum atop a station and never-threatening-to-be-dominant ding-dong.
This is the only mention of a male-female sex procedure that Dworkin even
mildly approves of throughout the entire length of Intercourse. One must
assume that Dworkin sanctions this ridiculous posture only as an interim
measure designed to wean women of their desire for cock entirely.
One wonders, however, what the porn-thwacking Dworkin must think of nude,
cunt-splayed photos taken in 1968 of the massive-muffed and Tampax-stringed
Hite that were eventually displayed in Hustler's April 1977 issue. Or what
Dworkin has to say to Germaine Greer for her toes-to-the-ceiling,
cunt-to-the-camera, shenanigans in the Amsterdam sex paper, Suck, in the
mid-seventies.
I suppose Dworkin was not about to split cunt hairs over the issue,
especially with ideological comrades. All this taken into account, how are
we to take Germaine Greer's blurb on Intercourse's front cover: "The most
shocking book any feminist has yet written." Shocking in what sense? In the
quality of the fantasy, its idiocy, or its hatred?
At the risk of contradicting Ms. Greer, the most extreme feminist tract has
got to be Valerie Solanas's S.C.U.M. Manifesto, the handbook of the society
for cutting up men. Solanas, who shot and almost killed Andy Warhol in the
late sixties, pleads for women to "destroy the male sex." Norman Mailer, who
quotes from the Manifesto in his meditation on feminist writing, The Prisoner
of Sex, provides insight into why the S.C.U.M. Manifesto was reprinted in the
popular feminist anthropology, Sisterhood is Powerful: "...the S.C.U.M.
Manifesto, while extreme, even extreme of the extreme, in nonetheless a
magnetic north for Women's Lib." Though Dworkin neglects to list the S.C.U.M.
Manifesto in her extensive bibliography at the end of Intercourse, the spirit
of Solanas's mandate is ever-present.
Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being
more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a
prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is,
therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as
well as an act of mercy. (The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, p. 67.)
Magnetic north of the women's movement? Consider the Bobbitt case, in which
Lorena's psychotic cock-cutting episode was elevated to a heroic call to
action by various feminist groups; consider that bootleg pamphlets of the
S.C.U.M. Manifesto have been circulating in women's bookstores for more than
twenty years. Dworkin doesn't have Solanas's humor or her damningly explicit
methodology of attaining an anti-male utopia, but she possesses the ingenuity
of a modern major general. She knows how to employ all the weapons of a
propaganda war; how to incite, persuade, and, most of all, bully.
Although Dworkin resembles the steatopygous Earth Mother, she doesn't pay
much attention to the technology-equals-patriarchy argument of Wiccan
feminism. For Dworkin, technology will provide the way out of
heterosexuality and intercourse:
It is not that there is no way out of it, for instance, one were to establish
or believe that intercourse itself determines women's lower status. New
reproductive technologies have changed and will continue to change the nature
of the world. Intercourse is not necessary to existence anymore. Existence
does not depend on female compliance, nor on the violation of female
boundaries, nor on lesser female privacy, nor on the physical occupation of
the female body. Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of
men's contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express
itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se.
Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential
truth of pornography.
It is indeed strange for the morbidly obese, pus-ugly Andrea Dworkin to
localize sexual intercourse as man's greatest expression of contempt for
women. If forced at gunpoint to fuck Andrea Dworkin, my "contempt" for her
would not reveal itself in a robust erection; to the contrary, my
shrivel-dick would require the services of a geeklike proxy, such as those
seen servicing the glandular atrocities in the Life in the Fat Lane porn
video series.
In one of those weird twists of fate, Dworkin's real-life "platonic" live-in
mate, John Stoltenberg, is rumored to be a biological male. Stoltenberg is
infamous in New York City's publishing community as Dworkin's rabid lap dog,
conveying threats and intimidation to those who do not indulge the whims of
his tyrannical mentor. Dworkin's big-footed imprint is seen all over
Stoltenberg's unintentionally hilarious books, Refusing to be a Man and The
end of Manhood, which rather vainly inveigh against such biological verities
as male genitalia and testosterone. Stoltenberg is the embodiment of one of
Valerie Solanas's "Men's Auxiliary" members: S.C.U.M. will conduct Turd
Sessions," wrote Solanas, "at which every male present will give a speech
beginning with the sentence: 'I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd," then
proceed to list all the ways in which he is one."
Perhaps it is unfair to lump Dworkin in the feminist category, for her turgid
hysteria has more in common with Carry Nation or the Maquis de Sade than
Susan B. Anthony. Nowhere in Dworkin's writings or public appearances does
she argue for the accumulation of rights or opportunities. That would be too
dull for her. Recently I enjoyed the opportunity of seeing Dworkin lecture
at Portland State University, where she recounted atrocity stories, cried,
and flapped her arms, screaming for vengeance. But the shrill passion didn't
succeed in whipping up inquisitional hysteria in the pampered and comfortable
middle-class femme contingent, probably for many of the same reasons why the
JDL hasn't yet convinced Beverly Hills yentas to assassinate Holocaust
Revisionists. Only a small portion of Dworkin's audience later participated
in a march to a local jerk-off arcade, where a handful of bulldykes startled
the raincoat rats with unladylike epithets. Too bad Andrea was too
circumspect to take the axe to the poop booths.
Those who most treasure Dworkin's hysteria aren't mainstream feminists but
prohibitionist paper-pushers and he fundamentalist right. I've envisioned a
scene fit for a Jodorowsky movie in which Richard Viguerie and Jesse Helms go
down on Dworkin and MacKinnon on a bed of severed penises.
In the end, it is understandable for Andrea Dworkin to wield the cudgel of
victim politics against men. In our "rape culture," women like Dworkin
aren't worthy of the trivialization accorded sex objects. They are rejected
utterly. This rejection has obviously left its mark on Andrea Dworkin; it
has honed a vengeful and crusading intelligence bent on evening the score.
Let us not weaken and pity the Gorgon; the fig leaf of victimization is
creating victims of us all.
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