Creek Running North

“In blaming and shaming the oppressed, the powerless, the left colludes with the right. There’s no reason to look to the left for justice, so people look to the right for order. It’s pretty simple. The victory of the right also expresses the rage of white men against women and people of colour who are seen to be eroding the white man’s authority. The pain of destroying male rule won’t be worse than the pain of living with it.”

Of all the radical thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (so far), few have been more wilfully and consistently misrepresented than Andrea Dworkin. She’s one of those writers, like Chomsky, who are roundly and repeatedly criticized by people who’ve never read her work.

I’ve read her work. I read Woman Hating at age 16 or so, Intercourse in 1987, the year it came out. Nowhere in those books, nor in the numerous Dworkin essays and interviews I’ve read throughout the years, can one find the man-hating feminist monster of the stereotypes. There’s a reason: Dworkin wasn’t that monster.

[Afterthought:] I disagreed with much of what she had to say. I found her alliance of convenience with certain people on the right disquieting, and her advocacy of limitations on free speech troubling.

But her criticism of male sexism — in the pornography industry, the institution of marriage, and in society at large — was devastating, accurate, and (so far as I can tell) largely unheeded, even by many feminists. Perhaps that should read “especially by many feminists.”

Susie Bright, who for many years fought fierce ideological wars with Dworkin, has a heartrendingly loving eulogy on her site. It’s one of those Karol Wojtyla/Mehmet Ali Agca moments. You should go read. [Comments contain discussion of pornography.]

A bit more: Via Roy Edroso, the Rad Geek has the definitive smackdown of much of the uninformed criticism Dworkin received. Which isn’t to say that the informed criticism is off-base, mind you.