#dworkin was right

[fall-and-shadows]

Tfw you think about what the world could be without men and tfw you know it'll never happen in your lifetime

[erebusvincent]

[watermelinoe]

it's funny how baffled my dad is by today's leftists bc he'll be telling me about organizing a high school walkout after mlk jr was assassinated or being in college during the vietnam war and taking over a building (???) and i'll be like yeah the leftists released live insects to thwart a meeting of gay and bi activists and he reacts like that image of joe biden looking at the quantum computer

[hairtusk]

Andrea Dworkin, 'The Promise of the Ultra Right', in Right-Wing Women (1983)

[haggishlyhagging]

Women's social condition is built on a simple premise: women can be fucked and bear babies, therefore women must be fucked and bear babies. Sometimes, especially among the sophisticated, "penetrated" is substituted for "fucked": women can be penetrated, therefore women must be penetrated. This logic does not apply to men, whichever word is used: men can be fucked, therefore men must be fucked; men can be penetrated, therefore men must be penetrated. This logic applies only to women and sex. One does not say, for instance, women have delicate hands, therefore women must be surgeons. Or women have legs, therefore women must run, jump, climb. Or women have minds, therefore women must use them. One does learn, however, that women have sex organs that must be used by men, or the women are not women: they are somehow less or more, either of which is bad and thoroughly discouraged. Women are defined, valued, judged, in one way only: as women—that is, with sex organs that must be used. Other parts of the body do not signify, unless used in sex or as an indicator of sexual availability or desirability. Intelligence does not count. It has nothing to do with what a woman is.

-Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women

[feministdragon]

This is a summary of Liberalism and the Death of Feminism, by Catharine A. MacKinnon, from the anthology The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism 1990 edited by Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond:

The women’s movement of the 70s criticized rape, war, as acts of male terrorism and criticized marriage and the family as acts of male control.  It criticized ‘sacred’ concepts from a standpoint of material existence.   

The women’s movement knew that if 99% of your options are not available, the last 1% is not real choice.

The women’s movement knew that ‘equality’ was defined according to a male standard.   It unmasked ‘sexual freedom’ as a cover for the freedom to abuse. 

This movement always wanted to know where the women were.  Where was women’s choice? Women’s consent?  Where was equality as women define it?  What did freedom for women mean?

The movement produced a systematic, relentless, materially based and rigorous critique of the male dominated reality of women’s lives.   The movement uncovered deep connections between race, class, and sexual oppression, and pursued them as essential to the movement.   It said every issue was a women’s issue, and every place was a woman’s place. 

The movement understood that sexual use and abuse is the same thing, turning a woman into a toy, or a corpse. 

Why did the movement do this?  Because women mattered.   When women were hurt, the movement defended them.  Because what was done to one woman was done to all women. 

It was a deeply collectivist movement. We said, ‘women’, ‘we’.  Commonality didn’t mean sameness.  We didn’t have to be all the same, in fact, the diversity was the strength.   

The movement understood the need to act with courage.  It understood that feminism was not a better deal or a riskless guarantee, but a discipline of hostile reality.   To say ‘the personal was political’ was to say that what we did every day matters, that you become what you do not resist. 

We felt and understood a responsibility to all women.  We insisted on women’s dignity.  Most of all, the movement believed in change.   It intended to transform language, community, the life of the spirit and body and mind, and the shape and nature of power. 

Then something happened. 

During the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, we were told that we could have this constitutional amendment because sex equality under the law wasn’t really going to do very much, and wouldn’t change anything.  Feminists ardently denied that sex equality would make much difference while urgently seeking it. 

During the fight for Roe Vs. Wade, abortion got framed as a privacy right.  A movement that knew that ‘private’ was a cover for the abuse of our selves and rights was suddenly told that abortion was our right to that same privacy.  But since it was private, the government could not pay for it, so then if you couldn’t pay that was a you problem. 

During the fight of Sears v. EEOC, a sex discrimination case where men were paid more than women, one feminist testified that it was discrimination because women want to be paid for their work the same as a man. Another feminist testified that it wasn’t necessarily discrimination because women want different things from work than men. 

Then some feminist groups told us that guaranteeing maternity leave is a form of sex discrimination.   Fortunately the Supreme Court, in a decision written by a black man, understood that granting maternity leave by law is not sex discrimination.  

Then the debate over BDSM made it really clear that the movement had broken down. When feminists said that BDSM is the sexuality that women would choose first over all others, they didn’t question why women would choose the one sexuality that has been pushed on us all our lives, a sexuality of violence and control.   

The ‘we’ in the women’s movement had completely broken down. Women stopped saying ‘we’, instead saying, “speaking only for myself, I…”.

Then came the discussion on pornography.

Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon designed a law that said that the sexual subordination of women through pictures and words violates women’s civil rights.   This was done as if women mattered, because we value women.  

To no one’s surprise, it was opposed by many people.  It was opposed by conservatives who discovered they disliked sex equality more than they disliked pornography.  It was opposed by liberals who discovered that they liked using women for sex more than they liked sex equality.  It was opposed by feminists who came together as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, or FACT. 

These FACT feminists said that pornography is sex equality, as long as women had better access to it.   They argued that women had not yet explored their sexuality and needed pornography to explore it, that even pornography that was problematic for women could still get them off, so it was okay.    For FACT, equality meant equal access to pornography.     

FACT implied that in a society of sex inequality—where sex is what women have to sell, sex is what we are, sex is what we are valued for—if we don’t choose sex then WE are the ones oppressing women. 

FACT was in fact fronting for male supremacy, getting women to do their dirty work (again). 

What is the difference between the women’s movement we had and the one we have now (if it even is a movement?)  The difference is liberalism.  

Where feminism was collective, liberalism is individualistic.  Where feminism is socially based and critical, liberalism is naturalistic, saying that women’s oppression is a natural facet of our sexuality.   Where feminism is based on material reality, liberalism is based in some ideal world in the head.   And where feminism is political, and deals with power and powerlessness, liberalism merely talks about ‘this is good’ ‘this is bad’. 

In liberal feminism, women are forced into being unique individuals, instead of sharing a social class in common.  Social characteristics are turned into natural characteristics.  Restriction of choices becomes an expression of free will.  Material reality is turned into ideas about reality.  And concrete positions of power and powerlessness are turned into ‘different but equally valid points of view’.   Women’s lived experience becomes a ‘point of view’. 

Law becomes about gender neutrality, consent, privacy, and speech.  If you can’t take gender into account, you can’t recognize the status quo of male supremacy and women’s subordination.   The concept of Consent means that whatever you were forced to do was actually your free will.  The concept of Privacy protects male abuse of women.  And the concept of Speech protects sexual violence against women when it is framed as male expression. 

The ERA has been lost.  Abortion has been lost.  And pornography is flourishing.   

Liberal feminism makes this necessary because it cannot look at sexuality as it is socially organized and see that it is based on sex inequality.  Liberal feminism will not recognize the continuing fact of male dominance. 

But we can get the women’s movement back.  We can discover the ways to change women’s fear, to mobilize ourselves, and against all odds, create a sex-based hope. 

[tu-vieja-steve]

To rightwing men, we are private property.

To leftwing men, we are public property.

In either case, we are not considered humans: we are things.

��Andrea Dworkin.

[d0llpartssss]

Some people in the queer community use TERF too much.

I've seen a lot of people calling radfems terfs for having completely valid and rational opinions.

Sex based oppression exists, yes. And this is not a terfy take. As we all know sex≠gender. There's gender based oppression and sex based oppression, we can't negate that.

This is genuinely such a normal feminist take is lowkey embarrassing talking about it.

Some of yalls brains have been rotted by liberal feminism, pleaseeee look into radfem theory i beg you

[queerism1969]

[silver4tongue]

To men, rape of women is discretion of property at worst.

It is evident in the way marrying the victim to her rapist is seen as "settling the issue" in multiple societies. Because it corresponds to the "you break it, you buy it" notion.

It's why marital rape is still legal in so many countries. "you buy it you can do whatever with it".

Parents and relatives of the victim, usually in South Asia are more worried about "who's gonna marry her now??.

To them violation of their daughter's autonomy isn't even a part of the equation. It's a matter of attack on their family "honor".

[athenawasamerf]

I had a spiritual experience while reading the last chapter of Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women today. Nothing has hit me harder or opened my third eye more than reading her careful dissection of the models of anti feminism, and going over the specific paragraphs about the woman-superior model. I was immediately sucker punched in the solar plexus. I could almost feel Andrea Dworkin sitting next to me, discussing the ‘divine feminine’ bullshit that’s on the rise on tiktok and Twitter right now. I have never before been so suddenly and powerfully aware of the importance and meaning of a concept I already believed in, which is that we as feminists need to stop reinventing the wheel and throwing it out every other generation. Everything we are going through today as women and as feminists has either been extensively described and dissected, or predicted by feminists past. We need to immediately stop discrediting all feminist text that’s already been written, and focus on understanding it and applying it to our world. We need to build on, not demolish and rebuild. And like, I knew this and believed it in theory, which is why I started reading more theory in English, but it just. Hit me right in the face.

[woman-for-women]

[mlfeminist]

There are women calling themselves feminists though they have no particular commitment to women as a group and no credible interest in sexual politics as such.—Letters from a War Zone (1988)

[haggishlyhagging]

[Note: What the women in Afghanistan are experiencing today is not a new story. In fact, it’s one of the oldest we know. And the silence of everyone on this topic, with the exception of certain feminists, is not new either. It’s perhaps the second oldest story, as Dworkin learned from her then-president, Jimmy Carter.]

Seductive mirages of progress notwithstanding, nowhere in the world is apartheid practiced with more cruelty and finality than in Saudi Arabia. Of course, it is women who are locked in and kept out, exiled to invisibility and abject powerlessness within their own country. It is women who are degraded systematically from birth to early death, utterly and totally and without exception deprived of freedom. It is women who are sold into marriage or concubinage, often before puberty; killed if their hymens are not intact on the wedding night; kept confined, ignorant, pregnant, poor, without choice or recourse. It is women who are raped and beaten with full sanction of the law. It is women who cannot own property or work for a living or determine in any way the circumstances of their own lives. It is women who are subject to a despotism that knows no restraint. Women, locked out and locked in. Mr Carter, enchanted with his good friends, the Saudis. Mr Carter, a sincere advocate of human rights. Sometimes even a feminist with a realistic knowledge of male hypocrisy and a strong stomach cannot believe the world she lives in.

-Andrea Dworkin, Letters From a War Zone

[honeyriot]

"I have thought a great deal about how a feminist, like myself, addresses an audience primarily of political men who say that they are anti-sexist. And I thought a lot about whether there should be a qualitative difference in the kind of speech I address to you. And then I found myself incapable of pretending that I really believe that that qualitative difference exists. I have watched the men’s movement for many years. I am close with some of the people who participate in it. I can’t come here as a friend even though I might very much want to. What I would like to do is to scream: and in that scream I would have the screams of the raped, and the sobs of the battered; and even worse, in the center of that scream I would have the deafening sound of women’s silence, that silence into which we are born because we are women and in which most of us die."

[ravenkings]

There is the fear of having murdered because so many men believe so passionately that she has. To many men, each aborted pregnancy is the killing of a son–and he is the son killed. His mother would have killed him if she had had the choice. These men have a peculiarly retroactive and abstract sense of murder: if she had had a choice, I would not have been born–which is murder. The male ego, which refuses to believe in its own death, now pushes backward, before birth. I was once a fertilized egg; therefore to abort a fertilized egg is to kill me. Women keep abortions secret because they are afraid of the hysteria of men confronted with what they regard as the specter of their own extinction.

–Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women