David,

Word is that there is a TV movie of Their Eyes Were Watching God made for ABC, featuring Halle Berry as Janie, which should be airing March 6:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0406265/

Thought y’all might be interested.

-C

Thanks, Jeanine, for your kind words about our essay. I think that you and I may disagree about many things at the end of the day but the need to bring vigorous feminist debate into the world of libertarian activism is certainly not one of them. I agree with you that there are many feminists—and, contrary to what many libertarians seem to take for granted, radical feminists significantly more so than liberal feminists—who are open to libertarian insights, if we will only take the trouble to acknowledge gender as a serious issue in its own right and talk about a respectful alliance of equals. There’s a long history of feminist activism independent of, or directly in opposition to, State power and both libertarians and feminists would be wise to look to it.

Thanks also for your enlightening comments elsewhere in the thread.

My last general overview touched on a lot of things I wanted to say, but I realized that I spent enough time on it there that I never got around to directly answering Robert’s direct questions. Again, speaking for myself; what Roderick agrees or disagrees with I’ll let him say.

The essay that we presented at APA (with the sections we didn’t have time to read restored for your reading pleasure) should be posted online as a draft-in-progress soon. I’ll post a URI when we have one.

Let me start by saying that when I single out “I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape” for praise, I really mean it—it’s an essay that fundamentally changed how I think about myself as a feminist. I don’t think of it as a great piece of libertarian feminist writing, but as a great piece of feminist writing simpliciter. Which, I’d argue, is good enough on its own; the problems with patriarchy aren’t all reducible to problems with sexist governments (although there are many such problems), and insofar as patriarchy is a system of oppression often allied with, but independent from, statism, feminist activism and theory can have independent merit without saying much or anything about the need for anti-statism on a particular occasion.

Of course, that’s a raft of assertions that are contentious. I’ll bracket the discussion of whether patriarchy is in fact real, pernicious, autonomous from statism, objectionable even when autonomous from statism, etc. for now; it’s an important discussion to have, but right now let me put it out there as one position among many in the space of libertarian positions, and address to what degree Dworkin’s work is compatible with that sort of feminist libertarianism. Here’s what Robert mentions regarding “I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape”:

“Here is one passage that I think might deserve comment. Keep in mind that the essay is not based on a speech that Dworkin gave to the tribal elders of Waziristan. It is based on a speech that she gave to the National Organization for Changing Men, in St. Paul, Minnesota:

‘We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us.’”

How you react to this passage is likely to depend a lot on what you think about the prevalence and effects of male violence against women. Since Robert marks out this passage without any comment further than saying it deserves comment and that it was given in Minnesota rather than Waziristan, I’m not sure what he means to ask about it, but it seems that he might find it an overstatement. (If that’s not what he meant to say, I apologize, and look forward to being set straight.) What I can offer is this: in a society in which (according to rather conservative measures of the CDC’s National Violence Against Women Society), about one out of every four women has been attacked, in the form of battery or rape or both, by her husband, fiancee, boyfriend, or date, Dworkin is right. I think we know enough about rape and battery at this point to know that she is also right that they are part of a larger cultural system that denigrates women and proclaims men’s right to control “their” women (wives, girlfriends, daughters), and that rape and battery are the nominally illegal but frequently excused expressions of that system in the form of violence.

The point of the passage is to urge pro-feminist men to take serious political action against gender violence now, because the problem is overwhelmingly large and urgent, and women who are facing the threat of rape or battery don’t have time to wait on the sort of touchy-feely guilt politics that was somewhat popular in the “pro-feminist men’s movement” of the 1970s and 1980s. I agree, and I think that the point applies quite broadly to a number of political tendencies that have urged feminists to hang out and wait until some magic bullet (e.g. overthrowing capitalism, ending racism, smashing the state, creating a culture of individualism, etc.) solves the problem.

Back to Campbell:

“A good deal more in this speech is worthy of comment, but I want to give priority to Dworkin’s conclusion:

‘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.’”

Well, what needs comment here? Isn’t it true that if you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong? Isn’t it true that a society in which rape is extremely prevalent will therefore be seriously retarded in any attempt to practice both equality and love between those who are made to live in fear of rape and those whom they are made to fear? Shouldn’t we long to experience a day of freedom from the threat of sexual assault?

Of course, no-one seriously thinks that a one-day “truce” like this is possible. I take it that if someone is reading this as a suggestion of political strategy for pro-feminist men rather than a visionary political fantasy intended to get the point across—that a commitment to freedom for women needs to include a serious commitment to ending rape—then that is a pretty curious form of uncharitable interpretation.

I comment a bit, briefly, on the issue of collective guilt and class analysis in reply to Aeon; Roderick’s talked about the need for libertarian class analysis at somewhat more length elsewhere.

“Keep in mind, too, the definition that Dworkin puts forth in the same essay:

“And by rape you know what I mean. A judge does not have to walk into this room and say that according to statute such and such these are the elements of proof. We’re talking about any kind of coerced sex, including sex coerced by poverty.”

I think that Dworkin is mistaken to assimilate otherwise unwanted sex that results from economic necessity with rape. But I think she’s right that the two have more in common than many people care to admit and that it’s important not to lose sight of those similarities even as we insist that, from the standpoint of the law and the defensive use of force, the two have to be strictly distinguished.

As for the use of “coerced,” well, I think there are two different ways the term is used, as I mention in my response to Mark Fulwiler, and that the important thing here is to give the standard libertarian arguments that violence is only justified as a defense against coercion in the narrow sense. But Dworkin’s use of “coercion” here is not particularly unusual or any more egregious than the broad use of “coercion” by Leftists and conservatives alike (Leftists frequently use it in reference to harsh economic realities; conservatives often use it in reference to pervasive cultural pressures; I think that both have a right to use the word that way but that both are quite wrong to take that as a grounds for calling in State violence).

“The same goes for Dworkin’s views on sexual intercourse, which she insists have been so grossly misrendered.”

Dworkin’s views on heterosexual intercourse have been grossly misrendered. Broadly, the theses of INTERCOURSE and similar work elsewhere are: (1) that patriarchal culture makes penis-in-vagina intercourse the paradigm activity for all sexuality; other forms of sexuality are typically treated as “not real sex” or as mere precursors to penis-in-vagina intercourse and always discussed in terms that analogize them to penis-in-vagina intercourse; (2) that penis-in-vagina intercourse is typically depicted in ways that are systematically male-centric and which portray the activity as iniated by and for the man (as “penetration” of the woman by the man, rather than “engulfing” of the man by the woman, or as the man and woman “joining” together—the last is represented in the term “copulation” but that’s rarely used in ordinary speech about human men and women); (3) that the cultural attitudes are reflective of, and reinforce, material realities such as the prevalence of violence against women and the vulnerability of many women to extreme poverty, that substantially constrain women’s choices with regard to sexuality and with regard to heterosexual intercourse in particular; (4) that (1)-(3) constitute a serious obstacle to women’s control over their own lives and identities that is both very intimate and very difficult to escape; (5) that intercourse as it’s actually practiced occurs in the social context of (1)-(3), and so intercourse as a real social institution and a real experience in individual women’s lives is shaped and constrained by political-cultural forces and not merely by individual choices; (6) that, therefore, drawing the ethical lines in regards to sexuality solely on the basis of individual formal consent rather than considering the cultural and material conditions under which sexuality and formal consent occur makes it hard for liberals and some feminists writing on sexuality to see the truth of (4); that (7) they therefore end up collaborating, either through neglect or endorsement, with the sustanence of (1)-(3), to the detriment of women’s liberation; and (8) feminist politics require challenging both these writings and (1)-(3), that is, challenging intercourse as it is habitually practiced in our society.

(Which is, I will add, not the same as declaring the anatomical mechanics of intercourse somehow antifeminist, or equating all heterosexual sex with rape, or coming out against sex.)

“Finally, I am curious to know what Roderick and Charles think of an op-ed from 2002, which praises the city council of Glasgow, Scotland, for enacting a ban on lap dancing. Including their interpretation of the final line.”

Well, I think that she’s wrong about the law and right about lap-dancing (and strip clubs, generally). But libertarian feminism broadly, and a libertarian feminist appreciation of Dworkin’s valuable work on rape and battery specifically, is to some degree a separable issue from whether you agree or disagree with her about whether strip clubs and lap-dances are pernicious. “Libertarian feminism” as such leaves that question open for feminists to argue over, and only demands that whatever they decide, government force neither used nor be confused with cooperative community action.

As for the last line, I take it to be a pretty common form of rhetorical excess. People often talk about beating people that they think hold scummy positions, forcing them to read some important work at gunpoint, etc. as a way of sharply pointing out what a sleazebag or doofus they think the person is, without seriously meaning it. It is enough to point to Dworkin’s endorsement of government force to find a point at which she is wrong; there’s no need to make an uncharitable reading in order to manufacture others.

This is only the beginning of what should by rights be a vast discussion; but I hope that it’s helped Robert understand my position a bit better.

‘And yes, I do understand that some women find themselves in difficult situations, but “coercion” has to mean the use force or the threat of force. I don’t see any other libertarian definition.’

Libertarianism is a theory of political justice, not of lexicography. If people sometimes (as they do) use the word “coercion” to refer to circumstances in which a man’s or woman’s range of choices is constrained by human-created conditions other than the use or threat of violence, then it seems to me that the best thing to do is to acknowledge the usage and to make the distinction between coercion in this broader sense and coercion in the narrower sense of constraint of choices by use of violence or threats. We can recognize that cases of constraint in the broader sense have some important things in common with cases of constraint in the narrower sense well enough while still arguing that only coercion in the narrow sense can legitimately be met with defensive force.

“And btw, most victims of violent crime are men despite what feminists would have you believe.”

I’m not aware of any feminists who disagree with this. However, what has this got to do with anything? The overwhelming majority of male victims of violence are attacked by other men, not by women. Further, the nature of the violence is different; most violence committed against men consists of one-off assaults committed by strangers; the overwhelming majority of violence against women consists of assaults committed by a man that the victim knows, often by a man that she lives with, and is frequently part of a persistent pattern of violence. And both violence against men—overwhelmingly committed by men—and violence against women—overwhelmingly committed by men—are horrifyingly common in our society (about 60% of men and a bit more than 50% of women are the victims of a violent assault in their lifetime, according to the CDC’s conservative estimates). If you think that these facts pose a challenge to the radical feminist understanding of men and women’s respective places in American society, I don’t quite know what to say.

As for the rest of Mark’s comments, I quote one of my favorite philosophical anarchists, J.R.R. Tolkien:

‘I have just received a copy of C.S.L.’s latest: Studies in Words. Alas! His ponderous silliness is becoming a fixed manner. I am deeply relieved to find I am not mentioned. . . . I think the best bit is the last chapter, and the only really wise remark is on the last page: “I think we must get it firmly fixed in our minds that the very occasions on which we should most like to write a slashing review are precisely those on which we had much better hold our tongues.” Ergo silebo.’

“I fully support the need to eliminate the amount of gender inequality based on irrational prejudices that still exists in America and the world, but libertarian feminists don’t talk like Dworkin does (like victimized collectivists as Aeon Skoble points out). Nor do they call for government intervention.”

I don’t think that the charge that Dworkin is operating on collectivist premises in the passages cited is a just one, but I say more on that in my reply to Aeon above.

As for government intervention: I’m not sure what your target is here. It’s true that Dworkin’s applause for government intervention against, e.g., lap-dancing, or her advocacy for government intervention against pornography, cannot be endorsed on libertarian principles. (That does NOT mean, however, that her writings on the subjects of lap-dancing or prostitution are therefore without value for libertarian feminists; whether she’s right or wrong about government intervention in response to a purported problem is a question distinct from whether she’s right or wrong about the nature of the problem.)

But Dworkin doesn’t just write on lap-dancing or pornography, and it’s not her writings on lap-dancing or pornography that have, in the main, been cited in this discussion. A substantial portion of her work is on male violence against women, particularly in the form of rape and battery. And there’s no demand, from libertarian principles, that libertarian feminists abstain from calling for government action against rapists or batterers. Now, it might not be strategically wise to put too much trust in government law enforcement as a solution to pervasive criminal violence; as an individualist I’d certainly agree. But that’s a separate issue which can’t be resolved apriori by reference to libertarian first principles. And in fact it’s an issue where Dworkin is in agreement, not in opposition, to the libertarian argument:

“There is not a feminist alive who could possibly look to the male legal system for real protection from the systemized sadism of men. Women fight to reform male law, in the areas of rape and battery for instance, because something is better than nothing. In general, we fight to force the law to recognize us as the victims of the crimes committed against us, but the results so far have been paltry and pathetic.” — from Letters from a War Zone

“I have to say I don’t see this at all. Just look at the Dworkin remarks excerpted in Bob’s post: “You men” should stop raping — the underlying collectivist premise here ought to be a clear signal that there’s zero affinity for libertarian ideas here.”

Aeon, this is surely stronger than can be justified. Herbert Spencer, in his old age, came to endorse military conscription; Thomas Jefferson, throughout his life, kept other human beings in outright slavery and used his considerable political influence to protect the institution. Neither position could be endorsed without collectivism of a far worse variety than anything Dworkin has ever employed, but that hardly means that either Thomas Jefferson or Herbert Spencer could be said to have “zero affinity for libertarian ideas.”

As for whether she was right to address the men in the National Organization for Changing Men in the second-person plural about stopping rape, that depends on a further argument she makes. It is not that all men are collectively responsible for the fact that many men commit rape (although it is statistically extremely unlikely that, in an audience of several hundred men, she was not addressing, inter alia, some men who had committed rape). It is that she holds that men, as a class, participate in a system of male supremacy—an interlocking system of ideas, cultural practices, material conditions, government coercion, “private” coercion through violence, etc.—that, among other things, issues in the extraordinary prevalence of the rape of individual women by individual men. I think that there are similarly good grounds to say that there is a “political class” in the United States, and that not all the members of that class personally beat people up or throw them in jail for failing to live up to arbitrary government decrees; but they do participate in a system of oppression and exploitation that ultimately issues in, among other things, beating people up and throwing them in jail. And that it is worth while to point this out to them as one of the reasons why they should work to undermine the political class system that they participate in and benefit from.

Neither class analysis involves any attribution of collective guilt or collective responsibility; nor do they presuppose any kind of centralized command-and-control structure. (Lynch law in the post-Reconstruction South would be another excellent example). This is just class analysis. I think that the example of the 19th century individualist anarchists’ writings on, among other things, racism, sexism, the exploitation of workers, and war, should be a good enough grounds for seeing that individualism is not incompatible, as such, with class analysis. If 20th century individualists mostly passed by class analysis then so much the worse for them, and the sooner we learn to do it again the better.

“I found it irksome that Roderick and Johnson assume that libertarian detractors of radical feminism are unfamiliar with the actual writings of radical feminists.”

What we were trying to urge is not that all libertarian critics of feminism are unfamiliar with the actual writings of radical feminists, and if we suggested that I’m sorry for it. But let me try to make my presumptions and my aims a bit more clear indirectly with a couple of questions back to you. I agree with you that there are libertarians, yourself and Tibor among them, who have substantial experience directly with radical feminist writings; but do you think that there are any prevalent libertarian complaints against radical feminism that are based on misunderstandings (whether through ignorance or misreading) of what radical feminists have historically said and done? And if you do, how prevalent do you find them to be?

Thanks, Robert, for raising the issue. A full reply to some of all the points is way beyond what I can do in the scope of a comment, but that’s no excuse not to get started with the space you’ve got.

“It would appear, then, that Andrea Dworkin is one leftist whom Roderick and Charles consider a potential ally.”

I can speak only for myself and not for Roderick, of course.

I don’t, actually, consider Andrea Dworkin a Leftist at all, exactly; in any case my recollection is that she rejects the term for herself. She’s a radical feminist, and there are a lot of complicated historical and theoretical issues involved in positioning feminism vis-a-vis the traditional (male-dominated) Left, which may not be worth digging too deeply into just now. This is worth noting mainly because it may or may not be the case, in particular cases, that the reasons for urging an alliance with the (traditional) Left are the same as those for urging an alliance with feminists. What I have to say on behalf of SDS, for example, has some things importantly in common with and importantly different from what I have to say on behalf of Andrea Dworkin; Dworkin gets a lot of very important things that SDS misses, and SDS gets a few important things that Andrea Dworkin misses.

That said, what I think about Dworkin is that she is a very important, and very frustrating, figure. Important because of her contributions to radical feminist thought and activism, frustrating because of her failures to see the libertarian conclusions that her positions should ultimately lead her to. Broadly speaking, the purpose of taking a good look at the work of radical feminists such as Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, among others, is not because we consider them to be libertarian feminists (they aren’t), or because we agree with everything they say (I certainly don’t, and I take it that Roderick doesn’t either), but rather to suggest that some of what they’ve written offers an important correction for the mistakes that have been made, both by some libertarian critics of feminism, and by those attempting some form of libertarian feminist synthesis. This may be sailing towards Scylla in order to avoid Charibdys, but there’s a place for that in a fallen world, and I think that’s actually overstating the problems with radical feminism as a whole pretty substantially. (As I mentioned in replying to a question from Tibor, most of the points at which, say, Andrea Dworkin’s position is particularly problematic are points at which there are other well-established positions within the radical feminist traditions that are preferable.)

I guess part of all of this is a matter of emphasis, and of precisifying what we mean by quoting (e.g.) Dworkin or MacKinnon. It’s a question worth asking, but I don’t think that the answer really should be much of a head-scratcher once everything is said and done. Most libertarians wouldn’t hesitate to pull a juicy quote from Thomas Jefferson; many if not most wouldn’t hesitate to say that we can learn a lot from John C. Calhoun—even though both of them personally committed crimes against natural law far worse than anything Andrea Dworkin has ever done or countenanced, and even though Calhoun went so far as to defend holding other human beings in chattel slavery as a “positive good.” Citing Dworkin or MacKinnon as sources of important lessons for a libertarian feminism shouldn’t entail agreement with, or blindness towards, their real mistakes any more than citing Jefferson or Calhoun as sources of important lessons for natural rights and decentralist libertarianism should entail agreement with, or blindness towards, the monstrosity of American race slavery.

I think it’s quite right to urge radical feminists towards more libertarian positions; I think one of the major points in our essay is that there are important things that libertarians can learn from radical feminists, too.

‘Is Dworkin “solid on civil liberties”?’

Here I would say “No,” but other Leftists and feminists certainly are. Also, though, that her position—problematic though it is—has often been profoundly mischaracterized by opponents, including civil libertarian opponents (it’s bad, but it’s neither as bad as they claim it is nor bad for the reasons they claim it is), and that opposition to it has been package-dealed with uncritical attitudes towards (e.g.) pornography that aren’t actually justified by any argument from libertarian principles (or from any true principles, I think, but delving into that is something for another time).

‘Is she one of those “whose instincts are firmly anti-authoritarian?”’

I’d say that they very clearly are—based on her essays and her memoirs, among other things; this may serve to point out that anti-authoritarianism is important and valuable but not always sufficient. She doesn’t endorse government coercion, where she does, because she thinks a powerful government coercing people into a just cause is a great idea; she does it because she (rightly) thinks that the issue of violence against women and entrenched sexism is overwhelmingly large and urgent, and (wrongly) thinks that admittedly problematic and dangerous government interventions are justifiable in dealing with it, even though she is deeply and thoroughly suspicious of State power.

Is that a mistake? Yeah, it is, but I don’t think it’s a failure to be sufficiently anti-authoritarian. It has more to do with a failure to be sufficiently individualist. The two are related, but not the same thing at all.

‘Is she perhaps neither—but her analysis of power relations in society is valuable to libertarians anyway?’

This much I’d whole-heartedly endorse.

More to come, here and elsewhere, I’m sure.

If you’re gonna make an omelet, ya gotta break a couple eggs. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Cluster bombs don’t just leave a bit of a mess around the kitchen. This is not some limited set of easily fixable costs we are talking about. People are dying, needlessly; conservative estimates place the number around 10,000-15,000 Iraqi civilians and some peer-reviewed results place it around 100,000. If you want to say that these innocent people’s lives are worth whatever the hell it is you hoped to accomplish, then say so, but at least have enough respect for the dead not to pass off their deaths with facile proverbs.