This is an interesting…
This is an interesting and nuanced picture of Andrea’s life. I think there is also a lot to disagree with here, but I appreciate those who can disagree with Andrea’s work without dismissing her or hurling abuse at her, like some of her critics (on both the Left and the Right) have been fond of doing in the past several days since her death.
A couple of notes.
Catharine MacKinnon DID NOT SAY “In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.” These words were written by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge in their book Professing Feminism. They are trying to summarize MacKinnon’s views, but this is their (mistaken, incidentally) interpretation of her views, not anything she ever wrote. Unfortunately Cal Thomas mis-attributed the quote to her in a March 1999 article and the mis-attribution has been running around the Internet ever since. (Snopes has a decent page on this.)
You cite a passage from Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Maybe her rhetoric is inflammatory; I don’t think it is particularly, but I’m used to far more strident writers than Brownmiller. But in any case it wasn’t particularly influenced by Andrea at the time. (Brownmiller started writing Against Our Will in 1971. She was already involved in the radical feminist movement in New York, but as far as I know she had not yet met Andrea — who was living as a battered wife in Europe at the time and who didn’t publish her first book, Woman Hating, until 1974.)
Above you say: “What Andrea Dworkin got right is that pornography encourages the basest instincts of male sexuality. … What Andrea Dworkin got right is that male lust is intrinsically self-serving. And since nature has made men more powerful than women, sexual liberation inevitably benefits men and hurts women.” Well, Andrea did criticize the effects of pornography on men’s sexuality and she did criticize self-serving male lust. But she did not believe that it was a matter of “instincts,” and she did not believe that men’s lust is intrinsically self-serving or that there’s any kind of biological inevitability about it. Right or wrong, she argued that pornography is part of a conscious, male-dominated political order, that male lust is “self-serving” in our society but that we can and should struggle to build a new society in which men’s sexuality is free from domination and narcissism, and that “sexual liberation” hurt women and benefitted men because it was “sexual liberation” on male terms. (She did not think that the fact that it was sexual liberation on male terms was biologically inevitable; she thought that it was the result of men’s political power, which she thought to be something that could be and should be overthrown.)
Anticopyright.