“Case in point: For years now, we’ve walked a very specific line on the issue of abortion. The government shouldn’t be allowed to tell us what we can or can’t do with our bodies has been the mantra of pro-choice advocates for 40 years. And while I certainly agree with that point, it doesn’t play well. The past two elections, and especially in this last one, our candidates have just looked silly with lines like, I have a tenet of faith, but I can’t force that tenet of faith on anyone else, when compared with a consistency from the Republicans on the issue.”

Pardon? Every time people are asked about invasive government restrictions on abortion in polls, lines like “The government shouldn’t be allowed to tell us what we can or can’t do with our bodies” does play very well. The problem is that it seems to be impossible to get Democrats—oh, hell, let’s say it, Democratic men—to just come out and say that without and endless stream of Concerned Looks and hand-wringing and apologies for being pro-choice like the majority of people in America and far more useless blather about how much you want to reduce abortion than about how it’s unconscionable for some well-armed prick in Washington to ordering women around on how and when to use their uterus.

The Clinton line is a case in point—and it just gets worse with repetition. “Safe, legal, and rare” is a slogan that uses rhetorical emphasis to highlight the fact that the speaker is conceding that there’s something wrong with getting an abortion, instead of the fact that jailing women and/or doctors is dead wrong. Of course that doesn’t motivate people; it doesn’t motivate people because the slogan apologizes for itself immediately.

Most Democratic men seem to feel profoundly uncomfortable with saying this (Howard Dean being the noble exception). Most Democratic women don’t seem to waste everyone’s time with it (Hillary Rodham Clinton—alas!—being the ignoble exception). But Democratic men have been the candidates for the past, well, 200 years, and thus we have weaselly ignoramuses like George Bush, who looks visibly uncomfortable and resorts to dog-whistle soundbites whenever the matter comes up in a public forum, looks like the Voice of Integrity by comparison.

Yeah, this is stuff I’ve worked over before, but it’s still true. If the Democratic candidates would stop trying to devise creative new apologetic soundbites and actually get on board with the fact that the party is pro-choice, they’d have a lot more success than they actually do.

Well, I treat posting on my website more like pleasure reading than like Mass: if I can’t get together the energy to do it on a given day that’s too bad but it’s not a mortal sin. But if I’m feeling lazy and want to post something, I usually resort to:

1. Link farms — sometimes a lot of stuff builds up that I want to mention but don’t have more than a couple sentences to say about. Sometimes this falls naturally into themes; other times not.

2. Quotes. Lots of quotes. I pick up a book (preferably one with material that’s not already online) and pull out a quote and put it online. There’s 1,000s of years of literature out there and a lot of it is by people who are more interesting than me, so I enjoy turning the space over to them every now and again.

And, if I do have energy, but just don’t have anything very topical to talk about, there is always:

1. Digging up old comments — those that could use a longer, philosophical response, and reply to them at length.

Is it that Andrea Dworkin (who was openly lesbian, for what that’s worth) was writing from a heteronormative viewpoint, or just that she can’t touch on every kind of pornography that there is every time she gives a talk?

I mean, whether one agrees or disagrees with her take on it, she does talk about lesbian pornography and pornography aimed at women and gay pornography elsewhere in her books and articles. She mostly focuses on heterosexual pornography aimed at heterosexual men, yes, but why shouldn’t she? Isn’t that what the overwhelming majority of pornography, as an industry and a cultural institution, consists of? As a political critic of pornography it seems to make sense to direct the majority of your analytical and polemical energy at what is overwhelmingly most common, and most definitive of the institution…

I have my disagreements with some of Susie’s statements in her obituary, but I have to say I found the Googlism touchingly inspired, and I appreciate those who can disagree sharply with Andrea Dworkin without feeling the need to engage in wildly hyberbolic attacks. I can’t say the same for this:

Anthony: “her ultimate deeds and words make her out to be a brutal, decisive, and damaging reactionary who did more damage to progressive thought with her antisex and antimale distortions of feminism than any other intellectual this side of Stalin.”

Stalin, famously, mercilessly slaughtered somewhere around 20,000,000 innocent people, through terror famines, through the hell of the gulag, and through plain old bullets to the back of the head.

You might think that besides Stalin, you might point to blood-soaked tyrants like Chairman Mao (who slaughtered another 20,000,000 himself while entrancing a generation of the American radical Left), Zhou En-Lai, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot, Trotsky, Beria, etc., or even at least someone like “revolutionary” serial rapist Eldridge Cleaver or violent terrorists like Mark Rudd or Bill Ayers or Bernadine Dorn. But no, apparently, it is none other than Andrea Dworkin right up there at #2.

Whether you agree with her or not, a little perspective, please.

On another note,

Christian: “After discussing the idea that Ms. D. seemingly espoused, namely that all male-female intercourse is rape (did she really say that?)”

No, she did not say that. There’s a reason why this soundbite is being bandied around freely without a citation to any of her work; it’s because you can’t find it there. (It’s commonly presumed to be the thesis of her book Intercourse, but it’s nowhere to be found in there and she’s explicitly rejected that interpretation when asked about it — cf. http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MoorcockInterview.html . She says a lot of radical and profoundly challenging things that throw the gauntlet down at the feet of “normal” heterosexual sexuality as it is commonly practiced, but this is not among them.)

I don’t mean to be rude, but if you admittedly haven’t read much (or any) of Andrea Dworkin’s work, how do you have any idea whether Andrew Sullivan is right or wrong about her? Do you normally take confident stances on the merits or demerits of political theorists based solely on second-hand information, mostly provided by their critics?

Richard Fagin: “Of course Andrea Dworkin was cracked. She stated that ALL sex between a man and a woman constitutes rape.”

Where did Andrea Dworkin say this?

“Everyone knows about her silly statement to the effect that all penetrative sex is rape.”

Strangely, Andrea Dworkin did not know about this statement of hers. Maybe it’s because she never said it.

Michael Moorcock: … You argue that attitudes to conventional sexual intercourse enshrine and perpetuate sexual inequality. Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?

Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever actually read anything by Andrea Dworkin, from beginning to end?

Actually I don’t get why it would have been hard at all to portray a wall-sized screen in the film if they’d wanted to. Why not just paint a wall blue, and then project whatever you want onto it? It’s not like traveling mattes were something unheard-of in 1966…

“actually it seems like you’re both fucking republicans”

Then you ought to expand your political horizons. I’d point out that lots of people on the Left have ripped into Clinton over his 8 years of dirty little wars around the world (as, in fact, they have), and start naming some names, but the problem is this would only pander to the idea that team-loyalty rather than truth is the appropriate criterion for judging a policy.

Democrat bombs kill people just as surely as Republican bombs do. They killed tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands all told, in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sudan, among others. If you want to give some kind of argument that his belligerence toward the Third World was justified (I don’t think that it was, any more than I think Mr. Bush’s is), you’re free to do so. But then you’d better give an argument that either (a) gives principled reasons to support Clinton’s policy while condemning Bush’s, or (b) give up and support Bush’s war policy too. I don’t think there’s any good argument on offer, but you might give one and persuade me. But it will take just that—an argument. Not calling your opponents names.

“But if, despite decades on the public stage and having published numerous books and articles, it is clear to only those who knew her best that she doesn’t harbor hatred for half the human race, I’d say she had a problem.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but your diagnosis of the “problem” seems to neglect an important fact. Her “decades on the public stage and … numerous books and articles” would only disabuse her critics of their misunderstandings about her if her critics actually bothered to read them. But no small number of the people who attack her — and especially those who like to traffic in the myths that she “hated men” as such or thought that “all heterosexual sex is rape” (which she did not believe and never said), as well as those who preferred to simply bypass any discussion of her ideas whatsoever to deride her as “ugly,” “fat,” “hysterical,” or a “vile, contemptible bitch” — never took the time to read a damned one of her numerous books and articles from beginning to end.

Have you?