Comments Elsewhere

“To any reasonable person, quotes such as these coming from a variety of radical feminist writers should make it quite clear that modern radical feminism is an ideology of pure hate as virulent as any hatred that has been unleashed against racial minorities in this country.”

I must be an unreasonable person, then. Part of the problem, of course, is that several things that you have cited here are completely irrelevant, wildly misinterpreted, and, in a couple of cases, complete fabrications. (Repeating wildly misinterpreted selective quotations is a form of dishonesty; repeating complete fabrications is telling lies.)

For example, in the “completely irrelevant” column:

“In my own life, I don’t have intercourse. That is my choice.” — Andrea Dworkin

What in the hell has this got to do with anything? Lots of women don’t have intercourse by choice. Hell, lots of men don’t; some of them are called priests or saints. What does this show? Nothing at all, except that the compiler of the quotes is apparently a busybody who feels free to deride women based on how they do or do not choose to have sex.

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.” — Valerie Solanas, Authoress of the SCUM Manifesto

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.” — Valerie Solana [sic], SCUM founder (Society for Cutting Up Men.)

The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness…can be trained to do most things. — Jilly Cooper, SCUM (Society For Cutting Up Men, started by Valerie Solanas)

These quotes are irrelevant because there is (contrary to the implication) no such organization as “SCUM” and the “founder” of this non-organization, Valerie Solanas, was not a radical feminist. She was a writer and actor in New York City who wrote the SCUM Manifesto in 1967, a year before the modern radical feminist movement started, who gained some notoriety in the press after she collapsed into paranoid schizophrenia and shot Andy Warhol in early 1968. She was a member of no WL organizations (when interviewed, years later, she said that SCUM was not an organization but rather a “frame of mind”) and her “Manifesto” (in which it is hard to separate what is seriously meant from what is put forward as dark humor—which you’d know if you’d read it) was not an influence on subsequent radical feminist writings. (I haven’t got any idea who Jilly Cooper is or why she is associated with the non-organization “SCUM” here; if you could provide a source for that quote it would be helpful.)

In the “wildly misinterpreted” column:

“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.” — Andrea Dworkin

And:

“All men are rapists and that’s all they are” — Marilyn French

You may or may not know this, but these quotes are cherry-picked out of the mouths of characters in novels — Ice and Fire and The Women’s Room, respectively — not from a speech or a treatise or essays. Taking quotations from fiction, without context and without any commentary on the characters or how they are presented, as if they accurately represented the author’s own views, is really a bit much.

In the “complete fabrication” column, there is possibly this:

“All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.” — Catherine [sic] MacKinnon

I have never encountered this sentence in any essay or book by Catharine MacKinnon, and no-one I’ve read repeating it on the Internet has bothered to give any source for it. (I’ve e-mailed some of those who did to ask about it and have not gotten any response.) Now, that doesn’t mean that the quote doesn’t exist. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. If you have a source for it in her writings then you ought to provide one. If you don’t have a source for it in her writings, then you have absolutely no more idea than I do whether she said it or not.

On the other hand, I do know where this comes from; it is certainly in the “complete fabrication” column:

“In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.” — Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies.

This is not a quote of Catharine MacKinnon. Daphe Patai and Noretta Koertge, the authors of Professing Feminism, wrote it. It is their attempt at a summary and interpretation of Catharine MacKinnon’s position, not something she said. (Note that they never claimed that it was something she said, either; that lie was started by Cal Thomas in a March 1999 column, and has been spread, unattributed, on the Internet ever since. See the Snopes article on the quote for an example. It is also a wildly inaccurate summary of MacKinnon’s position, as MacKinnon herself has made clear and as anyone who has read, for example, Chapter 9 of MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (which is one of her main extended treatments of rape law, coercion, and consent), ought to know. Of course, you may not have read Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. If so, that’s no sin; everyone’s time is limited and I’m not interested in telling people what to read. But if you are going to make confident pronouncements about the nature of MacKinnon’s views, or those of radical feminists in general, then it is totally irresponsible to hold forth on them when you clearly haven’t done the basic homework of reading what it is that they have to say, in context, rather than mindlessly repeating these sorts of “horror file” selective quote lists.

Quite apart from all of these issues, I don’t doubt that there are points of substantive disagreement between you and some of the radical feminists that you have named here. Hell, I know for a fact (because I have actually read them) that there are points of substantive disagreement between some of the radical feminists that you’ve named here and other radical feminists that you’ve named here. But a serious discussion of whether their statements are true or false, and whether their arguments for those statements are cogent or uncogent (which is, I think, a much more interesting question to resolve than whether they are “bigoted” or not) will have to wait until there is at least an honest and accurate presentation of what the views under discussion actually are, and not a series of wild caricatures that you cut and pasted from other people’s lists.