Comments Elsewhere

Tish:

“And if you haven’t sat in a throwback Women’s Studies course these days, don’t assume Dworkin’s rhetoric has been debunked.”

You missed the point. What Jim said has been repeatedly “debunked” is not the claim that “all heterosexual sex is rape.” What he (rightly) said has been repeatedly “debunked” is the claim that Andrea Dworkin ever claimed this in the first place. If you claim that she said it, you are claiming something false. This has not just been debunked online; it’s been debunked in print by Andrea Dworkin herself, in interviews , right at the front of the book in the preface to the tenth-anniversary edition of Intercourse (cf. pages ix-x).

‘Also, check the link on the Guardian site about Dworkin’s “rape” when she was in Europe….and how her essay re-confirms her dislike of heterosexual sex.’

Andrea said that she had been drugged and fucked while she was half-conscious and unable to consent. That’s rape, without any sleazy scare-quotes. You’re free to believe that it didn’t happen, but then you ought to say “alleged rape” or “supposed rape”, rather than suggesting that something happened to her other than “real” rape.

In any case, I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove. What she said in the article is that she has chosen not to have intercourse. So what? That’s her business. Lots of lesbians don’t like heterosexual intercourse. That doesn’t mean that they, or she, thinks that all heterosexual sex is rape.

“For Dworkin, straight sex was rape.”

According to what? Where does she say this?