Comments Elsewhere

“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