An argument stands or falls on its own merits, not on the appearance of (or any other facts about) the person who is giving it.

You might say that biographical facts about Dworkin (or Flynt or Goldstein) can be useful to understanding why they argue the way the do, or why they focus on what they focus on, or what have you. That’s fine, but that’s not the same thing as evaluating the arguments that they give (which is a matter for logic, not psychoanalysis).

If you try to argue (as obliterati does above) that Dworkin is unattractive and therefore does not need to be taken seriously when she gives moral and political arguments against pornography. This is just an argumentum ad hominem (abusive form). A rather sleazy one, in this case, since it involves nasty personal abuse and participates in well-worn misogynist gambits. Part of the point here is that nobody would think it’s appropriate to treat male scholars this way: if you went around saying things like “Harold Bloom is a fat old pervert. Who cares what he argues about love and sex in early modern literature?” or “Norman Mailer is a ghastly little garden gnome; what does he know about pornography or sex in contemporary literature?” you would (rightly) be regarded as a twit.

Argue with the text, or don’t bother.

See, that’s quite a lot of work when the books are mostly crap. But lets go through a summary of stereotypical “Dworkin thoughts”, which really is all you’re going to get out of an amateur of course . . .

Have you ever read one of her books? I mean, actually read it, from beginning to end? If so, why not talk about that book and the specific lines of argument that you find especially weak rather than pulling out a few unsourced quotes that you don’t have the context for? If not, then how do you have any idea whether or not “the books are mostly crap” in the first place?

This is important, because many of Dworkin’s critics accuse her, without any particular reference to her work, of things that she never said or advocated. Here’s an example:

You start randomly outlawing erotica like she wanted and you give rise to just about every bad thing there is about censorship and morality police and invasion of provacy.

But Andrea Dworkin never proposed “outlawing erotica” (let alone doing so “randomly,” whatever that means). She was a very harsh critic of pornography—and you can give arguments for or against her critical analysis of pornography—and she proposed laws which would allow women to sue pornographers for violations of their civil rights if specific abuses were committed against them because of the production or distribution of pornography—and you can give arguments for or against her model civil rights ordinance. But she was opposed in principle to both “obscenity” law and the use of criminal law to ban pornography. You might know this if you had read some of the things she’s written about it.

To suggest that *my* use of porn for instance, might somehow be involved in the plague of rape, which her writing states clearly, or that casual enjoyment of porn somehow condones rape, causes rape, necessarily profits from rape, …etc., is a despicable twisting of the facts of porn.

That’s an interesting assertion you’ve got there. Care to give the argument for it?

… the market for visual stimulation, which is a place where she has no business being.

This is, frankly, a useless cheap-shot. A sleazy cheap-shot that you ought to be embarassed you engaged in.

But even besides her legal and porn studies and everything else, much of her work is bland emotional outpouring about why no one loves her. Here’s another quote for you:

Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.

Nota bene: this passage is neither bland, nor particularly emotional, nor is it about who does or doesn’t love Andrea Dworkin (she does not mention herself at all). These are all things that you have read into the passage without any clear grounds for doing so.

Which is bullshit, as a theory on love, and I’m sure you agree.

You presume too much. First, because it’s not Andrea Dworkin’s “theory on love”; it’s her description of “love” as portrayed in pornography and as experienced under the conditions of a male-centric society, something which she takes to be a man-made social reality but something that can and should be changed. (You’d know this if you’d read The Root Cause, the essay from which the quote is taken from.) Second, because you presume that it is obviously false to anyone who reads it. But it’s not. In fact, it seems to me that it’s a rather obviously correct reading of how love has been portrayed, over and over again, in our culture—in literature, in pornography, in psychology, in religion, and everywhere else. Now, you may not find that convincing yourself; that’s fine, but you ought to give some arguments for why you think it’s unconvincing, rather than just pointing to the quote, declaring that it is bullshit, and relying on the fact that this is obvious to you (and therefore to everyone else?) to carry the day.

You know who is really ugly? Larry Flynt. Slimey, incoherent, drooling, pug-ugly Larry Flynt. If there is someone I would never, ever want to think of having any kind of sexual contact whatsoever, it is Larry Flynt.

You know who else is really ugly? Al Goldstein. If there’s someone else I’d never, ever want to think about having any kind of sexual contact whatsoever, it’s definitely Al Goldstein.

Strangely, the people who are so firmly convinced that their sleazy little snickers at Andrea Dworkin’s appearance are absolutely vital to understanding and replying to her arguments on pornography don’t seem interested in my pain-staking research into the absolutely vital issue of how ugly Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein are.

I wonder why that is.