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.)