Andrea Dworkin NEVER said "all sex is rape"

[RainDog]

242. I didn't really want to get into this

Last edited Wed Apr 2, 2014, 03:53 PM - Edit history (1)

and won't, beyond this, because people will take from Dworkin what they want - and even defend her with no knowledge of her actual writings... so what's the point, really? It's just point scoring, not actually looking at Dworkin's distorted view of heterosexual interaction as sexual beings for what it is.

Shulamith Firestone made a better argument earlier in feminist thought about the consequences of sex for females in a natural condition - arguing that bearing children and being the ones who are most often the ones who invest their time in day-to-day childcare creates a condition of subordination for women that would only be overcome when childbearing was removed from women's lives. Of course this view, like Dworkin's, was based upon a western capitalist model to frame the issue - and disregarded any actual female desire to care for children - the frame, iow, defers to the status quo rather than the socio-economic as a great part of the distortion of equality for women in a system that relies upon unpaid and low-paid wages to create "winners and losers."

However, in Intercourse, written in 1987, Dworkin's view of penis-in-vagina is entirely based upon the idea that heterosexual intercourse violates women - as a sexual act. What would any woman here call that other than rape? All would call it rape, it seems, but some make an exception when Dworkin says it because she was commenting upon history. Yet she did not confine the view to history (and, honestly, any husband in 1987 who claimed rights to sex because of marriage was not exactly a beacon of truth for husbands - really. Ask any husband in any relationship that was not bounded by religious belief if he thought he had legal right to rape his wife, no matter what law was on the books - or if any woman could not obtain a no fault divorce if she wanted to accuse said husband of rape or thought she had been raped. Women would not have, generally, accepted such a condition, no matter the law because they could use the law through other means to stop such bullshit - divorce means no sex, not even the rapey kind.)

She states outright that hetero sex is a fundamental issue IN AND OF ITSELF for women. No matter the law of the land, because her view of females was such that she gave them no agency or bodily integrity simply because they had PIV sex.

There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonialized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag. There is nothing exactly the same, and this is not because the political invasion and significance of intercourse is banal up against these other hierarchies and brutalities. Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence. There is nothing that happens to any other civilly inferior people that is the same in its meaning and in its effect even when those people are forced into sexual availability, heterosexual or homosexual; while subject people, for instance, may be forced to have intercourse with those who dominate them, the God who does not exist did not make human existence, broadly speaking, dependent on their compliance. The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people--physically occupied inside, internally invaded--be free; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self-respect?

She is clearly making AN ESSENTIALIST argument about women - that hetero intercourse is a condition of oppression for women that is "forced" upon women because they are human animals and intercourse propagates the species. She is not saying that, with an end of patriarchy, such oppression ends.

An essentialist argument is about the very nature of something that is irrevocable.

Yet she hedges on this essentialist argument by acknowledging that "compulsive heterosexual desire" is not rape - though it is dominance, and never an act of mutual agreement/consent.

Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society-- when pushed to admit it--recognizes as dominance.

So, sex is (often) dominance and a violation. It is occupation. per Dworkin.

She did not acknowledge that females ever initiate sex, or that males ever responded to female desires and requests in sexual acts. Her entire conception of hetero intercourse derives from her personal abusive experiences and not from a universal experience of hetero sex - because her view of sex does not define all experiences of the same. She does use "often" as a qualifier, but the content and context makes that qualifier a sort of sop to criticism so that, while she is trying to claim a universal, she cannot be held to that if so criticized. Her claims are not very well reasoned in any way. Her argument is a polemic, not a descriptive of the universal (female) human condition, tho, again and again, she claims no other human is violated as part of her natural state. tho women are.

This is her ridiculous claim: The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center.

...She is occupied--physically, internally, in her privacy.She, a human being, is supposed to have a privacy that is absolute; except that she, a woman, has a hole between her legs that men can, must, do enter.

--that slit which means entry into her-- intercourse--appears to be the key to women's lower human status.

Her choice to say to women that they are lower in human status, not just perceived to be so is indicative of her essentialist argument. This sort of thinking runs throughout her polemic.

Because some women do not orgasm via intercourse, she uses this as an argument about the negative nature of intercourse itself. Some women, however, do have orgasms via intercourse - so what are they? Vichy females? Again, she is trying to make an essentialist claim about the nature of intercourse that is not essential - and, further - to claim that orgasms that derive from other forms of stimulation somehow negates intercourse is a really, really limited view of what male/female intercourse has been about for a long time for just about anyone I know who has ever talked about this subject. But whatever - that doesn't uphold Dworkin's narrative of intercourse as something apart from female sexual satisfaction.

Women have wanted intercourse to work and have submitted--with regret or with enthusiasm, real or faked--even though or even when it does not. The reasons have often been foul, filled with the spiteful but carefully hidden malice of the powerless. Women have needed what can be gotten through intercourse: the economic and psychological survival; access to male power through access to the male who has it; having some hold--psychological, sexual, or economic--on the ones who act, who decide, who matter. There has been a deep, consistent, yet of course muted objection to what Anais Nin has called "[t]he hunter, the rapist, the one for whom sexuality is a thrust, nothing more."3 Women have also wanted intercourse to work in this sense: women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men, including in the act of intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love. There has been--despite the cruelty of exploitation and forced sex--a consistent vision for women of a sexuality based on a harmony that is both sensual and possible. In the words of sex reformer Ellen Key: She will no longer be captured like a fortress or hunted like a quarry; nor will she like a placid lake await the stream that seeks its way to her embrace. A stream herself, she will go her own way to meet the other stream. 4

A stream herself, she would move over the earth, sensual and equal; especially, she will go her own way.

Any woman who has ever had an orgasm would not describe it as a "stream moving over the earth." There are physical actions that happen to females that make their orgasms very similar, in terms of muscle contractions and the urge for release.

Shere Hite has suggested an intercourse in which "thrusting would not be considered as necessary as it now is. . . [There might be] more a mutual lying together in pleasure, penis-in-vagina, vagina-covering-penis, with female orgasm providing much of the stimulation necessary for male orgasm." 5

This, to me, is simply... ridiculous to state. So, the only thrusting that should be allowed in hetero intercourse is thrusting by females (because, yes, females do thrust, too - and that's okay, apparently, because ultimately that would seem to be what Hite is talking about - so, the reality is that both males and females thrust when they have sex - but because of patriarchy, it's only okay if females do it - and, okay, maybe males can do it in response to the vaginal muscles contracting with orgasm and pulling the penis deeper into the vagina - oh, but that would make a hetero orgasmic female somehow complicit in her own subjugation to have her body actually ask for male thrusting - which is what it does.

Anyway, so, anyone who wants to make a point that Dworkin never specifically stated all HETERO sex is rape is counting the angels dancing on the head of a pin, to me. If that's how someone wants to take her work - so be it. Others, however, read her and find that she offers nothing worthwhile to say to (hetero) females about the state of male/female sexual existence.

She did marry a gay man, came out as lesbian, they never had sex, she said she did not engage in intercourse by choice. She was abused and, to me, she was writing about her own trauma and making it the reference point for all hetero sex. I would not advise any young female to read her without a big dose of skepticism - her actions vis a vis the court and pornography are not separate from her worldview - and neither of them, to me, are worth much consideration as valid exercises in feminist thought.