Andrea Dworkin NEVER said "all sex is rape"

[RainDog]

301. Dworkin was not an academic

She got a BA at the tail end of the 1960s. All of her training for her life work was done while working with political anarchists and other political movements - but she did work as an asst. to Muriel Rukeyser, who was an important feminist from the WWII era, into the 1970s.

Nothing wrong with being an autodidact, but she had no training in logic, etc. and when she tries to make statements about universality, she falls far short, for me. Her argument that "biology is destiny" is a basic conservative argument - just retrofitted to sound like "the personal is political." - This is another reason left feminists have had an issue with her understanding of the world - Dworkin, tho she was definitely involved in leftist political issues, did not extend the idea of culturally-formed attitudes to females - or she did - depending upon which paragraph you read, or what her explanations in the media meant when you look at her view of intercourse and violation.

Diff. povs in feminism have approached the issue of "essentialism" - those who based much of their work on Freud, for instance - long after Freud was demolished, imo, by Sartre's examination of the idea of "the unconscious" as Freud understood it. But this essentialism has been an important part of European feminist theory - and Dworkin cut a lot of her political teeth in Europe.

But "essentialism" itself is a conservative argument in general, no matter the subject.

All to say - there are many diff. povs out there from women about women - and there is no universal agreement about the meaning of this or that - and, within the social sciences, a lot of this is just semantics, anyway, because basic issues of human rights, equality before the law, bodily sovereignty - legal issues - find broad agreement among feminists.

Her argument isn't about PIV, per se, tho her stance regarding PIV as violation has to be considered since it's central to her view that pornography contributes to violence (tho this has not been established.) That's why she gets attention on DU.

I think hifi guy was the one who read Dworkin in law school, maybe?