Wowzers! Daly is so essentialist (i.e. thinks women all inherently have certain mental characteristics). I’m not surprised that someone held her positions so much as I am surprised that she’s considered an (recent) influential feminist. I thought that all (contemporary?) feminism was just applied post-modernist (i.e. noticing that gender roles are historically contingent). But that’s clearly inconsistent with Daly. Model updated.
That said, I suspect I’m a lot more sympathetic to many of the arguments than you are. I don’t think I need to reject Andrea Dworkin in order to reject the essentialism of Daly. That said, I hope that Dworkin hasn’t said that the gender of the rape victim matters, because it shouldn’t matter. (She essentially agrees with your other examples, I think).
I thought that all (contemporary?) feminism was just applied post-modernist (i.e. noticing that gender roles are historically contingent).
(Academic) feminist theory has gotten much more postmodern (perhaps more specifically poststructural) over the past three decades, but constructionism isn’t the major axis of differentiation. When difference feminists were important they tended to be a bit more post-y than the dominance theorist, who were very often as modernist as the day is long.
Thanks. My recent experience is that my philosophical reach often exceeds my philosophy terminology grasp. I know what I think—and people have told me that it’s a “deconstructivist” position.
But I definitely don’t know the ins and outs of particular schools of thought—I had a discussion recently with a third-wave feminist who argued that rejecting intersectionality was an essential element of being second wave feminist. I don’t doubt that many second-wavers implicitly (or explicitly) rejected intersectionality—and I think intersectionality is an important structure in the correct theoretical framework. But I’m not familiar enough with the schools of thought to know whether second-wave is inherently inconsistent with intersectionality.
In short, are there accessible references that lay out the central positions of the various schools of thought—at a more nuanced and detailed level than wikipedia? The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is at the right level, but doesn’t seem to be directed at the topics I’m referring to here.
As with most things, my experience is that specialist encyclopedias are your best bet for knowledge per effort. There’s nothing as high-quality and legally accessible as the SEP, but the standard other places should have you covered. Depending on the level of detail you’re looking for, Cambridge Companions, Oxford Handbooks, and Very Short Guides tend to be pretty accurate and accessible.
(As for intersectionality I have yet to see a definition which isn’t either trivial or theoretically problematic. Which isn’t to say that realizing and incorporating the trivial form is itself trivial, but I don’t think either version would really hold up as a necessary or sufficient condition for differentiating waves. Waves are noticed based on broad shifts in theory and are thus necessarily fuzzy. But this is just IMO.)
That said, I hope that Dworkin hasn’t said that the gender of the rape victim matters.
I can’t find a cite but I’m sure someone in that school of thought has made that claim explicitly (“Men can’t be raped”).
That said, Dworkin and others have indicated that all penetrative sex is rape, specifically of the sort that a male perpetrates upon a female, so that would suggest that it could not happen the other way ’round.
Meghan Murphy has written a blog post entitled “Can women rape men? I’m not sure I care.”, though she later retracted it.
I don’t think anyone has explicitly said “penetrative sex is rape”; they do use phrases like “inherently degrading and violent”, but I’ve only ever heard opponents rephrase it as such.
Yes, I think the furthest Dworkin has gone is saying that a) penetrative sex is inherently violent, b) sex that is not initiated by “the woman” is never consensual, and c) men’s pleasure is necessarily linked to victimizing, hurting, and exploiting.
sex that is not initiated by “the woman” is never consensual
Is this a generally accepted notion in feminism, or does it represent a fringe view ? The reason I ask is because this sounds exactly like something a Straw Feminist might say...
What algorithm do you use to tell the difference between a feminist and a straw feminist? According to this algorithm, are Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin straw feminists?
It seems to me that any feminist suddenly becomes a straw feminist when an offensive or clearly irrational quote made by them is presented in a discussion about feminism.
I think a straw feminist is meant to be a character (a fictional character, or a persona played by a troll, or an imaginary opponent), not a person sincerely expressing their position. So Daly and Dworkin weren’t (or kept up the charade for quite a long time). Straw feminists say stupid and offensive things to make actual feminists look bad. Bugmaster meant that the quote sounds more like something someone would attribute to a feminist in order to make feminism look bad, than like something a feminist would say.
But there are in fact fringe feminists who are indistinguishable from their parodies.
What algorithm do you use to tell the difference between a feminist and a straw feminist?
I don’t have a complete algorithm handy but I know that the first line includes the query “Does this person exist?”
It seems to me that any feminist suddenly becomes a straw feminist when an offensive or clearly irrational quote made by them is presented in a discussion about feminism.
It would be (arguably) legitimate to make that redesignation if the character is a fictional feminist. Then determining whether it is a ‘straw feminist character’ or ‘feminist character’ would entail an evaluation of to what extent the beliefs or behaviors reflect that which is within the realms of ‘feminist’, also taking into account inferences about the author’s motives in creating the character. (Then you just shut up and say it is ‘straw’ if that makes your side of the debate look better.)
Could you provide evidence that Daly or Dworkin did assert such a thing? I’ve read quite a bit of Dworkin, nothing suggesting anything of the sort; I’ve read less Daly, and while I found all of it pretty silly I would be surprised if that was among them.
The “all sex is rape” claim is most often attributed to Dworkin or MacKinnon, which makes me strongly suspect that while surely someone somewhere has believed it, prominent radical theorists were not among them.
In another comment in this thread there is a link to Daly saying, in an interview:
If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.
Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
So assuming these are the best quotes to be found (I did not try too hard), it would be more precise and fair to say that Daly enjoyed the thought that 90% of men would be “decontaminated” by “an evolutionary process”; and Dworkin said that every man (under patriarchy, which means anything) is a “rapist or exploiter”.
None of this really makes any of them a sick person, does it?
I mean, if I said that “if life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth; a natural process resulting in drastic reduction of the females” and “under feminism, every women is a rapist or exploiter of another man”, those would also be perfectly OK, politically correct, inoffensive, and uncontroversial statements, ready to get me to the textbooks as a defender of equality and everything good. (Just joking, those are not my opinions.)
Well, you won’t find me defending Daly; everything I’ve read of her suggests she’s a nut. As you yourself note the passage doesn’t directly imply the sex=rape thesis, and there’s always context etc. (Dworkin for instance has some quotes describing sex as conceived by what she considers patriarchal ideology that have been taken out of context) but it also doesn’t seem like a perverse interpretation.
I mean, if I said that “if life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth; a natural process resulting in drastic reduction of the females” and “under feminism, every women is a rapist or exploiter of another man”, those would also be perfectly OK, politically correct, inoffensive, and uncontroversial statements, ready to get me to the textbooks as a defender of equality and everything good. (Just joking, those are not my opinions.)
Ah, but surely as rationalists we must not let emotions cloud our judgments or subject truth to the inquisitorial glare of political correctness, if men universally evolved to be scum may we should want to believe that they did, human biodiversity between untermenschen and überfräuen ought be celebrated, &c.
I don’t have a problem to believe things like “most mass murderers are male”, etc. (I just hope people around me are good enough at math to recognize that the statement is not equivalent to “most males are mass murderers”.) Just give me evidence from a reliable source.
Show me a sustainable utopia with 10% males (I would actually encourage feminists sympathetic to this idea to try it, but only with volunteers), give me reliable reports from independent sources, and I might be convinced. Until then, it is just a hypothesis in the idea-space, and I find other explanations more likely.
My last paragraph was, like yours, just joking and not my actual opinions. I’m a pretty strong constructionist on gender and also a dude, if that means anything.
Non-ironic: Daly and Dworkin said some repulsive things, and a non-mindkilled person would recognize some problems with their ideas. (Here are the quotes, and I did not even try too hard to find them.)
Ironic: If I said the same things publicly, only with genders reversed, the people who consider Daly and Dworkin sane, would consider me sane too. (Not likely.)
In the absence of a closer association between Daly and Dworkin, conflating their positions is like conflating Stephen J. Gould and Steven Pinker because they both claim to apply the theory of evolution.
As I and Oligopsony have said, Daly can go piss off. Dworkin’s quote is just articulating her definition of patriarchy. If you think we aren’t living in that society, her definition is not particularly interesting. But it isn’t like there’s no evidence that she’s somewhat accurately describing our current society.
It fits well into the memeplex of radical feminism. While I haven’t had my finger to the pulse of feminism for a few years, I’ve gotten the impression that radical feminism hasn’t been mainstream since the 1990s.
I don’t think the genderqueer BDSM pornographers usually call themselves “radical feminists”; they do call themselves both radicals and feminists, but they don’t usually combine the terms. The term “radical feminist” seems to have been largely monopolized by the Andrea Dworkin/ Mary Daly/ Twisty Faster crowd.
I don’t know if unpleasant second-wavers are the most common radfems or just the noisiest on the Internet. I tried doing a bit of a research but couldn’t bear it, so you’ll have to dig the everything-positive radfems up yourself if you’re interested. There are a few I’ve talked to, but they apparently don’t blog.
Rape is very often not violent, and there are many contexts where it wouldn’t be thought degrading by the victim or by the culture, such as marital rape in a culture where it’s considered normal.
Consensual degrading and violent sex is certainly kinky, but not necessarily a kind of kink that counts as BDSM and certainly not necessarily rape play. (I feel like I should be making innuendo here about developing your imagination or something.) The “cunnilingus and cuddles” feminist crowd probably don’t think it can truly be consensual, but they’re just obviously wrong; people might be brainwashed by the patriarchy to go along with something their partner wants, but not to seek it out secretly.
Rape is very often not violent, and there are many contexts where it wouldn’t be thought degrading by the victim or by the culture, such as marital rape in a culture where it’s considered normal.
Excellent points.
Consensual degrading and violent sex is certainly kinky, but not necessarily a kind of kink that counts as BDSM and certainly not necessarily rape play. (I feel like I should be making innuendo here about developing your imagination or something.)
Even if the word “rape” isn’t being used, it seems to me—and this may be a failure of imagination—that it nonetheless simulates rape, or at least something close to it.
people might be brainwashed by the patriarchy to go along with something their partner wants, but not to seek it out secretly.
Even if the word “rape” isn’t being used, it seems to me—and this may be a failure of imagination—that it nonetheless simulates rape, or at least something close to it.
There’s some nitpicking to be done about precise definitions of “degrading” and “violent”.
It seems fair to describe any pain play (at least if sufficiently intense and fast) as violent. And handing one’s date a flogger with a grin and a “Pretty please?” doesn’t look much like rape at all.
Here’s an example of very degrading sex that’s not rape play either. (The domme gives orders to the sub, and there’s one act the sub is reluctant to perform, but throughout the scene the sub expresses consent verbally and physically.) This story is extremely gross porn; there are two characters; the domme is a crossdressing woman; the sub is a woman; seriously I mean the “gross” part, you have been warned: Piggy, by Jen Cross.
It might be fair to classify all reluctance play as “simulating something close to rape” (e.g. “Stop hitting me”), and even anything involving restraints if you’re being very inclusive, but if someone’s begging to be hurt and to do something degrading (and there’s no roleplay where they’re being forced to or anything) I don’t see the resemblance.
people might be brainwashed by the patriarchy to go along with something their partner wants, but not to seek it out secretly.
You sure about that?
Nope! I just dismiss it as a Cartesian demon hypothesis. If you’re going to question what someone’s sincere introspection tells them they want when they think about it alone and at leisure and they never have to tell anyone about it, you might as well question your own impulse to question things; are you brainwashed by the patriarchy into slut-shaming women who have sex you don’t like, or into denying women’s agency, or into erasing female desire? Any amount of introspection that’s sufficient for you to decide you aren’t should also suffice for the person whose desires you’re questioning.
And if you’re not just questioning patriarchy-approved activities like intercourse and leg-shaving and slut-shaming, but also fetishes patriarchal thinking condemns as weird, you’d better also question your love of cunnilingus and cuddles and bra-burning.
Here’s an example of very degrading sex that’s not rape play either. (The domme gives orders to the sub, and there’s one act the sub is reluctant to perform, but throughout the scene the sub expresses consent verbally and physically.) This story is extremely gross porn; there are two characters; the domme is a crossdressing woman; the sub is a woman; seriously I mean the “gross” part, you have been warned: Piggy, by Jen Cross.
I didn’t read the story based on your warning and the fact that you gave a … synopsis … that seemed sufficient.
I think I see your point; it does seem possible that sex could independently be violent and degrading, for most values of “violent” and “degrading”, without utilizing rape play, although that would seem to be the easiest route.
It might be fair to classify all reluctance play as “simulating something close to rape” (e.g. “Stop hitting me”), and even anything involving restraints if you’re being very inclusive
That’s basically what I was thinking of.
if someone’s begging to be hurt and to do something degrading (and there’s no roleplay where they’re being forced to or anything)
Funny thing, but I seems to have been thinking that “degrading” meant nonconsensual. Which is stupid, now that I think of it. I guess “degrading” is an ambiguous term, come to think.
Even if the word “rape” isn’t being used, it seems to me—and this may be a failure of imagination—that it nonetheless simulates rape, or at least something close to it.
Yes, it simulates something close to it, but I think the two-step distinction is enough that avoiding the word “rape” and its connotations is very appropriate. The “degrading and violent” taps into certain emotions, but lacks certain key other emotions and characteristics that make rape so bad and hurtful. To name some, the helplessness feeling is most likely not present (since it’s consensual, as stated), and the whole existential crisis that is triggered by the emotional cascade and status markers and mental model updates that all happen at the same time during or in the aftermath. The trauma oft associated with “rape” seems to come mostly from those missing elements, so I wouldn’t include this in my carving.
(...) people might be brainwashed by the patriarchy to go along with something their partner wants, but not to seek it out secretly.
You sure about that?
I’m actually thinking that the reverse is more likely true: People can (and probably are) be brainwashed by culture/patriarchy to secretly seek out something.
I see no reason why they couldn’t, and I feel like I could draw a graph of at least one plausible way it could happen if I put some brain time into it.
Yes, it simulates something close to it, but I think the two-step distinction is enough that avoiding the word “rape” and its connotations is very appropriate. The “degrading and violent” taps into certain emotions, but lacks certain key other emotions and characteristics that make rape so bad and hurtful. To name some, the helplessness feeling is most likely not present (since it’s consensual, as stated), and the whole existential crisis that is triggered by the emotional cascade and status markers and mental model updates that all happen at the same time during or in the aftermath. The trauma oft associated with “rape” seems to come mostly from those missing elements, so I wouldn’t include this in my carving.
Obviously, there is a distinction between rape and BSDM play that simulates rape. Still, the claim that all penetrative sex is either rape or an attempt to capture certain emotional elements of rape seems very close to the statement that all penetrative sex is actual rape.
Still, the claim that all penetrative sex is either rape or an attempt to capture certain emotional elements of rape seems very close to the statement that all penetrative sex is actual rape.
Oh wow… I’ve failed my Psychometric Tracery. I didn’t think that was the actual claim being discussed. I find it to be a very silly claim; this makes me all the more curious to hear their rationale for it.
This discussion has stretched on pretty long … and I can hardly object to someone pointing out that a specific claim was wrong just because it doesn’t refute my original point.
For reference, this particular argument started with this comment.
Yes, I agree that Dworkin equates coercive sex and penetrative sex. If Dworkin thinks that understanding rules out male rape victims (female tool use, to say nothing of homosexual rape), that would make me sad. After all, male tool use on females would be coercive according to her.
Edit: Forgot central point, which is that saying “men can’t be raped” is very different from saying “male rape victims don’t matter” The first is an argument about definition and perspective. The second blatantly contradicts the assertion that rape is wrong.
At a certain level, I think it is right to say sex is generally coercive, in much the same way that going to work is generally coercive. If you don’t go to work for a long enough period of time, you will be the subject of violence. (e.g. eviction)
That understanding of coercion has the twin failings of (1) not being the ordinary usage of the word, and (2) not saying much that is interesting. Everything is Dworkin-coercive, just about.
At a certain level, I think it is right to say sex is generally coercive, in much the same way that going to work is generally coercive. If you don’t go to work for a long enough period of time, you will be the subject of violence. (e.g. eviction)
I don’t understand this analogy. It really is necessary to work. It’s not necessary to be in any intimate relationships. Taking a vow of celibacy does not lead inevitably to getting raped. Within a relationship, there will be increasing pressure to have sex as time since last coitus increases, but there is typically the alternative of ending the relationship, at least in modern Western society.
It’s not necessary to be in a relationship. Nor is it necessary to engage in sexual relations within the relationship. But there is social pressure to be in a (hetero-normative) relationship and to perform sex acts. Dworkins’ first point is that this pressure is gendered. The social norms function to make women feel worse for violating them than men. And the amount of pressure isn’t close.
Dworkins’ suggested response is to remake society to remove (and prohibit) this type of pressure. Whether she admits it or not, this conflicts with “freedom of speech.” But so do most anti-discrimination and anti-group defamation laws (the latter have not been generally implemented in the United States). That doesn’t meet we must implement Dworkins’ vision to avoid hypocrisy. But I think it is valuable to notice the trade-off we are making. To use economic language, one might call the gendered norms an opportunity cost of arranging society the way we have.
And if the referenced norms seem wrong to you, then you ought not to think of Dworkin as an idiot. Feel free to continue thinking badly of Mary Daly (with my blessing and encouragement).
Dworkin is from the school of thought that helped us notice those particular costs of the setup. If post-modern thought doesn’t appear, we might not notice any of the problems it identified.
I suggest that post-modern thought looks foolish now because more mainstream thought appropriated and applied most of its greatest insights. What “remains” of post-modern thought is much less insightful.
The second blatantly contradicts the assertion that rape is wrong.
“Its not wrong when it happens to the out-group” is standard human thinking. Also overall people do tend to care less about average male than average female suffering.
Edit: Forgot central point, which is that saying “men can’t be raped” is very different from saying “male rape victims don’t matter” The first is an argument about definition and perspective. The second blatantly contradicts the assertion that rape is wrong.
They’re not very different in how they are actually understood by listeners. The perceived differenced is based on a notion that humans consciously manipulate their mental categories by arbitrarily choosing explicit verbal definitions and that’s not the case.
“Suggest” very loosely, in that we would have to ignore both cases where both the penetrator and the penetratee are male, and cases where artificial tools of various sorts are used to perpetrate penetration, in order to draw that conclusion.
Which is not to say that there aren’t people who would argue precisely that.
I thought it would be sufficiently damning that it already rules out ‘ordinary’ female rape of males. If your definition of ‘rape’ includes consensual sex and does not include this, then we’ve stopped talking about rape.
Some can. It’s probably a very different experience though.
And many women can’t. If it’s unknown to the rapist, asserting power through a threat of forced pregnancy might still happen, but if she’s like sixty-five that’s not going to happen.
But gender does matter. A man raping a cis woman has a gender wars element to it, usually something like “Men want sex and women don’t, so this man is taking it from this woman, scoring one for Team Men. She’s a slut for letting it happen, unless she can prove she’s a perfect victim and he’s a complete monster, in which case she’s a victim of female weakness and needs protected by a strong good man.”. Conversely, a man raping a man hinges more on “A man weak enough to let someone rape him is not a real man, but gay-female-feminine. He is ridiculous and pathetic.”. There are other gender-dependent examples with female perpetrators, with prison rape, with corrective rape, with rape as a weapon for cultural domination, with isolated communities, and so on.
Of course it doesn’t matter in that some rapes count and some don’t, and it shouldn’t matter at all. Just saying, you should expect different support structures, not identical rape shelters which just happen to be 25% male-populated.
In addition to what MixedNuts said, the question I was raising was whether this was a feminist position. To the extent that it is, I’d like to know whether it is from the methodologically incorrect branch (represented in this discussion by Mary Daly) or the methodologically more correct branch (represented by Andrea Dworkin).
It would surprise me to hear that Dworkin has asserted that men can’t be raped—and if I heard it, I’d need to re-examine whether her arguments about the social effect of porn are valid (even if she’s right, there are knock-on concerns that weigh against censorship).
More generally, conflating Daly and Dworkin is like conflating Stephen J. Gould and Stephen Pinker.
I think I saw a comment subthread on The Good Men Project along the lines “What’s it matter whether it’s a man who has sex with a woman too drunk to consent [or something like that] or the other way round?” “The woman can get pregnant, etc., etc.” “Wow, that’s some serious Dworkin you’re channeling”, but I can’t find it right now, so I might have dreamt it or something.
Wowzers! Daly is so essentialist (i.e. thinks women all inherently have certain mental characteristics). I’m not surprised that someone held her positions so much as I am surprised that she’s considered an (recent) influential feminist. I thought that all (contemporary?) feminism was just applied post-modernist (i.e. noticing that gender roles are historically contingent). But that’s clearly inconsistent with Daly. Model updated.
That said, I suspect I’m a lot more sympathetic to many of the arguments than you are. I don’t think I need to reject Andrea Dworkin in order to reject the essentialism of Daly. That said, I hope that Dworkin hasn’t said that the gender of the rape victim matters, because it shouldn’t matter. (She essentially agrees with your other examples, I think).
(Academic) feminist theory has gotten much more postmodern (perhaps more specifically poststructural) over the past three decades, but constructionism isn’t the major axis of differentiation. When difference feminists were important they tended to be a bit more post-y than the dominance theorist, who were very often as modernist as the day is long.
Thanks. My recent experience is that my philosophical reach often exceeds my philosophy terminology grasp. I know what I think—and people have told me that it’s a “deconstructivist” position.
But I definitely don’t know the ins and outs of particular schools of thought—I had a discussion recently with a third-wave feminist who argued that rejecting intersectionality was an essential element of being second wave feminist. I don’t doubt that many second-wavers implicitly (or explicitly) rejected intersectionality—and I think intersectionality is an important structure in the correct theoretical framework. But I’m not familiar enough with the schools of thought to know whether second-wave is inherently inconsistent with intersectionality.
In short, are there accessible references that lay out the central positions of the various schools of thought—at a more nuanced and detailed level than wikipedia? The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is at the right level, but doesn’t seem to be directed at the topics I’m referring to here.
As with most things, my experience is that specialist encyclopedias are your best bet for knowledge per effort. There’s nothing as high-quality and legally accessible as the SEP, but the standard other places should have you covered. Depending on the level of detail you’re looking for, Cambridge Companions, Oxford Handbooks, and Very Short Guides tend to be pretty accurate and accessible.
(As for intersectionality I have yet to see a definition which isn’t either trivial or theoretically problematic. Which isn’t to say that realizing and incorporating the trivial form is itself trivial, but I don’t think either version would really hold up as a necessary or sufficient condition for differentiating waves. Waves are noticed based on broad shifts in theory and are thus necessarily fuzzy. But this is just IMO.)
I can’t find a cite but I’m sure someone in that school of thought has made that claim explicitly (“Men can’t be raped”).
That said, Dworkin and others have indicated that all penetrative sex is rape, specifically of the sort that a male perpetrates upon a female, so that would suggest that it could not happen the other way ’round.
Meghan Murphy has written a blog post entitled “Can women rape men? I’m not sure I care.”, though she later retracted it.
I don’t think anyone has explicitly said “penetrative sex is rape”; they do use phrases like “inherently degrading and violent”, but I’ve only ever heard opponents rephrase it as such.
Yes, I think the furthest Dworkin has gone is saying that a) penetrative sex is inherently violent, b) sex that is not initiated by “the woman” is never consensual, and c) men’s pleasure is necessarily linked to victimizing, hurting, and exploiting.
Is this a generally accepted notion in feminism, or does it represent a fringe view ? The reason I ask is because this sounds exactly like something a Straw Feminist might say...
What algorithm do you use to tell the difference between a feminist and a straw feminist? According to this algorithm, are Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin straw feminists?
It seems to me that any feminist suddenly becomes a straw feminist when an offensive or clearly irrational quote made by them is presented in a discussion about feminism.
I think a straw feminist is meant to be a character (a fictional character, or a persona played by a troll, or an imaginary opponent), not a person sincerely expressing their position. So Daly and Dworkin weren’t (or kept up the charade for quite a long time). Straw feminists say stupid and offensive things to make actual feminists look bad. Bugmaster meant that the quote sounds more like something someone would attribute to a feminist in order to make feminism look bad, than like something a feminist would say.
But there are in fact fringe feminists who are indistinguishable from their parodies.
I don’t have a complete algorithm handy but I know that the first line includes the query “Does this person exist?”
It would be (arguably) legitimate to make that redesignation if the character is a fictional feminist. Then determining whether it is a ‘straw feminist character’ or ‘feminist character’ would entail an evaluation of to what extent the beliefs or behaviors reflect that which is within the realms of ‘feminist’, also taking into account inferences about the author’s motives in creating the character. (Then you just shut up and say it is ‘straw’ if that makes your side of the debate look better.)
Could you provide evidence that Daly or Dworkin did assert such a thing? I’ve read quite a bit of Dworkin, nothing suggesting anything of the sort; I’ve read less Daly, and while I found all of it pretty silly I would be surprised if that was among them.
The “all sex is rape” claim is most often attributed to Dworkin or MacKinnon, which makes me strongly suspect that while surely someone somewhere has believed it, prominent radical theorists were not among them.
In another comment in this thread there is a link to Daly saying, in an interview:
A short look at wikiquotes of Dworkin gives this:
So assuming these are the best quotes to be found (I did not try too hard), it would be more precise and fair to say that Daly enjoyed the thought that 90% of men would be “decontaminated” by “an evolutionary process”; and Dworkin said that every man (under patriarchy, which means anything) is a “rapist or exploiter”.
None of this really makes any of them a sick person, does it?
I mean, if I said that “if life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth; a natural process resulting in drastic reduction of the females” and “under feminism, every women is a rapist or exploiter of another man”, those would also be perfectly OK, politically correct, inoffensive, and uncontroversial statements, ready to get me to the textbooks as a defender of equality and everything good. (Just joking, those are not my opinions.)
Well, you won’t find me defending Daly; everything I’ve read of her suggests she’s a nut. As you yourself note the passage doesn’t directly imply the sex=rape thesis, and there’s always context etc. (Dworkin for instance has some quotes describing sex as conceived by what she considers patriarchal ideology that have been taken out of context) but it also doesn’t seem like a perverse interpretation.
Ah, but surely as rationalists we must not let emotions cloud our judgments or subject truth to the inquisitorial glare of political correctness, if men universally evolved to be scum may we should want to believe that they did, human biodiversity between untermenschen and überfräuen ought be celebrated, &c.
I don’t have a problem to believe things like “most mass murderers are male”, etc. (I just hope people around me are good enough at math to recognize that the statement is not equivalent to “most males are mass murderers”.) Just give me evidence from a reliable source.
Show me a sustainable utopia with 10% males (I would actually encourage feminists sympathetic to this idea to try it, but only with volunteers), give me reliable reports from independent sources, and I might be convinced. Until then, it is just a hypothesis in the idea-space, and I find other explanations more likely.
My last paragraph was, like yours, just joking and not my actual opinions. I’m a pretty strong constructionist on gender and also a dude, if that means anything.
I’m having trouble telling which parts of this are ironic. I’m sure some of this must be … I just can’t tell what.
Non-ironic: Daly and Dworkin said some repulsive things, and a non-mindkilled person would recognize some problems with their ideas. (Here are the quotes, and I did not even try too hard to find them.)
Ironic: If I said the same things publicly, only with genders reversed, the people who consider Daly and Dworkin sane, would consider me sane too. (Not likely.)
Thanks for clarifying. It’s sometimes hard to tell in a text environment.
In the absence of a closer association between Daly and Dworkin, conflating their positions is like conflating Stephen J. Gould and Steven Pinker because they both claim to apply the theory of evolution.
As I and Oligopsony have said, Daly can go piss off. Dworkin’s quote is just articulating her definition of patriarchy. If you think we aren’t living in that society, her definition is not particularly interesting. But it isn’t like there’s no evidence that she’s somewhat accurately describing our current society.
MixedNuts and wedrifid said it better than I could.
It fits well into the memeplex of radical feminism. While I haven’t had my finger to the pulse of feminism for a few years, I’ve gotten the impression that radical feminism hasn’t been mainstream since the 1990s.
Radical feminists are a varied bunch. Twisty “everything is rape” Faster is a radfem, but so are a whole bunch of genderqueer BDSM pornographers.
I don’t think the genderqueer BDSM pornographers usually call themselves “radical feminists”; they do call themselves both radicals and feminists, but they don’t usually combine the terms. The term “radical feminist” seems to have been largely monopolized by the Andrea Dworkin/ Mary Daly/ Twisty Faster crowd.
I don’t know if unpleasant second-wavers are the most common radfems or just the noisiest on the Internet. I tried doing a bit of a research but couldn’t bear it, so you’ll have to dig the everything-positive radfems up yourself if you’re interested. There are a few I’ve talked to, but they apparently don’t blog.
That’s … pretty far. I mean, damn.
That distinction seems pretty fine; “degrading and violent sex” sounds a hell of a lot like rape (or perhaps some BSDM simulating rape, I guess.)
Rape is very often not violent, and there are many contexts where it wouldn’t be thought degrading by the victim or by the culture, such as marital rape in a culture where it’s considered normal.
Consensual degrading and violent sex is certainly kinky, but not necessarily a kind of kink that counts as BDSM and certainly not necessarily rape play. (I feel like I should be making innuendo here about developing your imagination or something.) The “cunnilingus and cuddles” feminist crowd probably don’t think it can truly be consensual, but they’re just obviously wrong; people might be brainwashed by the patriarchy to go along with something their partner wants, but not to seek it out secretly.
Excellent points.
Even if the word “rape” isn’t being used, it seems to me—and this may be a failure of imagination—that it nonetheless simulates rape, or at least something close to it.
You sure about that?
Thanks.
There’s some nitpicking to be done about precise definitions of “degrading” and “violent”.
It seems fair to describe any pain play (at least if sufficiently intense and fast) as violent. And handing one’s date a flogger with a grin and a “Pretty please?” doesn’t look much like rape at all.
Here’s an example of very degrading sex that’s not rape play either. (The domme gives orders to the sub, and there’s one act the sub is reluctant to perform, but throughout the scene the sub expresses consent verbally and physically.) This story is extremely gross porn; there are two characters; the domme is a crossdressing woman; the sub is a woman; seriously I mean the “gross” part, you have been warned: Piggy, by Jen Cross.
It might be fair to classify all reluctance play as “simulating something close to rape” (e.g. “Stop hitting me”), and even anything involving restraints if you’re being very inclusive, but if someone’s begging to be hurt and to do something degrading (and there’s no roleplay where they’re being forced to or anything) I don’t see the resemblance.
Nope! I just dismiss it as a Cartesian demon hypothesis. If you’re going to question what someone’s sincere introspection tells them they want when they think about it alone and at leisure and they never have to tell anyone about it, you might as well question your own impulse to question things; are you brainwashed by the patriarchy into slut-shaming women who have sex you don’t like, or into denying women’s agency, or into erasing female desire? Any amount of introspection that’s sufficient for you to decide you aren’t should also suffice for the person whose desires you’re questioning.
And if you’re not just questioning patriarchy-approved activities like intercourse and leg-shaving and slut-shaming, but also fetishes patriarchal thinking condemns as weird, you’d better also question your love of cunnilingus and cuddles and bra-burning.
I didn’t read the story based on your warning and the fact that you gave a … synopsis … that seemed sufficient.
I think I see your point; it does seem possible that sex could independently be violent and degrading, for most values of “violent” and “degrading”, without utilizing rape play, although that would seem to be the easiest route.
That’s basically what I was thinking of.
Funny thing, but I seems to have been thinking that “degrading” meant nonconsensual. Which is stupid, now that I think of it. I guess “degrading” is an ambiguous term, come to think.
Yes, it simulates something close to it, but I think the two-step distinction is enough that avoiding the word “rape” and its connotations is very appropriate. The “degrading and violent” taps into certain emotions, but lacks certain key other emotions and characteristics that make rape so bad and hurtful. To name some, the helplessness feeling is most likely not present (since it’s consensual, as stated), and the whole existential crisis that is triggered by the emotional cascade and status markers and mental model updates that all happen at the same time during or in the aftermath. The trauma oft associated with “rape” seems to come mostly from those missing elements, so I wouldn’t include this in my carving.
I’m actually thinking that the reverse is more likely true: People can (and probably are) be brainwashed by culture/patriarchy to secretly seek out something.
I see no reason why they couldn’t, and I feel like I could draw a graph of at least one plausible way it could happen if I put some brain time into it.
Obviously, there is a distinction between rape and BSDM play that simulates rape. Still, the claim that all penetrative sex is either rape or an attempt to capture certain emotional elements of rape seems very close to the statement that all penetrative sex is actual rape.
Oh wow… I’ve failed my Psychometric Tracery. I didn’t think that was the actual claim being discussed. I find it to be a very silly claim; this makes me all the more curious to hear their rationale for it.
This discussion has stretched on pretty long … and I can hardly object to someone pointing out that a specific claim was wrong just because it doesn’t refute my original point.
For reference, this particular argument started with this comment.
Yes, I agree that Dworkin equates coercive sex and penetrative sex. If Dworkin thinks that understanding rules out male rape victims (female tool use, to say nothing of homosexual rape), that would make me sad. After all, male tool use on females would be coercive according to her.
Edit: Forgot central point, which is that saying “men can’t be raped” is very different from saying “male rape victims don’t matter” The first is an argument about definition and perspective. The second blatantly contradicts the assertion that rape is wrong.
At a certain level, I think it is right to say sex is generally coercive, in much the same way that going to work is generally coercive. If you don’t go to work for a long enough period of time, you will be the subject of violence. (e.g. eviction)
That understanding of coercion has the twin failings of (1) not being the ordinary usage of the word, and (2) not saying much that is interesting. Everything is Dworkin-coercive, just about.
I don’t understand this analogy. It really is necessary to work. It’s not necessary to be in any intimate relationships. Taking a vow of celibacy does not lead inevitably to getting raped. Within a relationship, there will be increasing pressure to have sex as time since last coitus increases, but there is typically the alternative of ending the relationship, at least in modern Western society.
It’s not necessary to be in a relationship. Nor is it necessary to engage in sexual relations within the relationship. But there is social pressure to be in a (hetero-normative) relationship and to perform sex acts. Dworkins’ first point is that this pressure is gendered. The social norms function to make women feel worse for violating them than men. And the amount of pressure isn’t close.
Dworkins’ suggested response is to remake society to remove (and prohibit) this type of pressure. Whether she admits it or not, this conflicts with “freedom of speech.” But so do most anti-discrimination and anti-group defamation laws (the latter have not been generally implemented in the United States). That doesn’t meet we must implement Dworkins’ vision to avoid hypocrisy. But I think it is valuable to notice the trade-off we are making. To use economic language, one might call the gendered norms an opportunity cost of arranging society the way we have.
And if the referenced norms seem wrong to you, then you ought not to think of Dworkin as an idiot. Feel free to continue thinking badly of Mary Daly (with my blessing and encouragement).
I don’t follow. Dworkin criticises something stupid, that doesn’t make ver not an idiot.
Dworkin is from the school of thought that helped us notice those particular costs of the setup. If post-modern thought doesn’t appear, we might not notice any of the problems it identified.
I suggest that post-modern thought looks foolish now because more mainstream thought appropriated and applied most of its greatest insights. What “remains” of post-modern thought is much less insightful.
“Its not wrong when it happens to the out-group” is standard human thinking. Also overall people do tend to care less about average male than average female suffering.
They’re not very different in how they are actually understood by listeners. The perceived differenced is based on a notion that humans consciously manipulate their mental categories by arbitrarily choosing explicit verbal definitions and that’s not the case.
“Suggest” very loosely, in that we would have to ignore both cases where both the penetrator and the penetratee are male, and cases where artificial tools of various sorts are used to perpetrate penetration, in order to draw that conclusion.
Which is not to say that there aren’t people who would argue precisely that.
I thought it would be sufficiently damning that it already rules out ‘ordinary’ female rape of males. If your definition of ‘rape’ includes consensual sex and does not include this, then we’ve stopped talking about rape.
I’ve heard non-obviously-bogus arguments that it should, e.g. men cannot get pregnant as a result of rape.
Some can. It’s probably a very different experience though.
And many women can’t. If it’s unknown to the rapist, asserting power through a threat of forced pregnancy might still happen, but if she’s like sixty-five that’s not going to happen.
But gender does matter. A man raping a cis woman has a gender wars element to it, usually something like “Men want sex and women don’t, so this man is taking it from this woman, scoring one for Team Men. She’s a slut for letting it happen, unless she can prove she’s a perfect victim and he’s a complete monster, in which case she’s a victim of female weakness and needs protected by a strong good man.”. Conversely, a man raping a man hinges more on “A man weak enough to let someone rape him is not a real man, but gay-female-feminine. He is ridiculous and pathetic.”. There are other gender-dependent examples with female perpetrators, with prison rape, with corrective rape, with rape as a weapon for cultural domination, with isolated communities, and so on.
Of course it doesn’t matter in that some rapes count and some don’t, and it shouldn’t matter at all. Just saying, you should expect different support structures, not identical rape shelters which just happen to be 25% male-populated.
In addition to what MixedNuts said, the question I was raising was whether this was a feminist position. To the extent that it is, I’d like to know whether it is from the methodologically incorrect branch (represented in this discussion by Mary Daly) or the methodologically more correct branch (represented by Andrea Dworkin).
It would surprise me to hear that Dworkin has asserted that men can’t be raped—and if I heard it, I’d need to re-examine whether her arguments about the social effect of porn are valid (even if she’s right, there are knock-on concerns that weigh against censorship).
More generally, conflating Daly and Dworkin is like conflating Stephen J. Gould and Stephen Pinker.
I think I saw a comment subthread on The Good Men Project along the lines “What’s it matter whether it’s a man who has sex with a woman too drunk to consent [or something like that] or the other way round?” “The woman can get pregnant, etc., etc.” “Wow, that’s some serious Dworkin you’re channeling”, but I can’t find it right now, so I might have dreamt it or something.
Unwanted pregnancy can be a result of rape, but rape seems like a separate Bad Thing that can happen to someone.