|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Andrea Dworkin had the image of being the most inflammatory Amerikan feminist. Few would know that a husband survived her and she said she was not a man-hater.
In fact, Andrea Dworkin was not quite a real feminist. That she pointed out many things wrong with liberal feminism and opposed many overly male-identified ideas is not in doubt, so many of her ideas must be defended. Perhaps her contribution is really that she raised the notion of thinking outside the box as necessary for the feminist cause, in a country where the people calling themselves feminist are in a terrible rut. Dworkin tried desperately to fire the imagination in her fiction work and slogans.
Dworkin marks an important boundary between mainstream acceptable views and revolutionary feminism. She said it herself that she intended herself as some kind of bouncing point between radicalism and liberalism: "'I have a really strong belief that any movement needs both radicals and liberals," she explained. 'You always need women who can walk into the room in the right way, talk in the right tone of voice, who have access to power. But you also need a bottom line.'"(1)
Dworkin's line reminds MIM of how some organizations use armed struggle to go back to the negotiating table as a strategy of life--something MIM regards poorly in class struggle. We may regard Dworkin as the African National Congress (ANC) of Amerikan feminism. The ANC and Dworkin both engaged certain subjects of interest to MIM, including Marx, Mao and the Black Panthers. Yet they reached different conclusions and we cannot sweep that under the rug in this obituary.
With MIM's theory of imperialism, sometimes we find it difficult to see the distrust between men and wimmin or among men or among wimmin as anything but an historical stage of decadence. A contradictory system brings forward contradictory ideas with no possibility of stability. Dworkins may claim to be something new under the sun while just being a new turn in imperialist decadence.
It remains true that Dworkin's line would be a disaster in most Third World countries, because it would lead to fighting among the most oppressed people. Yet in the imperialist countries, if we do not allow the Dworkin or even less radical lines to take over the party, then we can see the Dworkin line play a positive role. Sowing distrust among exploiters or oppressor genders is a good thing. Where we question Dworkin is on the question of the oppressed gender in relationship to the oppressor.
The ANC vacillated between armed strategy and negotiation. Dworkin vacillated between lines such as "dead men don't rape" and integrationist strategy for wimmin much along the lines of the ANC for Blacks and whites.
The problem with catchy slogans that Dworkin was good at coining is that they always presume more than is possible between men and wimmin. There is nothing about the romance culture worth preserving with slogans like "dead men don't rape." Such a slogan implies something so important between men and wimmin that it is necessary to issue such slogans. That's what MIM means by decadence. It's as if the trashiest romance novel were true and the be-all-and-end-all is the romance culture, because it's worth killing for. Quite the opposite, the historical appearance of the Dworkin trend indicates the dead-end for gender relations under imperialism.
While many pointed out that Dworkin seemed to reject the romance culture in the trivia--the shaving, the make-up, the weight--MIM would say that much more important was that her line was still intellectually stuck in the romance culture. Nations and tribes often claim not to obtain any benefit from each other. That is not a possible approach for wimmin living with men. Wimmin and men can separate. There is nothing between men and wimmin worth preserving with violence. In this sense, Dworkin is clear and appealing mainly because she talks like the twisted men she berates. It's at that point where we speak of the oppressed gender being converted into the oppressor gender. Slogans like "dead men don't rape," teach people to think like oppressor men. In contrast, MIM does not seek to make the oppressed more like the oppressor so much as we intend to change the system to benefit the oppressed.
The bouncing between liberalism and radicalism may be the reason that Dworkin and MacKinnon both denied "all sex is rape" despite being the two most famous wimmin of recent times whose work came closest to suggesting that. MIM too could deny that all sex is rape, because we cannot say we know how humyns existed in tribes of primitive communism ten thousand years ago. Very possibly sex was not rape then. In the distant communist future, all sex may not be rape. Despite that, MIM does not see any need for denying that "all sex is rape," but that was inevitable as MIM was going to refract MacKinnon through Lenin. Dworkin has gone further in the opposite direction than MIM would: "I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality."(2) MIM is not so sure. As people's consciousness improves, even people like Dworkin who believed there is some liberating sex may come to believe there is not. This is not something that should be pre-judged before the abolition of power relations.
The trouble with Dworkin's view is that it is too anti-structural and encourages sub-reformism. When we Marxists say proletarians are by definition exploited under capitalism, we mean that that cannot change until socialism, and it is true for all proletarians. That was always Marx's position. We should not deny that all proletarians are exploited, just because under socialism proletarians will not be. We should say, "under socialism, proletarians are not exploited." When Dworkin said not all sex is rape, she implied that there are conditions right now under which sex is not rape, and in a single sentence she cut herself off from the oppressed gender as a group, as if the sex she had could possibly be independent and not influenced by the sex that other wimmin had. If wimmin are not a group, then there is no point in talking about feminism. We're sure Dworkin was aware of the "iFeminists" trying to subvert feminism with appealing statements about civil liberties that take advantage of the correct distrust of the imperialist state. Surely no consistent feminist should allow any crack for the iFeminists to pass through.
The only exception we can entertain for "all sex is rape," is the notion that perhaps among men all sex is not rape. Yet even if Dworkin were capable of social male status, and enjoyment of sex, we would want her and others to betray her enjoyment of sex to stand with the oppressed, including and mostly children.
Dworkin was also a Zionist and drew parallels between how I$raelis fight and how wimmin should fight and this brings us to the question of internationalism. Real feminists believe that it is not possible to fight for wimmin as a group by backing Zionism. It could be that Andrea Dworkin fought for narrow interests of the Zionist and Amerikan wimmin, but that would make her an oppressor nationalist, not a feminist. Since the majority inside most countries outside China and India is wimmin, the most efficient way to be a nationalist is by getting to the wimmin in a way specific to one's culture --despite whatever some extremely narrow pig-headed male chauvinists might say contrary. Dworkin's work aims at a more perfect nationalism than allowed by previous nationalists.
Ultimately, the same basic ideological critique also applies to MacKinnon. Dworkin and MacKinnon only talked about something that Mao actually accomplished when it came to abolishing pornography and going much further. Yet, one will hear scarce mention of Mao by either of them. Dworkin weaves Mao and the Black Panthers into her fiction, but it's more as an encounter. Along these lines we can read more substance in Kate Millet's encounters with Maoists and we would think even John Lennon would have had more to say. For MIM, this is blindness indicating a lack of seriousness. We do not want to fall into the same error, so we must engage Dworkin just as we would have wanted Dworkin to come to terms with Mao.
One would think it would be people like Dworkin looking at the world's fastest progress for wimmin and trying to figure out systematically what it was that worked. Some comparison or settling of accounts with Mao is really necessary, because there is an important underlying view of power in the work of Dworkin and MacKinnon. Dworkin saw herself working with the liberals and passing anti-pornography laws. We can say at the very least there is a reform versus revolution question there and we did not see a satisfactory answer as to why wimmin are not revolutionaries or cannot succeed that way.
Our readers may ask why we are always talking about MacKinnon then, if MacKinnon and Dworkin were not an internationalist duo. The answer is that if Engels were still around writing books about gender conditions, we might have much less to say about MacKinnon. As it stands, in the united $tates MacKinnon fights for theory, and this makes her seem as isolated and extreme as Dworkin was in politics, if we look at 99.9% of writers in the same subjects. MacKinnon's theory boils down to saying that the way wimmin fight requires a subjectivist road. MIM finds this unsatisfying, because we look for a comparison of historical practices. Dworkin seems to say we have to encounter those Maoists in day-to-day life the same way MacKinnon says it is necessary to engage Marx for theory purposes, but MIM says that's not enough.
What Dworkin did that is of interest to MIM is address current conditions of imperialist country wimmin. Just as MIM pays attention to other views calling themselves "Marxist," MIM also pays attention to other views calling themselves "feminist."
Dworkin spent her life pointing out what pseudo- feminists would call the objectification of womyn--the treatment of womyn as cattle to be diced, sliced and served up raw or cooked. Her main message seemed to be to have some reference point in power struggle and not always compromise or erase. Men tend to think they have some intrinsic desire for sex, but if wimmin can only achieve equality by thinking of it is a business deal or armed struggle of two equal sides in the bedroom, in order to "get something" out of it, then men and wimmin should just realize that they don't have enough in common. Alternatively, if men really do not desire sex but just violent dominance, then again, the answer is the same, that there is just not enough common ground for a romance culture.
MIM expects the true parts of Dworkin's work to be watered down and reconstituted in a non-threatening form by pseudo- feminists. MIM asks all real feminists to fight this tendency which would degrade her life's work.
Pseudo-feminists like Hillary Klinton or Camille Paglia tell wimmin, wrongly, that they can have it both ways: that wimmin can have their imperialist super profit exploitation cake (the bennies of exploitation of the Third World) and whine about being exploited. In truth these gender bureaucrats have abandoned the oppressed and speak for a social group that already has privilege.
To put this in language for Marxists, pseudo-feminists are the revisionists of the feminist movement. Their existence explains the necessity of a Leninist vanguard party operating under democratic centralism: otherwise, backsliding, revisionism, and capitalist restoration occurs.
The existence of pseudo-feminists underlines MIM line that biological gender is not the same as social gender. Andrea Dworkin was a biological womyn who tried to understand gendered wimmin. Camille Paglia is a biological womyn and a gender man or we can say Paglia expresses the line of successful male identification regardless of gender. We cannot say that Paglia's line is unreal in any way, because the reality is that those of her biology do become gender oppressors in the united $tates and similar countries.
Failing to become gender oppressors when offered the chance may even come with penalties. We would rather a womyn come to a simple but wrong Freudian line on sex if it would only allow her to go on in life onto other subjects without wasting too much time. People often stumble on the question of persynal life in an oppressive system and it's difficult to predict what will bring comfortable clarity that contributes to revolutionary cohesiveness. Dworkin was the marker on that boundary between accepting and denying privileges. She told wimmin to take the punishments of the patriarchy and stand up independently anyway. Yet we consider this a secondary question. If even someone like Gloria Steinem had managed to become a revolutionary, her line on her own peculiar position as a persyn capable of joining the gender oppressors would be secondary. The reason we say that is an underlying theory of power behind the patriarchy. Paglia versus Dworkin does not represent the most important part of gender dynamics.
This is opposite to what patriarchy, its pseudo- feminists and assorted other imperialists would say. So what. Truth is truth. Even though pseudo-feminists sometimes have inklings that gender and sexuality occur on a spectrum, just as race, they ignore the dynamics of the imperialist system of exploitation because it lines their pockets.
Andrea Dworkin will perhaps best be remembered, at least in MIM circles, as having co-authored with MacKinnon a law against pornography and for working tirelessly to link pornography to rape. Dworkin could be seen as the hammer: righteous outrage in the face of exploitation. MacKinnon would be the anvil: the calm, solid, jurist, taking the firebrand's dream and helping forge it into reality by grounding the theory. MIM cannot say how much Andrea Dworkin inspired, corrected or guided MacKinnon.
Typical Republican Party activists have already issued obituaries calling Dworkin a feminazi. For different reasons, because Dworkin worked for reform within the existing system, MIM cannot completely discount that argument. Trying futilely to patch up a morbid imperialism does lead to fascism, especially piecemeal, because there is no social force unleashed by the Dworkin line to prevent the fascism.
Recently, a womyn stopped by a campaign to say that in her country of Kanada, she was glad that people like Ward Churchill could go to jail for hate speech. It's true that MacKinnon and Dworkin have had a big hand in the political atmosphere in Kanada and politically correct circles in the united $tates. Here again nationalism plays its deadly role: with the assumption of angelic white workers or an historically progressive Aryan race, it becomes possible to think that anti-pornography reforms would have good implementation instead of serving as a guise for fascism and national oppression.
Dworkin's death at 58 by imperialist standards is too early. However, measured by the life expectancy of the international proletariat, overwhelmingly found in the Third World but just about nonexistent in the First World, she had a long life. A poet would say, even in death, she wanted to lead, but not overtake, the proletariat.
MIM extends its condolences and a clenched fist salute to the family and friends of Andrea Dworkin. We're sorry not to have had more chances to struggle with her.
Sources:
1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/04/13/db1301.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/04/13/ixportal.html
2. http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MoorcockInterview.html
3. Andrea Dworkin's website:
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/; April
11, 2005 "Feminist Scholar Andrea Dworkin Dies at
58"
http://www.msmagazine.com/news/uswirestory.asp?ID=
8992; "Feminist icon Andrea Dworkin dies", Simon
Jeffery, Monday April 11, 2005 ,
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1
457224,00.html