From: mig@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Meir I Green)
Subject: Re: Dworkin...
Reply-To: mig@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Meir I Green)
Organization: Columbia University, New York
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 05:27:23 GMT

In article <l-cn-sd.payner@netcom.com> payner@netcom.com (Rich Payne) writes:
>Here are some quotes from Andrea Dworkin, a feminist lawyer.
>This material is from _Reason_ magazine. There is much more...
>
>In Dworkin's view, any material involving sexual intercourse
>would by definition be degrading to women. "Intercourse remains
>a means or the means of psychologically making a woman
>inferior, communicating to her cell by cell her inferior status,"
>she writes in her book _Intercourse_. "Physically the woman in
>intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied
>literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance; even
>if the occupied person said, 'Yes please, yes hurry, yes more.'"
>Intercourse, she declares, "is the pure, sterile, formal expression
>of mens contempt for women." The fact that a woman might enjoy sex
>makes it even more degrading. Dworkin contends that material depicting
>women as enjoying sex is worse than the Nazis' treatment of the
>Jews:"The Jews didn't do it to themselves and they didn't orgasm....
>No one, not even Goebbels, said that the Jews liked it.

Well, if she believes in God who created human beings, male and female, then I
believe she would say that God is sexist, and the architect of female
suffering.  I guess she would have to say that God is a man!

I find these spoutings of hers insensitive, offensive, sexist and bigoted, and 
they offend me, as a human being, a Jew, and a man.

I truly wonder whether she can conceive of a loving relationship with a member
of the opposite sex.  I won't tell her what kind of relationships to have or
not to have, but I think she is only declaring her own bias by asserting that
sexual intercourse is and is only a degredation of females by males.

How interesting that she brings up Jews in her "argument".  She must not know
that in modern Judaism, sex is one expression of the ultimate human
relationship that is almost divine:  marriage.  It is *not* at all sinful!
That relationship is two-sided and, contrary to Dworkin's view of the world,
Jewish men are required to provide sex *for* their wives.  Furthermore,
married couples are supposed to enjoy the pleasures of sex on the Sabbath as
a way of enhancing the beauty and perfection of the Sabbath, and it presumably
also makes the sex more of a Divine experience.

I'm not saying that this is what everyone in America practices, and I am not
saying that this is what every Jew practices.  But it seems to me that
Dworkin takes a completely negative approach to sex, without analyzing any
cultural patterns other than what she sees in her own backyard!  Then she
applies it to the whole world, to all males and females, and to the biology
which created her!  What bothers me is that people actually listen to her,
because she is feminist!  She is not pro-female only, she is vehemently and
blindingly anti-male!  Academia should never accept this trash as valid!

I am saying all this only in context of the above post...I assume that it
truly reflects Dworkin's views :-(

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