From: payner@netcom.com (Rich Payne)
Subject: Dworkin...
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 92 04:23:26 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 


Here is some information that I posted to a local net. There is a
3.?K limit to the size of what can be posted, so it is a short clip.
If I can find the article, I will post more.


Rich

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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.


Most of the feminist theory is based upon socio-political reasoning
that reads like the communist manifesto. Here is a sample...


The view of womens subjugation within the patriarchy is crucial to
the idea that a "hostile environment" is a form of sexual harrasment.
While the feminist jurisprudes might concede that a man could
suffer sexual harrasment in a narrower sense - for example, if his
boss said "Sleep with me, or your fired" - they would insist that only
a woman can be the victim of sexual harrasment in the form of a hostile
environment.

In the 1990 case _Drinkwater_v._Union_Carbide_Corp_, the U.S. court of
appeals for the third circuit explained why: "In the quid pro quo cases,
sexual harrasment claims are equally available to men and women, but non-
quid pro quo hostile environment cases depend upon the underlying theory
that "[w]omen's sexuality largely defines a women as a women in our society,
so violations of it are abuses of women as women."... The theory points
out that there is a sexual power asymmetry between men and women and that,
because men's sexuality does not define men as men in this society, a
mans hostile environment claim, although theoretically possible, will
be much harder to plead and prove.

Sexual-harrasment law thus discards the idea of equal protection: given
the same behavior, a man will find it much harder to prove a claim than
a woman. The "hostile environment" approach also does away with the idea of
intent. It does not matter what the defendant intended to do, or even
what he actually did. The crucial test is the "environment" that his
actions created - in other words, the subjective reaction of the
complainant.

***********

This is scary stuff, it is real, and it is happening now.

I will post more in the future.


Rich

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