Before I
begin this critique of radical feminist Andrea Dworkin’s book, I will make my
position on the ‘feminist’ question very clear. I think that there should be
complete equality before the law between
men and women, no more and no less. I think that the descriptor’s ‘man’ and ‘woman’
should never be used in any piece of legislation or in the course of any
judicial proceeding. The law should be gender-blind, just as it should be
race-blind and height-blind. In addition, personally, I judge people, men and
women, based on their own merit as individuals (as I myself perceive it).
Having
cleared that up, I will now proceed to the critique of Andrea Dworkin’s, Right-wing Women[1].
Due to the fact that feminism contains both objectionable and non-objectionable
features, logical and illogical stances, I have decided to make this a
passage-based critique. I picked out the passages I found most notable or
obnoxious and focused my critique on them. The purpose of this is to weed out
some of the objectionable/illogical aspects of radical feminism, without
necessarily trying to attack the entire feminist movement as such.
The Promise of the
Ultra-Right
Dworkin: “Using both force and threat, men in
all camps demand that women accept abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves
to hearth and home with rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and
resentment.” 15
Brian: Well, that’s an awfully broad
statement. So all men are virtual slave drivers and women are powerless to
resist? Care to cite any evidence for this assertion, or just leave it at that?
Dworkin: “And the derision of female lives
does not stop with these toxic, ugly, insidious slanders” 16
Brian: Hold on, what do you think you were
doing to men when you wrote the passage quoted above? Calling all men slave
drivers isn’t a toxic, ugly, insidious slander?
Dworkin: “(Marilyn) Monroe’s premature death
raised one haunting question for the men who were, in their own fantasy, her
lovers, for the men who had masturbated over those pictures of exquisite female
compliance: was it possible, could it be, that she hadn’t liked It all along –
It – the It they had been doing to her, how many millions of times? Had those smiles
been masks covering despair or anger? If so, how endangered they had been to be
deceived, so fragile and exposed in their masturbatory delight, as if she could
leap out from those photos of what was now a corpse and take the revenge they
knew she deserved.” 18
Brian: Firstly, if Marilyn Monroe didn’t
like being a sexy film icon, she could have just stopped acting and done
something else. There were no slave drivers forcing her to do anything, she was
just offered riches and fame if she gave people what they wanted, and that’s
exactly what she did. Who are you, Andrea Dworkin, to argue with her own free choice?
Secondly, masturbating over a picture of someone is not a punishable offense, certainly
not worthy of any form of ‘revenge’. It does absolutely no harm to anyone,
except perhaps to busy body feminists who for some reason, view the biological,
sexual attraction of men to women as some kind of grave sin.
Dworkin: “Women die, mourning not the loss of
their own lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as
men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-defined feminine
ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal, by definition, turns a woman
into a function, deprives her of any individuality that is self-serving or self-created,
not useful to the male in his scheme of things.” 19
Brian: This is a terribly unflattering,
blanket description of women. According to Dworkin, all ‘non-feminist’ women
just strive to please men, and that for some reason their survival depends on
it. Now, perhaps this was the case in earlier times, but can you really still
say that this is true in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries? What exactly will happen to these women if they stop trying to
please men, like Andrea Dworkin obviously has? Will they be hit by a lightning
bolt, or be lynched by a gang of vengeful men? Apparently not, because Andrea
Dworkin, for one, lived to write quite a few books. This belief in mysterious
‘powers’ that can supposedly dominate people, even without the actual physical,
institutional power to do so, I find incomprehensible. Either men have the power
to execute and imprison women who don’t please them or they don’t. If they do,
I and every lover of freedom would take away that power by force. If they
don’t, then women in fact do have choices, and just caricaturing them all as miserable
serviles is not helpful to women.
Dworkin: “Attempting to strike a bargain, the
woman says: I come to you on your own terms. Her hope is that his (men’s)
murderous attention will focus on a female who conforms less artfully, less
willingly. In effect, she ransoms the remains of a life – what is left over
after she has renounced willful individuality – by promising indifference to
the fate of other women. This sexual, sociological, and spiritual adaptation,
which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is the primary imperative
of survival for women who live under male-supremacist rule.” 19
Brian: Again, only in societies where men
have the power to actually physically punish or kill women that don’t please
them. In societies where that isn’t the case, this is just a self-serving,
psychobabble-based explanation for why people supposedly hold a particular
political ideology (ie. not being radical feminists).
Dworkin: “No one can bear to live a
meaningless life. Women fight for meaning just as women fight for survival: by
attaching themselves to men and the values honored by men. By committing
themselves to male values, women seek to acquire value. By advocating male
meaning, women seek to acquire meaning. Subservient to male will, women believe
that subservience itself is the meaning of a female life. In this way, women,
whatever they suffer, do not suffer the anguish of a conscious recognition
that, because they are women, they have been robbed of volition and choice,
without which no life can have meaning.” 21
Brian: This entire paragraph presupposes
that the values and meanings in question actually are “male values” and “male
meanings”, rather than just “human values” and “human meanings”. Perhaps in
very rare cases this supposition holds, but not in the vast majority of cases.
Dworkin: “The Right in the United States
today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but
built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and
the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination
over women.” 34
Brian: I think that most political
movements are controlled by one group of self-interested people (those that
clearly benefit from the policies proposed), but are built largely on the fear
and ignorance of their supporters, who are actually not being benefitted by the
policies and whose interests are in fact being sacrificed by them. I think that
‘men’ (ie. about half of the country’s population) is way too broad a group to
be effective political manipulators. In fact, many of these supposedly
‘pro-men’ policies, such as making abortion illegal and subsidizing the married
nuclear family, actually appeal to only a narrow subset of men
(family-oriented, religious ones). I, as an unmarried, single man, don’t
particularly care how well ‘The Family’ fares, and hence I don’t want to
contribute to subsidizing it, and making abortion illegal just gives me more
stress and worry when it comes to unwanted pregnancies of female partners.
Besides, as a general supporter of individual liberty, I recognize that if
liberty is going to be effective and be supported, it must be applied as a
general principle across the board, not just in cherry-picked cases. I don’t
want women’s individual freedom to be curtailed anymore than I want Asian men’s
individual freedom to be curtailed, or that of any other ‘social-group’ that is
supposedly ‘different’ from me.
Dworkin: “The hope is that these women, upset
by internal conflicts that cannot be stilled by manipulation, challenged by the
clarifying drama of public confrontation and dialogue, will be forced to
articulate the realities of their own experiences as women subject to the will
of men. In doing so, the anger that necessarily arises from a true perception
of how they have been debased may move them beyond the fear that transfixes
them to a meaningful rebellion against the men who in fact diminish, despite,
and terrorize them. This is the common struggle of all women, whatever their
male-defined ideological origins.” 35
Brian: Dworkin’s step-by-step strategy for
discrediting a political ideology: Step 1: Claim that support for the ideology
among a large group of its apparent supporters is not due to the content of
that ideology, but because of a deep psychological force, largely unrelated to
the contents of the actual political ideology in question. Step 2: Oversimplify
the world in an almost cartoonish fashion. Men (ie. half of the world’s
population) are all women-hating, brutal, vindictive tyrants. Women who support
right-wing political ideology are all psychologically oppressed, cringing,
pathetic puppets of the evil men. Step 3: Groundlessly assume that the
particular issue being discussed (in this case, feminist versus non-feminist
policies) is the most important, fundamental, political issue of them all.
Views on all other political issues should take a back-seat to one’s views on
this all-important issue. This issue alone should decide one’s political
allegiance, all by itself.
Here’s what I think of this cunning strategy: Step 1: It is,
in fact possible for people to be actually convinced by the content of a
political ideology, not all are pressed into it by deep psychological forces.
Or, as I think happens in most cases, people just ‘inherit’ their political
ideology from their families and communities, and do not take the time to
really question it too much. Either way, accounts of dark psychological forces
do not have all-encompassing explanatory power. In fact, I would venture to say
that they have very little explanatory power, and are mostly just used as a
cheap trick to discredit political ideologies that the writer disagrees with,
without having to go through the trouble of actually examining the specific
content of that ideology. Step 2: Groundless slander. I’m sure you could cherry
pick examples of abusive men and oppressed women, but the fact is that the
world is made up of billions of unique individuals. Members of so-called
‘social groups’ do not all share the same personality traits, as crass
stereotypes suggest. Such groups are actually made up of great multitudes of
unique individuals. Unless Dworkin has carefully observed the behaviour of
every man and ‘right-wing woman’ on earth, which of course is impossible, her
blanket remarks remain groundless slander. Step 3: If all women were in fact
being kept as chattel slaves by all men, then Dworkin might have a point here,
feminist versus non-feminist issues would be pretty darn important. In fact
though, this is not the case at all, and there are all kinds of political
issues that some women may legitimately feel are more important than so-called
‘women’s political issues’. Would it really be reasonable for a woman who was a
convinced libertarian, when faced with a choice between a communist party
promising free abortions, and a generally libertarian party who unfortunately
decided that abortion should be illegal, to choose the communist party?
Political elections always involve choosing between the lesser of two evils,
and I suspect that this woman would choose the anti-abortion but generally libertarian
party as a lesser evil over the pro-abortion communist party, even if she did
feel fairly strongly that abortions should be legal.
The Politics of
Intelligence
Dworkin: “(As Catharine A. MacKinnon wrote in
the on sentence that every woman should risk her life to understand: “Man fucks
woman; subject verb object.”) 39
Brian: ‘Stephen Harper shakes hands with
Barack Obama; subject verb object’. Does that mean that Stephen Harper is a
tyrannical man and Barack Obama is like a submissive woman? No, actually,
that’s just how English grammar works; there is no deeper significance to it.
If we want to get more philosophical, I am willing though. If
someone accused me of objectifying women, I would respond as follows: ‘Me,
objectify women?! Not just women, I objectify everybody!’ Allow me to explain: Every
individual person is an ego with a unique point of view, and from the point of
view of each ego, other people are objects, to be used for the gratification of
said ego, even if we are aware that these people are egos themselves. I view
people based on their relationships to me, not for their ‘own sakes’, whatever
that means. I seek to derive utility, or gratification, from other people. From
my perspective, that is what they are there for. To me, a friend is a
‘friendship object’, a female companion is a ‘companionship object’, a family
member is a ‘familial object’, and yes, a sexual partner is a ‘sexual object’.
If this means that I ‘objectify women’, it also means that I objectify the man
that I pay to do my dry-cleaning, and that I objectify my close family members.
If people think that this is shameful, I would ask them to reflect more deeply
on what other people really mean to them, to check if they don’t actually consider
other people the same way themselves.
Dworkin: Robin Morgan in 1974 (quoted
approvingly): “I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when
it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and
desire.” 60
Brian: So, anytime someone does something
unenthusiastically, it’s as bad as when the person is genuinely forced to do
that thing through physical violence or the threat thereof? Sounds like a
perversion of language and an obliteration of much needed distinctions to me.
Also, under this definition of rape, I’m sure men are ‘raped’ all the time,
unless women are just groundlessly given a special privilege in this regard. If
a man really just wants to go to sleep, but the woman insists on sex and would
get angry or would make the man feel guilty if he refused, wouldn’t this be an
instance of ‘rape’, according to Morgan’s definition?
Dworkin: “Women’s work that is not marriage
or prostitution is mostly segregated, always underpaid, stagnant,
sex-stereotyped. In the United States in 1981 women earned 56 to 59 percent of
what men earned. Women are paid significantly less than men for doing
comparable work.” 65
Brian: The answer to this problem, if these
stats are still roughly accurate and are actually based on “comparable work” (a
highly subjective term and a very complicated thing to determine, and something
which should also include ‘potential to do more higher level work in the
future’ as a key factor), is more economic freedom. I explain why in an earlier
post, the relevant section of which I will reproduce here:
“According to feminist and anti-racist activists, certain
groups such as women and ethnic minorities face ‘structural discrimination’ and
thus do not have the same economic chances as males of the majority ethnic
group. It is alleged that employers irrationally discriminate against these
groups when hiring, even when their qualifications and prospects for being a
success in the position are equal or better than that of any male member of the
majority ethnic group also applying. As a result, the potential social mobility
of women and minorities is allegedly unacceptably reduced, and government must
take action by granting subsidies or calling for affirmative action programs
for the groups in question.
Whether the
psychology of most white male employers and its results described above is or
is not accurate, a true free-market system would almost certainly result in
less of such discrimination. This is because, in a free labor market, such
irrational discrimination against women and minorities would open up
significant arbitrage opportunities for the non-racist/sexist employer. Any
significant discrimination against women or minority groups would result in a
situation where premium wages were being paid for male or majority group
employees. Any non-racist/non-sexist employer could take advantage of this,
hire women or minority group members at a discount, and thus have lower labour
costs of production than the racist/sexist employer, putting the
non-racist/non-sexist employer at a competitive advantage. As more employers
copied this strategy, the wages of the disadvantaged groups would be driven up
by competition for their services, tending towards an elimination of any ‘wage
gap’ that might exist.
In addition,
at the same time, it is likely that any racist/sexist psychology that might
exist in society would diminish as women and minority members are increasingly
viewed in similar occupations and economic positions as males and majority
ethnic group members, which they would be due to the arbitrage described above.
For these reasons, a free-market would tend towards the elimination of
irrational discrimination, and this effect provides another argument for
establishing a free-market society.” (http://thinkingabouthumansociety.blogspot.ca/2013/04/why-free-market-society-is-not-caste.html.)
Dworkin: “Men in all their institutions of
power are sustained by the sex labor and sexual subordination of women. The sex
labor of women must be maintained; and systematic low wages for sex-neutral
work effectively force women to sell sex to survive.” 66-67
Brian: In addition to what was said above,
I would add here that as a man, I would prefer it if women contributed to
society as manufacturers, doctors, engineers, and as other useful things, then
if they just remained ‘sexual slaves’. I would derive a lot more benefit as a
consumer from having all the women working at all the other jobs than I would
from forcing them all to be prostitutes and housewives. And if I think so,
might not other men as well? And if other men think this as well, then isn’t
Dworkin’s crude stereotyping once again discredited?
The Coming Gynocide
Dworkin: “Cuts in Social Security and food
programs for the old directly issue from the willingness of the US government
to watch useless females go hungry, live in viciously degrading poverty, and
die in squalor.” 153
Brian: It’s hard to take such slander
entirely seriously. Obviously Dworkin is too bigoted to actually look into the
problems inherent in these welfare programs and the case against them. She
prefers the tactics of hyperbole and the attributing of sinister motives to
those she disagrees with, over the more laborious task of rationally and
systematically examining the pros and cons of, and alternatives to, specific
policies. Suffice it to say that welfare policies, targeted specifically at
preventing people from ‘dying in squalor’, could be devised that would be much
less expensive and much less societally detrimental than the US welfare
arsenal.
Antifeminism
Dworkin: Antifeminism is always an expression
of hating women: it is way past time to say so, to make the equation, to insist
on its truth. (...) The same antifeminist contempt for women is expressed in
resistance to affirmative action or in defenses of pornography or in the
acceptance of prostitution as an institution of female sex labor. If one sees
that women are being systematically exploited and abused, then the defense of
anything, the acceptance of anything, that promotes or continues that
exploitation or abuse expresses a hatred of women, a contempt for their freedom
and dignity; and an effort to impede legislative, social, or economic
initiatives that would improve the status of women, however radical or
reformist those measures are, is an expression of that same contempt.” 196-197
Brian: Wow, I must really hate women then,
who knew? Apparently, I hate women because I don’t want the government forcing
employers to hire women over men when a man is equally qualified or more
qualified for the position in question than a woman. Apparently, I hate women
because I don’t support the use of force to prevent them from making voluntary,
mutually beneficial economic exchanges involving their own bodies and their own
sexuality (pornography and prostitution). In fact, as a viewer of pornography,
I must hate women because I do not suppress my biological attraction to their
bodies when that attraction causes no tangible harm to anyone, but provides
benefits to me.
When I do see that women are being systematically exploited
or abused (ie. domestic violence, rape, coercive sex trafficking), my natural
sympathetic feelings towards them and my desire for a civilized community where
coercive violence is rare, prompts me to protest against such abuses and to seek
ways of preventing them. But one simply cannot make the (il)logical leap that
Dworkin makes by claiming that because a lot of women are abused in the world,
anyone who doesn’t support policies supported by the supposed champions of
these oppressed women (the feminists), must support the continued abuse of
women. This just reeks of a cheap intellectual trick used to silence all
criticism of whatever ‘feminism’ happens to advocate without further argument,
by means of guilt-tripping and Ad Hominem attacks, something that just doesn’t
fly for me intellectually.
Dworkin: “When a woman expresses an opinion –
about anything – and the response is to undermine perceptions of or question
her sexuality, sexual identity, femininity, relations with men, the response
can be identified without further analysis as implicitly antifeminist and
woman-hating.” 199
Brian: On this, we can agree.
Dworkin: “Liberal men and women ask, Why
can’t we just be ourselves, all human beings, begin now and not dwell in past
injustices, wouldn’t that subvert the sex-class system, change it from the
inside out? The answer is no. The sex-class system has a structure; it has deep
roots in religion and culture; it is fundamental to the economy; sexuality is
its creature; to be “just human beings” in it, women have to hide what happens
to them as women because they are women – happenings like forced sex and forced
reproduction, happenings that continue as long as the sex-class system
operates.” 217
Brian: The answer is yes! Moreover, this is
the only sure and sustainable way of changing anything whatsoever! Nobody will
really accept, and nothing good will really come out of, installing a system of
‘reverse discrimination’, where the interests of present men are sacrificed
because of past injustices inflicted by past men on past women. This just
changes the game of special privileges and sacrificial victims; it does not
abolish the game as any sure and sustainable solution would. It puts
tremendous, easily abusable power into the brutal, ham-fisted hands of coercive
governments. To effectively fight exploitation one must end exploitation, not
just change who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.
I find Dworkin’s reasons for opposing the equality before the
law solution to be unconvincing. She says that the ‘sex-class system’ has deep
roots. So did the inefficient, caste-based, medieval economic system, yet for
all that it was rapidly obliterated by the Industrial Revolution. Ultra-conservatism
is a characteristic feature of political elites ensconced in their positions of
coercive power, not of free, enterprising individuals, always on the lookout
for sources of personal gain, whose myriad decisions would guide a free-market
social order. Every significant gain in economic independence that women have
made (and make no mistake, significant gains have been made), has been due to
free-market forces, not to government dictates. The vast majority of
profit-seeking employers on the free-market are not going to forego profits
that they could have made, or put themselves at a competitive disadvantage, by
systematically overrating the abilities of male workers and systematically
underrating the abilities of female workers. The more the freedom of employers
and employees is respected, and the less diluted the profit motive is by taxes,
subsidies, and regulations, the more this powerful force of self-interest will
operate to the great economic benefit of women.
Dworkin states that the ‘sex-class system’ is fundamental to
the economy. Actually, as I mentioned earlier, the economy would be better off
if women entered fields that are more value-productive than prostitution or
house-wifery. Forcibly keeping 50% of the population in these two ‘professions’
is certainly not an economic imperative, just the opposite in fact.
Dworkin says that in a regime of equality before the law
between the two genders, women will still have to endure ‘forced sex’ and
‘forced reproduction’, and will have to keep silent about these matters. But if
men and women are equal before the law and the law prohibits forced rape and
allows voluntary abortion (which the law should), then women do not have to
keep silent about these abuses. In fact, they can call the police, or sue in a
court of law, and their case will be heard appropriately, as is called for in
the very definition of a regime of equality before the law.
Dworkin: “There is no real feminism that does
not have at its heart the tempering discipline of sex-class consciousness:
knowing that women share a common condition as a class, like it or not. What is
that common condition? Subordinate to men, sexually colonized in a sexual
system of dominance and submission, denied rights on the basis of sex,
historically chattel, generally considered biologically inferior, confined to
sex and reproduction: this is the general description of the social environment
in which all women live.” 221
Brian: Murky Marxist collectivism. If an
individual woman is not subordinate to a man, nor sexually colonized, nor
denied rights on the basis of her sex, nor considered biologically inferior by
the people she interacts with, nor forcibly confined to sex and reproduction,
(I can think of a number of women I know that fit this description), then in
what sense are they part of this class of ‘oppressed women’ of which you speak?
At best, the shared gender between the un-oppressed and the oppressed women
might make the former feel somewhat more sympathetic pain due to the suffering
of the latter than they would if the sufferer were male, although even this is
by no means certain. Why can’t the un-oppressed women form their own class? Or
sympathize more with their national group, or community group, or family group?
Or just sympathize equally with all of humanity? Until proven otherwise, the
Marxist assertion of fundamentally shared interests and automatic ‘solidarity’ between
members of arbitrarily designated social groups, remains dogma taken only on
faith, based neither on evidence nor logic.
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