This Mythistory Monday sort of straddles the line between historical and topical: the myth in question is the endlessly repeated chestnut Andrea Dworkin claims that all heterosexual sex is rape. No she doesn’t; she never said this, and has repudiated it when asked directly. The myth is historical, in a sense, since it deals with the upshot of key writings of Second Wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. The myth is topical, in a sense, since Andrea Dworkin’s still alive and still writing, and since it seems the idiot notion seems to keep coming up no matter how many times it is addressed (see, for the latest example, Mark Fulwiler’s regrettable comments–which he later, in part, retracted–in the Liberty and Power controversy that Roderick and I have managed to stir up). But whether historical or topical, it’s all bunk.

Dworkin’s slanderers, if they bother to cite anything from her work at all (which they usually don’t), usually skim some out-of-context quote or another from Intercourse; often, for example, something like this:

A human being has a body that is inviolate; and when it is violated, it is abused. A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. The discourse of male truth–literature, science, philosophy, pornography–calls that penetration violation. This it does with some consistency and some confidence. Violation is a synonym for intercourse. At the same time, the penetration is taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use; it is appropriate to enter her, to push into (“violate”) the boundaries of her body. She is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include physical privacy. She is, in fact, human by a standard that precludes physical privacy, since to keep a man out altogether and for a lifetime is deviant in the extreme, a psychopathology, a repudiation of the way in which she is expected to manifest her humanity.

— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, chapter 7

Or this:

Male-dominant gender hierarchy, however, seems immune to reform by reasoned or visionary argument or by changes in sexual styles, either personal or social. This may be because intercourse itself is immune to reform. In it, female is bottom, stigmatized. Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to her cell by cell her own inferior status, impressing it on her, burning it into her by shoving it into her, over and over, pushing and thrusting until she gives up and gives in– which is called surrender in the male lexicon. In the experience of intercourse, she loses the capacity for integrity because her body–the basis of privacy and freedom in the material world for all human beings–is entered and occupied; the boundaries of her physical body are–neutrally speaking– violated. What is taken from her in that act is not recoverable, and she spends her life–wanting, after all, to have something–pretending that pleasure is in being reduced through intercourse to insignificance.

— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, chapter 7

But taking the interpretation, from these passages, that Dworkin thinks all heterosexual sex (or all penis-in-vagina intercourse) is rape merely amounts to a misunderstanding–either because the reader has only encountered passages like these, out of context, in a horror file-style catalogue or because he or she is not extending the same effort at interpretive charity towards Dworkin that she or he would for anyone else. Both seem to be unfortunately common conditions; as a result, statements that Dworkin makes about the meaning of intercourse are routinely misinterpreted as statements made in propia voce when in fact they are statements of the meaning attributed to intercourse by male supremacist culture and enforced by the material conditions (economic vulnerability, violence) that women face under patriarchy. These are meanings that Dworkin, among other things, intends to criticize (anyone who has had to write a long exposition of a systematic view with which they disagree could probably be misinterpreted in the same way).

Dworkin’s argument in Intercourse is not that the anatomical features of heterosexual intercourse make it tantamount to coercion. Dworkin has no patience at all for anatomical essentialism–something you should know if you’ve read essays such as Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea. Intercourse is not an anatomy textbook; it’s an examination of intercourse, as a social practice and a lived experience for women, under the cultural and material conditions of a male supremacist society. When she describes intercourse as, for example, occupation, she does not mean that the biological act itself involves occupation; she is talking about intercourse as it is consistently depicted in male supremacist culture, and as it is consistently acted out in a society where rape and male-centric sexuality are extremely defended and culturally excused or even valorized. That doesn’t mean that equality requires the end of either sexual pleasure or, specifically, heterosexual intercourse; it does mean that it requires a radical change to the way it is thought of and approached (she argues that this will involve, inter alia, a sexuality that isn’t monomaniacally focused on intercourse; but that’s a different claim).

In passages like the second one, Dworkin is also specifically responding to sexual liberals and to some feminists (in this case, Victoria Woodhull), who take the legitimacy of intercourse-centric sexuality and intercourse as it is currently practiced more or less for granted–and attempt to draw all the ethical lines on the matter strictly in terms of formal consent, or (in the case of Woodhull) in terms of some more robust sense of women’s sexual autonomy, without challenging the cultural centrality of intercourse or the way in which intercourse is systematically shaped and mandated by the surrounding cultural and material conditions that men impose on women in a patriarchal society. It’s a matter of context; and, in talking about intercourse just as much as in reading the book, context oughtn’t be dropped in the effort to make some kind of point.

If I had to try to summarize what Dworkin is saying while standing on one foot, I’d try this woefully abridged summary of her major theses: (1) that patriarchal culture makes heterosexual intercourse the paradigm activity for all sexuality; other forms of sexuality are typically treated as “not real sex” or as mere precursors to intercourse and always discussed in terms that analogize them to it; (2) that heterosexual intercourse is typically depicted in ways that are systematically male-centric and which portray the activity as iniated by and for the man (as “penetration” of the woman by the man, rather than “engulfing” of the man by the woman, or as the man and woman “joining” together–the last is represented in the term “copulation” but that’s rarely used in ordinary speech about human men and women); (3) that the cultural attitudes are reflective of, and reinforce, material realities such as the prevalence of violence against women and the vulnerability of many women to extreme poverty, that substantially constrain women’s choices with regard to sexuality and with regard to heterosexual intercourse in particular; (4) that (1)-(3) constitute a serious obstacle to women’s control over their own lives and identities that is both very intimate and very difficult to escape; (5) that intercourse as it’s actually practiced occurs in the social context of (1)-(3), and so intercourse as a real social institution and a real experience in individual women’s lives is shaped and constrained by political-cultural forces and not merely by individual choices; (6) that, therefore, drawing the ethical lines in regards to sexuality solely on the basis of individual formal consent rather than considering the cultural and material conditions under which sexuality and formal consent occur makes it hard for liberals and some feminists writing on sexuality to see the truth of (4); that (7) they therefore end up collaborating, either through neglect or endorsement, with the sustanence of (1)-(3), to the detriment of women’s liberation; and (8) feminist politics require challenging both these writings and (1)-(3), that is, challenging intercourse as it is habitually practiced in our society. But, while I hope this helps clarify a bit, you really should just read the whole book for yourself to understand what’s going on.

The myth is one that Andrea has battled for many years now. Here’s what she had to say about the matter in her 1995 interview with Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock: After Right-Wing Women and Ice and Fire you wrote Intercourse. Another book which helped me clarify confusions about my own sexual relationships. You argue that attitudes to conventional sexual intercourse enshrine and perpetuate sexual inequality. Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?

Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse–it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.

The whole issue of intercourse as this culture’s penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the all sex is rape slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don’t think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.

It’s important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the all sex is rape slander repeatedly over the years, and it’s been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.

And here’s what she and Nikki Craft add at the Andrea Dworkin Lie Detector:

And in a new preface to the tenth-anniversary edition of Intercourse (1997), Andrea explains why she believes this book continues to be misread:

[I]f one’s sexual experience has always and without exception been based on dominance–not only overt acts but also metaphysical and ontological assumptions–how can one read this book? The end of male dominance would mean–in the understanding of such a man–the end of sex. If one has eroticized a differential in power that allows for force as a natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape? Equality in the realm of sex is an antisexual idea if sex requires domination in order to register as sensation. As sad as I am to say it, the limits of the old Adam–and the material power he still has, especially in publishing and media–have set limits on the public discourse (by both men and women) about this book [pages ix-x].

I hope that this has helped clear up matters a bit. This one may be a bit lame for a Myth-Busting Monday–it’s already been handled by feministe, not to mention by Andrea Dworkin herself (via Nikki Craft’s web stylings). Nevertheless, it keeps coming up, and so I guess it is worthwhile to keep hammering the point home, and–if nothing else–do some writing for Google on the matter and up the Google juice a bit on other articles that touch on the same point. If I can bust this myth in one person’s head, then I’ll be quite glad; if I can get someone or another to actually read Intercourse before they start screeching for it to be burned, then I’ll be downright giddy.

Update 2005-01-23: Minor revisions, since this is written for Google, to enhance readability and usefulness.

Dear Porn-spamming Morons:

Just so you know, you are wasting your time.

Posting the URI of your website in the comments sections of my weblog does not increase your Google ratings, for even a split-second. My weblog software routes all links in the comments section through a redirection script; since search engines don’t see the address of your site anywhere on my pages, you get no Google-bombing benefit from it. If your aim is to boost the search engine ratings of your silly little wank sites, you are wasting your time.

Spam comments are usually deleted from my website within a matter of minutes. Your spam disappears and your IP address is banned from posting again. If your aim is to drive people who happen upon my website to your silly little wank sites, you are still wasting your time.

I won’t tell you to stop. It’s a little bit of annoyance for me to zap your comments as they come in, but I think that the pornography you are peddling is misogynist, pernicious, and ultimately very sad stuff. So I’m glad to put up with a little bit of annoyance, when I have the minor satisfaction of knowing that you are wasting your time, and your sponsors’ money, posting empty spam comments that spend 15 minutes or so doing nothing on a pedantic anarcha-feminist boy’s website before they are deleted. If you want to continue wasting your time, by all means do so.

But you are wasting your time. Just so you know.

I suppose that somone is going to tell me about how I need to lighten up and have a good laugh at this.

The cutting edge in humor at class establishments like Virgin Airways

Even though they allow for high-volume servicing and back-in-a-flash trips to the john, the point-and-shoot-a-stinky-deodorizer-cake oddity known as the men’s restroom urinal has been, for women, a constant enigma. But nothing will prepare you for the men’s room in the newly-designed Virgin Airways Clubhouse in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, terminal 4: Urinals shaped like a woman’s mouth, dolled up with red lipstick, wide open and ready for business.

In anything that we do there has to be a smile, and that’s the smile in this Clubhouse, said John Riordan, Vice President of Customer Services for Virgin Airways.

The urinals, called Kisses, were designed by Netherlands based company Bathroom Mania.

Kisses — the sexy urinal, makes a daily event a blushing experience! This is one target men will never miss!, said the Bathroom Mania team via e-mail from the Netherlands.

— Unwired Travel: Virgin Potty Talk [Yahoo! News]

(via feministe)

Yes, that is how very wealthy men get a smile in these post-feminist days: by pissing in women’s mouths.

I really wish that I could say this surprises me more than it actually does. It’s audaciously disgusting, yes, and it’s not every day you see something like this out in the open. But wealthy men on business trips are, after all, the chief patrons of many segments of the commodity trade in women’s bodies, from casual decisions to hold business meetings at Hooter’s or at strip clubs, to hotel pornography, to such wonderful institutions as sex tourism (read: child prostitution) in Thailand. There’s a whole seamy, creepy, half-hidden, and ultimately quite desparate and pathetic culture of overgrown fratboys in American business travel, and this just looks to me like a particularly gaudy piece of that sort of systematic sexualized woman-hatred.

(Pre-emptive clarification: I know that this is not true either of all men on business trips or of all frat boys. Some of my best friends were in frats/are in business management and don’t act like this, &c. I do think, nevertheless, that this sort of creepy culture is pretty clearly widespread in both of these worlds.)

The good news is that NOW and feminist bloggers got the word out on this, and Virgin has dropped the plans and issued an apology (the apology was astoundingly blithe and clueless, but we’ll set that to one side).

To return to where we started out: feminists are often accused of being uptight and having no sense of humor. I don’t know how people can read about WITCH zaps or read Dykes to Watch Out For and still believe this, but that’s a topic for another day. For right now, the main question on my mind is this: really, what sort of a person do you have to be to find pissing in a dolled-up woman’s mouth really, really funny? And why in the world would anyone want to be that sort of a person?

Further reading:

• Analysis from feministe, Echidne of the Snakes, Ms. Magazine, and Bitch

• GT 11/25/2001: What the fucking hell was he thinking? (on other things that just aren’t funny)

A few things have recently come together for me. First, Andrew Leonard recently penned an interesting column on spam-blocking technology for Salon; then Jennifer Lee wrote another interesting article for The New York Times. Finally, I made use of a brief free trial of McAfee’s SpamKiller software. I’ve also just been doing a lot of thinking lately about what needs to be done to seriously address the rising tide of spam that is flooding most everyone’s inbox. Spam e-mail has been getting worse over the past several years, and it’s been getting worse at an accelerating pace. If we don’t want Internet communications to become simply worthless from being drowned by spam e-mail, then we have to rethink our basic model for e-mail so that spammers can no longer take advantage of the system’s architecture to overwhelm legitimate messages with their crap. Lee’s article shows a good grasp of the problem and why anti-spam legislation won’t do much to solve it. Leonard’s has a good grasp on the overall technological shift needed to address the problem, but he doesn’t push the envelope nearly enough in the kind of framework that needs to be accomplished.

Leonard’s article describes the development of SpamAssasin, an open source spam blocker being adopted and improved by many system administrators. Leonard points out that the collaborative effort between legions of dedicated spam-fighters can greatly improve the ability of the software to identify spam messages. As Leonard puts it, The only way to stem the flood of unwanted e-mail may be to harness a million eyeballs and an army of open-source hackers. There’s an intuitive reason why this should be the case. Obviously, by harnessing the efforts of thousands of administrators who ferociously hate spam, it will get a big boost in productive energy. But that’s not all.

The basic problem is this: under the present e-mail architecture, the spam market works. It works phenomenally well, and especially well for the seedier side of online industries, in particular pornography and sex-related products, which can’t advertise through conventional media (other than other porn outlets) and don’t have any financial interest in maintaining a reputation as a friendly corporate citizen. The reasons are inherent features of the e-mail architecture:

• It costs nearly nothing to send spam: once you have an Internet connection set up (which you’ll need for your product’s website, anyway), it costs virtually nothing to send out scads and scads of spam e-mail. Labor costs can be reduced to nill by feeding addresses from a web crawler into an automated spamming program. This is a fundamental reversal from direct mail and telemarketing, where a fixed cost for contacting a person is borne by the advertiser.

• Lots of people see it: If you send out a spam message to a huge group of people, then most of the people you send it to will see it. In part, this is because e-mail is a durable medium, like direct mail or fax, and unlike the telephone, so if you send a message while the user is away, they still get it. It’s also due to the relatively primitive state of message sorting and spam filtering–users have very little control over the order and priority with which messages appear in their inboxes, so to get to the mesages they want, they generally have to wade through, or at least scan over, any spam that they get.

• It’s hard to track offenders. Many comparisons have been drawn between spam e-mail and the junk faxes whose rising costs spurred a federal law against them in 1991. The two are alike in that advertisers get a basically free contact, while victims are stuck with the primary costs (in paper, bandwidth, time, what have you) of the interactions. However, there is a crucial difference: junk faxes can easily be tracked to their perpetrator through phone company records. Offenders can be blocked and identified for legal action. Spam e-mails, on the other hand, are generally very difficult to track to their originators. Headers can easily be forged, server relays can be found to use, one-time-only addresses created with free services, work can be farmed out to mule computer users, who are paid a small amount to send out a huge volume of messages, and then take the fall if they get caught. The anonymity of e-mail and its reliance on the honor system for identifying senders makes spam very difficult to flag and filter.

When we look at all these factors, we begin to see that we need a comprehensive solution which will work to address these structural holes. We cannot rely on anti-spam legislation, since spammers will merely relocate to different states or different countries, and use the anonymity of the communication to further shield themselves. Spam is only going to get worse until we have mass deployment of an easy-to-learn, easy-to-use, agile framework which harnesses both human intelligence and high-quality, flexible technological solutions to make legitimate email easier to access and identifies and deals with spam.

Unfortunately, most anti-spam solutions fail, because they are focused narrow-mindedly on a single goal–the goal of accumulating as many heuristic rules as possible to identify and kill spam (this is reflected in the names–McAfee’s SpamKiller, SpamAssasin, and so on. The most common and most maddening manifestation of this is scorched-earth spam programs such as SpamKiller, which works entirely by accumulating thousands and thousands of rules to try to identify common patterns in the way that spam messages are written or addressed. These do indeed catch a lot of spam, but they also slam perfectly legitimate e-mail. For example, my decision to uninstall SpamKiller was finalized when I saw it was trashing legitimate e-mails because a filter (one of thousands, which took lots of scrolling to find) was killing messages because they contained the word rape. Now, look, folks, I’m pretty much physically nauseated by some of the spam ads I’ve received for rape-fetish pornography sites. But I’m an anti-rape activist, and I receive tons of perfectly legitimate e-mail with the word rape in it. SpamKiller’s approach to spam is like trying to kill a swarm of mosquitoes with a cluster bomb, and plenty of perfectly innocent messages were getting clobbered.

The problem here is that most people who work on spam-blocking software and most of those who purchase it are basically in the frame of mind of trying to get rid of a source of long-term and maddening irritation. Programs tend to be reactively focused on axing spam by any means necessary, rather than proactively focused on improving the e-mail user’s experience. But if we keep our mind on what users need and want, rather than what gives us the temporary satisfaction of the kill, then we should begin to see a bit more clearly what needs to be done.

To reduce the effectiveness of spam, first spam management software needs to be widespread, usable, and respectful of user’s legitimate e-mail. With millions of users employing software that lets them take control of their own inboxes, users will be able to stay on top of their legitimate e-mail and sidestep the spam. Information for identifying spam should come from automated reports that millions of users submit: when a spam slips through, the recipient presses one button in the mail client and it is registered as a spam message so that no-one else receives it (SpamAssassin uses Vipul’s Razor, a system which does just this, but it needs to be integrated into easy to use clients, not just arcane Unix mail filters).

Second, we need to plug the anonymity hole through use of double-key authentication and encryption of e-mail. E-mail clients could prioritize messages which can be verified as coming from a valid address, and also messages which are encrypted for the recipient’s eyes only. Spammers who want their messages seen would have to separately acquire a public key for, and encrypt the message for every intended recipient. For millions of e-mail addresses, that’s an awful lot of extra processor time, network bandwidth, and human labor that the spammer has to pay for. Furthermore, the spammer’s PGP signature or signatures can be blacklisted as quickly as the spams start going out.

Finally, system administrators at big ISPs need to get responsible. One of the biggest conduits for spam open relays, poorly configured mail servers which allow anyone on the Internet to send e-mail through the server by forging headers to pose as a machine on the server’s network. System administrators need to get serious about ensuring that connections are only accepted from authenticated users or legitimate machines on the ISP’s own subnet. And when spam is being sent by a user, they need to be quick about axing that user’s account.

What you can do now:

You can do some things now, both short-term and long-term, to keep yourself from being overwhelmed and work towards an Internet not being drowned in spam.

• Use shield accounts for online commerce. A lot of high-end spamhouses harvest addresses by buying them from merchants such as Amazon.com. For online interactions which won’t be anything other than perfunctory receipts, it’s good to maintain a shield account (say, diespammersdie@hotmail.com or somesuch) as the address through which you interact with online stores.

• Download and use PGP. You can get PGP — a great security program which will let you securely sign messages (so that the recipient can verify your identity) and/or encrypt messages (so that only the recipient can read them). The Windows version of PGP automates the process of creating and using PGP keys, and has plugins for popular Windows e-mail clients which let you use simple pushbuttons for its functions. PGP will make your e-mail more secure, and also help build an Internet environment where spammers can no longer hide behind forged headers to conceal their identities.

• Look for solid anti-spam software that suits you. If you can find spam management software which suits your needs, grab it! If you’re willing to geek around a lot, SpamAssasin looks very good. Better yet, Deersoft is in the process of developing SpamAssassin Pro, a commercial product for Windows based on the SpamAssassin engine and integrated with your mail client. Unfortunately, most spam management software I’ve tried (e.g., SpamKiller) is crap.

• More tips: Jennifer Lee’s article is accompanied by some tips for avoiding spam, some of which I agree with, and others of which I don’t. Unfortunately, the present spam-heavy environment is encouraging a lot of people to take up measures which cut down spam at the expense of breaking human usability of the e-mail system. Lee suggests using complex e-mail addresses, which do thwart spammers who use dictionary searches on mail services, but which also makes it hard for your friends to remember your e-mail address. She also suggests removing your e-mail from any online directories in which it may be included, which will again thwart spammers but also keep people from being able to reach you. I totally disagree with this method of spam filtering. Again, it amounts to protecting your inbox at the cost of shredding real people’s ability to contact you. Nevertheless, some of her suggestions (such as disposable forwarding accounts for use on Usenet and bulletin boards) are solid.

Clothing-makers Abercrombie & Fitch are once again in the news for paedophile-chic clothing lines. This time it’s thongs for seven year old girls, imprinted with such cute and fun and sweet slogans as eye candy, sexy, and wink wink.

A&F apparently thinks that it is cute to portray little girls as eroticized future sex objects. However, this is pretty obviously a lie; as usual, they are trying to attract attention to their stupid clothing line by being edgy. The thing that people don’t seem to get is that this kind of shit isn’t even remotely edgy. It’s the same old cultural detritus, repackaged. The quasi-child porn thing was already old when Calvin Klein did it; it was even older when Britney Spears did it; and it’s older than dirt by now. It’s not only not cute, it’s not edgy, either. It’s just also-ran, offensive and stupid.

Take action!

Write a complaint to Abercrombie & Fitch asking them why they think that portraying children as sex objects is cute and fun and sweet, and ask them to pull the line from stores. Public outcry has already forced them to remove their racist caricatures of Asians from stores, and now it’s time to turn up the heat on their paedophile-chic.