False! It’s equal to the average amount of labor time (not “labor”) needed to produce any similar commodity in current conditions of production.
]]>Here is a larger excerpt from the chapter in question. There is no doubt that Dworkin views intercourse as a violation of the female body and that men, all men, derive sexual pleasure from their hatred of women.
“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. She will not have an orgasm—maybe because she has human pride and she resents captivity; but also she will not or cannot rebel—not enough for it to matter, to end male dominance over her. She learns to eroticize powerlessness and self-annihilation. The very boundaries of her own body become meaningless to her, and even worse, useless to her. The transgression of those boundaries comes to signify a sexually charged degradation into which she throws herself, having been told, convinced, that identity, for a female, is there—somewhere beyond privacy and self-respect.
It is not that there is no way out if, for instance, one were to establish or believe that intercourse itself determines women’s lower status. New reproductive technologies have changed and will continue to change the nature of the world. Intercourse is not necessary to existence anymore. Existence does not depend on female compliance, nor on the violation of female boundaries, nor on lesser female privacy, nor on the physical occupation of the female body. But the hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right. Intercourse appears to be the expression of that contempt in pure form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it requires no passion or heart because it is power without invention articulating the arrogance of those who do the fucking. Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se. Any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography. So freedom from inter course, or a social structure that reflects the low value of intercourse in women’s sexual pleasure, or intercourse becoming one sex act among many entered into by (hypothetical) equals as part of other, deeper, longer, perhaps more sensual lovemaking, or an end to women’s inferior status because we need not be forced to reproduce (forced fucking frequently justified by some implicit biological necessity to reproduce): none of these are likely social developments because there is a hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion. Reproductive technologies are strengthening male dominance, invigorating it by providing new ways of policing women’s reproductive capacities, bringing them under stricter male scrutiny and control; and the experimental development of these technologies has been sadistic, using human women as if they were sexual laboratory animals—rats, mice, rabbits, cats, with kinky uteri. For increasing numbers of men, bondage and torture of the female genitals (that were entered into and occupied in the good old days) may supplant intercourse as a sexual practice. The passion for hurting women is a sexual passion; and sexual hatred of women can be expressed without intercourse.
There has always been a peculiar irrationality to all the biological arguments that supposedly predetermine the inferior social status of women. Bulls mount cows and baboons do whatever; but human females do not have estrus or go into heat. The logical inference is not that we are always available for mounting but rather that we are never, strictly speaking,”available. ” Nor do animals have cultures; nor do they determine in so many things what they will do and how they will do them and what the meaning of their own behavior is. They do not decide what their lives will be. Only humans face the often complicated reality of having potential and having to make choices based on having potential. We are not driven by instinct, at least not much. We have possibilities, and we make up meanings as we go along. The meanings we create or learn do not exist only in our heads, in ineffable ideas. Our meanings also exist in our bodies—what we are, what we do, what we physically feel, what we physically know; and there is no personal psychology that is separate from what the body has learned about life. Yet when we look at the human condition, including the condition of women, we act as if we are driven by biology or some metaphysically absolute dogma. We refuse to recognize our possibilities because we refuse to honor the potential humans have, including human women, to make choices. Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?”
When will men choose to not despise women? Is she serious? I mean holy shit! See a therapist or something. And it just keeps going and going.
]]>I’ve been told by so many people that it’s perverse, quixotic or disingenuous to read Dworkin in this way – that is, to actually read her, and make a good-faith effort to understand what kind of an argument she’s making, how she’s making it, what the various resources called upon to support it are doing there and how they’re being used – that seeing someone else do it properly and get it right is, finally, tremendously reassuring.
I very much appreciate your clearmindedness and patience.
]]>I want to suggest to you that a commitment to sexual equality with males, that is, of uniform character as of motion or surface, is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. I want to ask you to make a different commitment-a commitment to the abolition of poverty, rape and murder; that is, a commitment to ending the system of oppression called patriarchy; to ending male sexual model itself. (from “Not for sale: feminists resisting prostitution and pornography,” p. 338, by Rebecca Whisnant and Christine Stark).
When read in context, as I understand it, Dworkin meant that if women imitate men by adopting patriarchal practices, they end up in the same rank as patriarchal oppressors. That’s why superficial (in Dworkin’s words: “of uniform character as of motion or surface”) commitment to sexual equality with male is not enough.
I notice the similarity between this and another you’ve quoted from elsewhere:
“I want to talk to you about equality, what equality is and what it means. It isn’t just an idea. It’s not some insipid word that ends up being bullshit. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with all those statements like: Oh, that happens to men too. I name an abuse and I hear: Oh, it happens to men too. That is not the equality we are struggling for. We could change our strategy and say: well, okay, we want equality; we’ll stick something up the ass of a man every three minutes.
You’ve never heard that from the feminist movement, because for us equality has real dignity and importance—it’s not some dumb word that can be twisted and made to look stupid as if it had no real meaning.” (I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape).
Nevertheless, because Nikki Craft doesn’t make chapter 2 of “Our Blood” online, I don’t know how Dworkin’s quote look in even broader context.
]]>Thanks for your kind words.
But, from what I can tell, she is saying that all heterosexual intercourse is rape under certain circumstances. Namely, under vicious male patriarchy.
I don’t think that this is what Dworkin’s saying. Certainly I haven’t found it anywhere in Intercourse or any of the other pieces by her that I’ve read. What do you have in mind when you offer this interpretation?
Here’s my understanding of what Dworkin is saying about intercourse in the real world, from an earlier reply:
Does it mean that all heterosexual sex in a male-supremacist society is rape? No, it doesn’t mean that, either. It does mean that women’s experience of heterosexual sex is colored by the fact of rape, and the fact that many men’s attitudes towards consensual intercourse and towards women (the attitudes that men are put under intense pressure by their peers and by the culture at large to exhibit) are alarmingly like the attitudes of rapists. (And that this isn’t just accidental; it’s part and parcel of the way that the men in our culture have portrayed and had sex, and the kinds of sex that they have portrayed as paradigmatic for sexuality as such.)
To which I’ll add only a couple of things. First, that one of the lessons Dworkin thinks that you should take from this is that formal consent is not the only ethical or political category that’s relevant when you’re looking at sexuality. (It’s necessary but not sufficient; of course male Leftists and liberals have no trouble understanding this when it comes to, say, terms of employment, but it’s notable how many retreat to the thinnest of thin ethical standards when it comes to sex.)
Second, I don’t think Intercourse ever deals at all with the question of whether this or that woman should or shouldn’t have intercourse with this or that man (or vice versa). Intercourse is a systemic critique of intercourse as a social institution. So I just have no idea whether she thinks that there are folks in our society for whom intercourse can be not only genuinely consensual but also mutually rewarding and free of exploitation and subordination; as far as I know she doesn’t say. I think that the purpose of Intercourse is not to tell you what to do or not to do in bed but rather to get you to understand something about what sex means for women and men in our society, and to demand that you take that into account when you think about yourself and the sexual relationships you have with other men or women. It’s a radical view that involves an intensely personal challenge to how the overwhelming majority of us, if not all of us, conduct our daily lives, to be sure. But I think that what she tries to accomplish in the space she has has much more to do with exposing what you need to know than with giving you any kind of detailed advice about what to do with that knowledge.
]]>I saw this and was impressed. I wanted to ask you a question, since you know Dworkin a lot better than I do.
Dworkin is not saying that heterosexual intercourse is rape.
But, from what I can tell, she is saying that all heterosexual intercourse is rape under certain circumstances. Namely, under vicious male patriarchy.
Now, here’s the kicker. There have only been patriarchies, there only are patriarchies, and there is no prospect for their being anything other than patriarchies.
See my point here?
She isn’t saying that sex is essentially or necessarily rape. That’s true.
But it SEEMS to me that she saying that all heterosexual sex in our culture is rape….and in all cultures to this point.
Is she saying this? Or is our society sufficiently gender-egalitarian for genuinely consensual sex?
]]>Of course, I never believed “feminists consider het intercouse to be rape” (which is contrary to my experience), but I did think she had said something boiling down to “a woman’s consent to intercourse can’t be taken at face value,” whereas I now understand the thesis to be more like “there is a male view of sex as conquering and violating a woman, and this view is harmful to women.”
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