A Blast from the Past...
Hurdygerdi
Andrea Dworkin has died. I'd forgotten all about her really - it seems a lifetime away when she was the femnist to read and quote. It's even weirder that we actually agreed with what she was saying. This must have been around 1989/90. Then all of a sudden queer theory came along and knocked radical feminism off its perch. Although I don't agree with a lot of what she said, I hated the way she was portrayed by the press as a fat ugly man-hater.
Anyway, this article from The Guardian makes some good points, including:
She had no time for the textual analysis of porn so beloved of academia; what she cared about was the women performing in the films, the harm they suffered, and what other women had to suffer as a result of men watching porn.
...
I remember being in a restaurant with her in London when she joked that she really ought to go on a diet, and did I know of any good ones?
...
Dworkin's feminism often came into conflict with the more compromising theories of others, such as Naomi Wolf. "I do think liberal feminists bear responsibility for a lot of what's gone wrong," she told me in 1997. "To me, what's so horrible is that they make alliances for the benefit of middle-class women. So it has to do with, say, having a woman in the supreme court. And that's fine - I'd love a woman, eight women, in the supreme court - but poor women always lose out."
It's probably better to read the whole article.
Andrea Dworkin has died. I'd forgotten all about her really - it seems a lifetime away when she was the femnist to read and quote. It's even weirder that we actually agreed with what she was saying. This must have been around 1989/90. Then all of a sudden queer theory came along and knocked radical feminism off its perch. Although I don't agree with a lot of what she said, I hated the way she was portrayed by the press as a fat ugly man-hater.
Anyway, this article from The Guardian makes some good points, including:
She had no time for the textual analysis of porn so beloved of academia; what she cared about was the women performing in the films, the harm they suffered, and what other women had to suffer as a result of men watching porn.
...
I remember being in a restaurant with her in London when she joked that she really ought to go on a diet, and did I know of any good ones?
...
Dworkin's feminism often came into conflict with the more compromising theories of others, such as Naomi Wolf. "I do think liberal feminists bear responsibility for a lot of what's gone wrong," she told me in 1997. "To me, what's so horrible is that they make alliances for the benefit of middle-class women. So it has to do with, say, having a woman in the supreme court. And that's fine - I'd love a woman, eight women, in the supreme court - but poor women always lose out."
It's probably better to read the whole article.
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