Maybe they just read, say, Dworkin, on how all heterosexual sex is rape? Pretending people who disagree with political movements just need to understand those movements more is presumptuous.
Michael Moorcock: 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?
Dworkin: No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say that, then or ever.… 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 understand Dworkin says she didn't say that. Here is the actual quote, which seems very different from the 'point' above:
> 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.
If you read this in context, it's clear that she's saying "this is the view of patriarchal society", not "this is how things should be".
Later in the same chapter you're quoting from, Dworkin says:
> Women have also wanted intercourse to work in this sense: women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men, including in the act of intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love. There has been—despite the cruelty of exploitation and forced sex—a consistent vision for women of a sexuality based on a harmony that is both sensual and possible… These visions of a humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of women; and even the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill them. They are not searching analyses into the nature of intercourse; instead they are deep, humane dreams that repudiate the rapist as the final arbiter of reality. They are an underground resistance to both inferiority and brutality, visions that sustain life and further endurance.
Odd, I'd already expanded the area around the quote to provide context when pasting it. There seems to me a casual move between using the word 'men' and using 'patriarchy' (used as a synonym for evil), that many people find disturbing.
This is actually really good stuff, I've never been a fan of Dworkin due to some out of context quotes. I would say that this attitude isn't one held by all women, though.
Dworkin makes challenging reading, and is certainly extremely radical and outspoken. But most of the really unbelievable things attributed to her are misreadings or deliberate distortions. She just doesn't pull punches.
That's interesting, actually. I think that many radfems have actually got the wrong end of the stick too, as I've seen many an article (not by Dworkin) saying that PIV sex is always rape. But they are seen as kind of wingnuts in the broader feminist community.
Dworkin rejects that interpretation of her writing. "What I think is that sex must not put women in a subordinate position. It must be reciprocal and not an act of aggression from a man looking only to satisfy himself. That's my point."
