I want to acknowledge that the discussion was opened to women. I am not a woman. I wondered as I read through the comments, how many of the contributors here are women and how many are men. Assumingperhaps incorrectlythat some if not many are men, I address what follows particularly to them. Regardless, I hope the lengthy response that follows enriches the conversation.
The idea that gender/sex is a classed system, or that race is a classed system, or that economic position is a classed system, stems from the social/political/economic analytic work of Karl Marx. Many consider this work to be of great value in organising socially against oppression and it has been used effectively in this regard, particularly in South America. "Class" is socially existent: Marx wasn't making it up; he was analysing its origins and how to combat its oppressive and dehumanising effects on the root level.
That is what I think about when I read some of the comments above, which appear to dismiss the reality of class oppression or to greatly minimise classed existence altogether.
To those who would deny or ignore such a reality, particularlybut not onlyif you are male, I would ask each of you to consider this: oppressors, or those atop any given social-political-economic hierarchy, generally want to deny the system itself, even while we reap the benefits, advantages, privileges, power, control, and access to resources that comes with being positioned, structurally, as an oppressor.
Anyone need only look at the history of England to understand economic class power and oppression. To understand it with regards to race, just look at the history of South Africa. To understand it with regard to gender, one need only look at most Western and non-Western societies.
To imagine the places in the world where gender/sex, race, and economic class become powerful combining sources of gross exploitation and abuse, consider only the reality of sexual slavery in the world. When I consider the difference in power, control, authority, and access to resources between these two groupspoor girls of color from relatively poor countries, disenfranchised ethnic groups, or police-harassed neighborhoods, and their oppressors: white men from wealthier countries, enfranchised ethnic groups, or police-protected neighbhorhoodsI am left without a means of comprehending such horror if I toss out the reality of class-level oppression.
Class theories about economics, race, or sex alone are not adequate to understand or combat that particular global atrocity. I have not been subjected to sexual slavery, to being sold into it, to being trafficked from country to country, to being forced or coerced to please a man (in fact, many men: hundreds of men) who I don't know who is three, four, five, and six times as old as I was between the ages of six and ten. Because of this, I am mindful of the structural positions of privilege and power I occupy socially: I am not poor, I am not of color, and I am not female.
I need to understand the concept "class oppression" to make sense of what is happening there. I don't accept that the cause is simply the 'bad fortune' of the millions of girls used and abused in those ways each day and night until somehow they escape or die. If it were only bad fortune, the demographics of the abused and the abusers wouldn't be so glaringly different.
Often, especially among white men on the Left, I find that unjust and inhumane economic class and racial class systems can be acknowledged and even fought against. But for some reason, the sexual class system is ignored by those men.
A radical white feminist died recently. Her name was Shulamith Firestone. She started a few majority-white radical feminist groups in NYC. Her most famous work, The Dialectics of Sex, was among the first feminist books (1970) to describe gender as a classed system of oppression--of women by men. I recently reread the opening to the first chapter of that book:
"Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child - 'That? Why you can't change that! You must be out of your mind!' - is the closest to the truth. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that."
But as this thread began referencing Dworkin, if you haven't read it yet, I found this piece of writing which relates to the one that opens this discussion: "Prostitution and Male Supremacy". Here is the link:
www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MichLawJourI.html