Andrea Dworkin on pornography

[MagicMix]

I've been meaning to read some Dworkin for a long time to try to better educate myself on second-wave feminism. I just got her book Pornography on my Kindle.

Wow, it is dynamite. I only just read the introduction but holy shit this is powerful stuff. I wanted to share a few quotes here.

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The women trapped in the pictures continue to be perceived as the free speech of the pimps who exploit them. No judge seems willing to look such a woman, three-dimensional and breathing, in the face and tell her that the pimp's use of her is his constitutionally protected right of speech; that he has a right to express himself by violating her.

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But no one, not even Goebbels, said the Jews liked it. The society agreed that the Jews deserved it, but not that they wanted it and not that it gave them sexual pleasure. [...] The questions now really are: why is pornography credible in our society? how can anyone believe it? And then: how subhuman would women have to be for the pornography to be true? To the men who use pornography, how subhuman are women? If men believe the pornography because it makes them come - them, not the women - what is sex to men and how will women survive it?

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A system of dominance and submission, pornography has the weight and significance of any other historically real torture or punishment of a group of people because of a condition of birth; it has the weight and significance of any other historically real exile of human beings from human dignity, the purging of them from a shared community of care and rights and respect. Pornography happens. It is not outside the world of material reality because it happens to women, and it is not outside the world of material reality because it makes men come. The man's ejaculation is real. The woman on whom his semen is spread, a typical use in pornography, is real. Men characterize pornography as something mental because their minds, their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies, are more real to them than women's bodies or lives.

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It is suddenly extremely clear to me why Dworkin is demonised the way I was always semi-aware of. This was a dangerous woman to the patriarchy. I would give my right arm to go back in time and give this book to my teenage self. I don't know whether I would have really got it back then, but I grew up not hearing a single critical thing about pornography. The only reason anyone could have a problem with pornography that I knew about back then was being an uptight, sexually-repressed religious fanatic. A clear, powerful, shocking voice like this would have been life changing. And she wrote this intro in 1989, when by all accounts mainstream porn was tame compared to the porn of today and wasn't readily available to the extreme degree it is now.

Anyway, off to get on with the rest of the book. If it's all as good as the intro, I highly recommend it. Anybody read any other Dworkin and have some recommendations of what to get next? Because I definitely want to hear more from her. Or any other second-wave feminists?

Get them while they're available;
tinyurl.com/Fembooks1

Thanks for posting Magicmix. Porn, even hardcore porn has pretty much been normalised now and it's my experience that anyone who attempts to raise it as a feminist issue will get a majority response, which will include other 'feminists', citing the 'happy hooker' and other 'empowered' women who love staring in porn 'so what's the problem?' I don't have any answers for how we deal with the awfulness of it all, though my gut feeling is that change will come from raising our children with the truth of the very real and disastrous consequences suffered by us all from accepting it as it is now.

"If men believe the pornography because it makes them come - them, not the women - what is sex to men and how will women survive it?"

And we already know, from the recent 'rough sex gone wrong' travesties, than far too many women don't survive it.

What a seemingly simple question, 'what is sex to MEN?' -- and porn of today tells us that, however hard so many claim it doesn't. It's all 'fantasy' they say, yet the women in porn are real, and we all know that the porn would not work for them if they weren't real.

It's a tough read MagicMix, but she did the hard work of looking, and came back and told us what she had discovered.

How so many supposed feminists can claim that porn is all fine and dandy is beyond me, once you have read Dworkin.

Hi there Magic!

I recommend Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape - another second wave classic.

I’m going to read it too. It came out in my teens and when I became political in my later teens and studied femininsm in my early 20s, I never read it. I never read it because I knew - though I never voiced it - that if I did, I’d struggle to sleep with men (late bloomer alert). I felt myself to be heterosexual and I had a huge urge to have kids. So I badged it as ‘extremism’ and stayed away. I’m ready to read it now. The way things have gone with porn - I suspect she nailed it. I also suspect it will do for my heterosexuality.

Of all the feminist discussions I find depressing, I think the ones about porn are the most depressing.

Sorry, that’s not a helpful contribution, I know.

Ah Andrea. I went to university at 19 having read zero feminism, and went straight in at Dworkin. Fuck me, that was a heady experience.

I have Intercourse and Right Wing Women somewhere, as well as Pornography.

I really should re-read them now I am 50. I strongly expect I will still love her.

I read "pornography" when I was a teenager in the 1980s. I found it amazing yet terrifying - and I had no one around me who was like minded that I could discuss it with. My response was to try to unsee what I had already seen and to close it off and forget it.

I'd like to read it again, 30 years on

When I was a student in the early 90s, Dworkin made me uncomfortable. I didn't want to hear her. Now she gives me the shivers because there was something prophetic in her writing.