Plain, Simple… And Wrong
It’s been many years since I last bothered the ErosBlog audience with my reactions to beyond-the-pale notions in radical feminist politics. Going out upon the internet to find an outrage of extremity was fun in 1996 or even in 2006, but in 2016 it has too much in common with shooting fish in a rain barrel. It’s like: “Yeah, internet, there be crazies, whoa, you just figured that out? Way to be slow, dude!”
I’m making an exception this time, however, because of a resonance with a factual “did-she-or-didn’t-she” argument from so long ago that it pre-dates the web’s easy fact-checking. I’m old enough to remember when Andrea Dworkin had not yet begun to deny that she meant “All heterosexual sex is rape” when she actually wrote “violation is a synonym for intercourse” in her infamous book. For quite some time she sort of walked a knife’s edge of deliberate ambiguity, basking in radical approbation for having “went there” while dissembling just slightly to the media in order to preserve her mainstream respectability and media access.
Whatever Dworkin truly meant back in 1987, the malign idea first attributed to her has certainly not died. If she didn’t quite mean it, or wasn’t willing to own it back then, in 2016 there are some who do and are. Check this out:
The first sentence is “Just to recall a basic fact: Intercourse/PIV is always rape, plain and simple.” That’s followed by nine paragraphs of supporting argument. Of course it’s all shot through with the totalitarian ideology that women aren’t capable of consent and that their accounts of consent should not be credited. It will always baffle me that anyone who advocates for women or for any of the various feminisms could be comfortable with such a sweeping dismissal of female agency. Does not compute!
And that’s quite enough about that.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=17856
I can sort of understand what they’re saying, but only if I first accept that I do not share that author’s definition of “rape.”
The crime of “rape,” as I perceive it, is a violation of the victim’s right to decide whether or not to engage in a sexual activity, provided that the decision is free of the threat, duress, etc.
In that author’s opinion, I believe that she is using “rape” to be a synonym for “systematic oppression” or “exertion of control.” Also, the author writes as though “rape” were something that was experienced by (and/or perpetrated against) all women simultaneously, regardless of their interaction with the sexual activity. If my interpretation is accurate, then I can better understand the argument: traditional intercourse is always a means of control over a woman by a man, and is a symbolic oppression of all women. I don’t agree with that position, but it’s a much less opaque (and far less polarizing) argument.
As an aside, I believe (though I admit I could not support this assertion) that you often see this sort of thing in radicalized discourse; where the author(s) will use a deliberately polarizing word to signify an idea in order to further ideological divide. It would be similar to the way that far-right Americans use the word “great” in the phrase “Make America Great Again” to signify their vehement objection to those things which the non-speaker is aware the speaker is opposed to. Identity and
The use of an intentionally attention-grabbing and intentionally polarizing syntax is certainly problematic from the position of the open transfer of ideas, but that is probably not the author’s goal. Rather, deliberately polarizing speech is, in my experience, most often aimed toward “the choir” rather than “the gentile.”
I agree that the more problematic aspect comes when you intentionally (or unintentionally, I don’t know) follow the dogma literally and start condemning a person’s right to willingly engage in an activity. It’s an a posteriori argument: if you start from the conclusion that an activity is rape, the victim could not have consented to it (because if there was consent, there was not rape). If, instead of using the term “rape” you consider “systematic oppression of all women,” then you can actually have your a posteriori argument: if PIV intercourse is always an act of systematic oppression against all women, you can condemn the willing participant as a “gender-traitor” without simultaneously stripping that person of their right to make a choice. Surely, it must be a far better position to hold that a person is making a bad choice rather than to claim that they made no choice at all, but were nonetheless compliant in their own victimization. Even though you must ultimately concede the objectivity of your own position, you can make all of the same arguments. If the arguments are sound then they will stand.
Yea THIS is why when I say I am feminist, some people run the other way. I have to keep explaining that batshitcrazy and feminist are completely different concepts.
If you think this article is lovely, you should hear what I’ve been told about my consensual S&M relationship with my trans man partner while I continue to self identify as queer. It’s as if my entire sexual history was planned just to spite them. Lucky coincidence ;)
Ashley, yes! In fact feminist is a word I never claim for myself, because there are too many feminisms and I’m likely to offend someone who thinks I don’t live up to their version. My mother’s feminism has no place in it for porn, the linked blogger’s feminism has no place in it for my favorite kind of sex, and my conception of the word may not match that of anyone else. So I just do what I do and say what I say and hope it’s contributing somehow to a better world for everybody.
And thus we invented the Waves of feminism, so we could argue about smaller and more precise meanings. Some people call the current developing wave of thought coming out of Unis 3rd wave, but it’s really 4th wave, or something else entirely, perhaps more accurately ‘taking offense culture’. There are serious battles still to be fought, but if we spend All day arguing about which terms to use, we’re going to get stuck forever. We need to call some things good enough for now, and spend more time later deciding on the order of letters in LGBTIQ+
Justin, I see this as more than artificial etiquettes dancing on the head of a campus pin. This is a serious effort to define the terms of the discourse in a manner that defines away the agency of women. If you can set things up so that their consent is (must be!) always disregarded, you’ve set yourself (or somebody other than them, anyway) up as the arbiter of their lives. If they can’t be trusted to know their own good, they aren’t free. It’s a totalitarian ideology that is even more pernicious than the folks who want to redefine offensive speech as aggressive or violent.
Most civilised people would agree there’s still a lot of work to be done about gender imbalance, and gender issues in general. At my late stage in life I’m trying to redress some of my entrenched thinking. I’d have dismissed this sort of talk a few years ago but now I tend to think it may serve a purpose, even if it isn’t the intended purpose when the statement was originally made.
There are several ways to conduct a negotiation, a process which bears similarities with a seduction. The classic gambit is to wait until your partner tells you what they want, so you have a ball park idea of whether you’re in with a chance. There’s a tit for tat point and counter-point and eventually you settle or walk away.
Sometimes the other side is so dug-in and closed-off that the only way to move the negotiation is to drop a bunker buster on it. The equivalent of turning up to view a used car for sale and offering to tow it away for free, because who would pay for THAT?
If systemic oppression of women is the issue, perhaps the only way to address it is to call all sex rape and then negotiate down once you have people’s attention. When you make someone deny they’re a rapist, most people will be angry, but some will be thoughtful and ultimately you’ll have shifted things slightly. Maybe. It’s just a thought. I try not to get angry these days, because there’s just so much to get angry about and I’m pretty sure anger causes cancer. (Alternatively, I don’t think I’ve ever achieved anything substantial without getting angry first.) I actually favour the organic approach which is slower and less disruptive, but gets there in the end, however it does seem like we’ve been moving backwards on acceptance recently.