Welcome readers. My apologies for the lack of posting today. Normally, Tuesdays are a very prolific day for me, but I felt a bit ill this afternoon and skipped a few classes in favor of sleep. Posting will be unpredictable this week. Just stay tuned.
Andrea Dworkin, an infamous feminist, died this week. Ordinarily, I might not know who this person was (I tend not to read much literature from extreme left feminists), but her work came to light after I wrote my term paper for my ethics course on pornography.
Her position on pornography produces one of the few agreements I would ever have had with her. Her concern for the plight that pornography put on women was noble, and the treatment she gave of the connection between civil/equal rights and the effects of pornography were creative and thought-provoking. Unfortunately, past that, we wouldn't have seen eye to eye. While her writings never quite equated all heterosexual sex as rape, it came pretty darn close. All male sexual expression, at least, was an act of violence, a means of creating submission in women. Too much of her position required an extremely low view of men. Don't get me wrong: Pornography is horribly subversive and damaging. But as she views the problem, it goes beyond pornography; everything that is male is, by nature, anti-female.
Be that as it may, despite the real lack of substantial results her work seems to have had in the world, the fight against pornography is still worth making. She made a worthy ally in the fight, even if all of her ideas and positions were less than palatable.
Side-note: Perhaps sometime I'll post the text of that term paper on here for digestion. Your thoughts?
No comments:
Post a Comment