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thomblake comments on Can the Chain Still Hold You? - Less Wrong
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Meghan Murphy has written a blog post entitled "Can women rape men? I'm not sure I care.", though she later retracted it.
I don't think anyone has explicitly said "penetrative sex is rape"; they do use phrases like "inherently degrading and violent", but I've only ever heard opponents rephrase it as such.
Yes, I think the furthest Dworkin has gone is saying that a) penetrative sex is inherently violent, b) sex that is not initiated by "the woman" is never consensual, and c) men's pleasure is necessarily linked to victimizing, hurting, and exploiting.
Is this a generally accepted notion in feminism, or does it represent a fringe view ? The reason I ask is because this sounds exactly like something a Straw Feminist might say...
What algorithm do you use to tell the difference between a feminist and a straw feminist? According to this algorithm, are Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin straw feminists?
It seems to me that any feminist suddenly becomes a straw feminist when an offensive or clearly irrational quote made by them is presented in a discussion about feminism.
I think a straw feminist is meant to be a character (a fictional character, or a persona played by a troll, or an imaginary opponent), not a person sincerely expressing their position. So Daly and Dworkin weren't (or kept up the charade for quite a long time). Straw feminists say stupid and offensive things to make actual feminists look bad. Bugmaster meant that the quote sounds more like something someone would attribute to a feminist in order to make feminism look bad, than like something a feminist would say.
But there are in fact fringe feminists who are indistinguishable from their parodies.
I don't have a complete algorithm handy but I know that the first line includes the query "Does this person exist?"
It would be (arguably) legitimate to make that redesignation if the character is a fictional feminist. Then determining whether it is a 'straw feminist character' or 'feminist character' would entail an evaluation of to what extent the beliefs or behaviors reflect that which is within the realms of 'feminist', also taking into account inferences about the author's motives in creating the character. (Then you just shut up and say it is 'straw' if that makes your side of the debate look better.)
Could you provide evidence that Daly or Dworkin did assert such a thing? I've read quite a bit of Dworkin, nothing suggesting anything of the sort; I've read less Daly, and while I found all of it pretty silly I would be surprised if that was among them.
The "all sex is rape" claim is most often attributed to Dworkin or MacKinnon, which makes me strongly suspect that while surely someone somewhere has believed it, prominent radical theorists were not among them.
In another comment in this thread there is a link to Daly saying, in an interview:
A short look at wikiquotes of Dworkin gives this:
So assuming these are the best quotes to be found (I did not try too hard), it would be more precise and fair to say that Daly enjoyed the thought that 90% of men would be "decontaminated" by "an evolutionary process"; and Dworkin said that every man (under patriarchy, which means anything) is a "rapist or exploiter".
None of this really makes any of them a sick person, does it?
I mean, if I said that "if life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth; a natural process resulting in drastic reduction of the females" and "under feminism, every women is a rapist or exploiter of another man", those would also be perfectly OK, politically correct, inoffensive, and uncontroversial statements, ready to get me to the textbooks as a defender of equality and everything good. (Just joking, those are not my opinions.)
Well, you won't find me defending Daly; everything I've read of her suggests she's a nut. As you yourself note the passage doesn't directly imply the sex=rape thesis, and there's always context etc. (Dworkin for instance has some quotes describing sex as conceived by what she considers patriarchal ideology that have been taken out of context) but it also doesn't seem like a perverse interpretation.
Ah, but surely as rationalists we must not let emotions cloud our judgments or subject truth to the inquisitorial glare of political correctness, if men universally evolved to be scum may we should want to believe that they did, human biodiversity between untermenschen and überfräuen ought be celebrated, &c.
I don't have a problem to believe things like "most mass murderers are male", etc. (I just hope people around me are good enough at math to recognize that the statement is not equivalent to "most males are mass murderers".) Just give me evidence from a reliable source.
Show me a sustainable utopia with 10% males (I would actually encourage feminists sympathetic to this idea to try it, but only with volunteers), give me reliable reports from independent sources, and I might be convinced. Until then, it is just a hypothesis in the idea-space, and I find other explanations more likely.
My last paragraph was, like yours, just joking and not my actual opinions. I'm a pretty strong constructionist on gender and also a dude, if that means anything.
I'm having trouble telling which parts of this are ironic. I'm sure some of this must be ... I just can't tell what.
Non-ironic: Daly and Dworkin said some repulsive things, and a non-mindkilled person would recognize some problems with their ideas. (Here are the quotes, and I did not even try too hard to find them.)
Ironic: If I said the same things publicly, only with genders reversed, the people who consider Daly and Dworkin sane, would consider me sane too. (Not likely.)
Thanks for clarifying. It's sometimes hard to tell in a text environment.
In the absence of a closer association between Daly and Dworkin, conflating their positions is like conflating Stephen J. Gould and Steven Pinker because they both claim to apply the theory of evolution.
As I and Oligopsony have said, Daly can go piss off. Dworkin's quote is just articulating her definition of patriarchy. If you think we aren't living in that society, her definition is not particularly interesting. But it isn't like there's no evidence that she's somewhat accurately describing our current society.
MixedNuts and wedrifid said it better than I could.
It fits well into the memeplex of radical feminism. While I haven't had my finger to the pulse of feminism for a few years, I've gotten the impression that radical feminism hasn't been mainstream since the 1990s.
Radical feminists are a varied bunch. Twisty "everything is rape" Faster is a radfem, but so are a whole bunch of genderqueer BDSM pornographers.
I don't think the genderqueer BDSM pornographers usually call themselves "radical feminists"; they do call themselves both radicals and feminists, but they don't usually combine the terms. The term "radical feminist" seems to have been largely monopolized by the Andrea Dworkin/ Mary Daly/ Twisty Faster crowd.
I don't know if unpleasant second-wavers are the most common radfems or just the noisiest on the Internet. I tried doing a bit of a research but couldn't bear it, so you'll have to dig the everything-positive radfems up yourself if you're interested. There are a few I've talked to, but they apparently don't blog.
That's ... pretty far. I mean, damn.