army1987 comments on Can the Chain Still Hold You? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (354)
Wowzers! Daly is so essentialist (i.e. thinks women all inherently have certain mental characteristics). I'm not surprised that someone held her positions so much as I am surprised that she's considered an (recent) influential feminist. I thought that all (contemporary?) feminism was just applied post-modernist (i.e. noticing that gender roles are historically contingent). But that's clearly inconsistent with Daly. Model updated.
That said, I suspect I'm a lot more sympathetic to many of the arguments than you are. I don't think I need to reject Andrea Dworkin in order to reject the essentialism of Daly. That said, I hope that Dworkin hasn't said that the gender of the rape victim matters, because it shouldn't matter. (She essentially agrees with your other examples, I think).
I've heard non-obviously-bogus arguments that it should, e.g. men cannot get pregnant as a result of rape.
Some can. It's probably a very different experience though.
And many women can't. If it's unknown to the rapist, asserting power through a threat of forced pregnancy might still happen, but if she's like sixty-five that's not going to happen.
But gender does matter. A man raping a cis woman has a gender wars element to it, usually something like "Men want sex and women don't, so this man is taking it from this woman, scoring one for Team Men. She's a slut for letting it happen, unless she can prove she's a perfect victim and he's a complete monster, in which case she's a victim of female weakness and needs protected by a strong good man.". Conversely, a man raping a man hinges more on "A man weak enough to let someone rape him is not a real man, but gay-female-feminine. He is ridiculous and pathetic.". There are other gender-dependent examples with female perpetrators, with prison rape, with corrective rape, with rape as a weapon for cultural domination, with isolated communities, and so on.
Of course it doesn't matter in that some rapes count and some don't, and it shouldn't matter at all. Just saying, you should expect different support structures, not identical rape shelters which just happen to be 25% male-populated.
Unwanted pregnancy can be a result of rape, but rape seems like a separate Bad Thing that can happen to someone.
In addition to what MixedNuts said, the question I was raising was whether this was a feminist position. To the extent that it is, I'd like to know whether it is from the methodologically incorrect branch (represented in this discussion by Mary Daly) or the methodologically more correct branch (represented by Andrea Dworkin).
It would surprise me to hear that Dworkin has asserted that men can't be raped - and if I heard it, I'd need to re-examine whether her arguments about the social effect of porn are valid (even if she's right, there are knock-on concerns that weigh against censorship).
More generally, conflating Daly and Dworkin is like conflating Stephen J. Gould and Stephen Pinker.
I think I saw a comment subthread on The Good Men Project along the lines “What's it matter whether it's a man who has sex with a woman too drunk to consent [or something like that] or the other way round?” “The woman can get pregnant, etc., etc.” “Wow, that's some serious Dworkin you're channeling”, but I can't find it right now, so I might have dreamt it or something.