67 Andrea Dworkin calls Heterosexuality "totalitarian", but condones Bestiality & Incest

Andrea Dworkin calls Heterosexuality "totalitarian", but condones Bestiality & Incest

Trotsky, denying that there is such a thing as Human Nature:

"there is nothing unchanging on this earth ... society is made out of plastic materials"

 - The Revolution Betrayed (New Park Publications, 1967, p. 159): http://mailstar.net/trotsky.html#unchanging

Andrea Dworkin scoffing at "Human Nature":

{quote}
"man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian ... Heterosexuality, which is properly defined as the ritualized behavior built on polar role definition, and the social institutions related to it (marriage, the family, the Church, ad infinitum) are "human nature."
{endquote}
- Woman Hating (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974, p. 174).

Dworkin on Bestiality:

"Primary bestiality (fucking between people and other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies. ... in androgynous community, human and other-animal relationships would become more explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse" (p. 187-8)

Dworkin on Incest:

"The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism" (p. 189)

The occasional baby is born with two heads. That does not mean we abandon one head as the norm. The occasional farm animal is hemaphradite; that does not mean that farmers abandon two sexes as the norm.

The occasional person has sexual encounters with the same sex. That does not mean we dismantle the hetersexual structre of society.

(1) Caster Semenya tests show high testosterone; coach is former East German
(2) Caster Semenya row: is she a he? Top 10 gender benders in sport
(3) Houston Mayor Bill White proclaims 'Transgender Center Day'
(4) Transgender student turned away from prom
(5) Stu Rasmussen: transgender mayor receives reprimand for clothing
(6) Equal love: same-sex marriage rights now - (Trotskyist) Green Left Weekly
(7) Andrea Dworkin supported over bestiality & incest remarks
(8) Andrea Dworkin vs the Incest Taboo
(9) Obituary - Andrea Dworkin - no mention of her marriage
(10) Dworkin's marriage to fellow Gay Jew John Stoltenberg
(11) Quotes from Andrea Dworkin's book Woman Hating

(1) Caster Semenya tests show high testosterone; coach is former East German
Caster Semenya tests 'show high testosterone levels'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/athletics/6078171/World-Athletics-Caster-Semenya-tests-show-high-testosterone-levels.html

Preliminary medical tests on Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old South African at the centre of a gender row, have recorded elevated levels of the male hormone testosterone, Telegraph Sport can reveal.

By Simon Hart in Berlin

Published: 7:30AM BST 24 Aug 2009

A source close to the investigation into the 800 metres gold medallist has confirmed that tests carried out before the start of the World Championships indicated that the runner had three times the normal female level of testosterone in her body.

Telegraph Sport can also reveal that the head coach of the South African team is Dr Ekkart Arbeit, the former East German coach who was accused by a female athlete of giving her so many anabolic steroids that she was forced to undergo a sex-change operation and live the rest of her life as a man.

Although it is unclear how closely Arbeit has been working with Semenya, news of his position will raise concerns with the International Association of Athletics Federations.

The analysis on Semenya's testosterone levels was carried out in South Africa and it is understood this information contributed to the IAAF's decision to request the South African federation carry out a detailed "gender verification" test on the athlete.

Arbeit, who was named as a key figure in the East German doping machine in a German parliamentary inquiry headed by Professor Werner Franke, has admitted his involvement in the drug programme and has expressed his regret for the part he played in East Germany's tainted successes of the 1970s and 1980s.

But he has also insisted that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he has had no involvement with performance-enhancing drugs and that his coaching methods are now clean.

Heidi Krieger, who underwent surgery in 1997 and now lives in Germany as Andreas Krieger, has always blamed Arbeit for the role he played in supervising her drug regime under East Germany's state-sponsored doping programme.

Arbeit was, however, considered trustworthy enough to be invited by Frank Dick, a former head coach of British Athletics, to work with Denise Lewis, the 2000 heptathlon Olympic champion. Arbeit coached Lewis for several months in 2003 before they parted ways after the World Championships in Paris.

The row over whether Semenya is a woman or a man has become a cause célèbre in South Africa, where the country's parliament is preparing to file a complaint with the United Nations Commissioner of Human Rights over the athlete's treatment, saying the gender verification tests are a "gross and severe undermining of rights and privacy."

Medical tests on the athlete are said to be ongoing, with the results not expected for several weeks.

On Sunday, Lamine Diack, the IAAF president, said he regretted the public row over the athlete and admitted that the affair could have been treated with more sensitivity.

"It should not even have become an issue if the confidentiality had been respected," said Diack.

"There was a leak of confidentiality at some point and this lead to some insensitive reactions."

(2) Caster Semenya row: is she a he? Top 10 gender benders in sport

By Oliver Pickup 25/08/2009

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/more-sport/2009/08/25/top-10-gender-benders-in-sport-115875-21610519/

Nazi cover-ups, sexually ambiguous sprinters and tell-tale five o'clock shadows

Is she a he, or isn't she? A South African 800 metre runner's gender has been questioned after she stormed to victory in the World Championships in Berlin last week. Below we serve up our top 10 gender benders in sport. And - a word of warning - be prepared to stomach phases like, ahem, 'ambigious genitalia', 'transitioning'  and 'gender reassignment'.

1. Physically imposing middle-distance sensation Caster Semenya, 18, is at the centre of a gender inquiry due to concerns over whether she is really a bloke or lass. Yesterday she was found to have three times the normal female level of testosterone.

Weeks before the race the International Association of Athletics Federations made Semenya take a gender verification test, the results of which are not yet known.

Below shows her storming to victory in Berlin:

Strong running, you must agree. Make up your own mind about Semenya. Here she is speaking after her semi-final win.

2. Poor Caster could lose her (his?) medal if the IAAF determine she is actually a he – and it would not be the first time an athlete has been stripped of a medal … not to mention their dignity.

Three years ago Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan had to hand back her 800m silver medal after failing a gender test at the Asian Games in Doha. Sadly, feeling publicly humiliated, Soundarajan (below) later attempted suicide.

3. Back in 2005 a judge in Zimbabwe sentenced a leading youth athlete to four years in prison for competing in female events, after Samukeliso Sithole was caught with his pants down and found to be a man.

The 18-year-old, who earlier claimed to be a hermaphrodite, notched up seven gold medals in women's competitions in 2004.

After six witnesses - including two doctors – confirmed that Sithole was a man, she / he confessed and then was locked up.

4. Stanislawa Walasiewicz (later Stella Walsh) won Olympic gold for Poland in the 100 metres at the 1932 Los Angles Games. Four years later she won silver in the same event.

So popular was Walasiewicz in her homeland that she was named Polish sportsperson of the year in 1930 and from 1932-4 while in her career she set over 100 national and world records, including 51 Polish records, 18 world records, and eight European records.

And she would have gone down as one of the greatest sportswomen in history if she had not been caught up in an armed robbery in 1980. Walasiewicz was a bystander in the heist in Cleveland, Ohio, and was shot dead. An autopsy revealed that she possessed male genitalia.

5. In 2004 Australian golfer, and former man, Mianna Bagger qualified for the Ladies European Tour, becoming the first transsexual in history to do so. The LET had previously stated all entrants must be "female at birth", but the rules were changed for Bagger following a ruling by the International Olympic Committee.

6. American Richard Raskind was a pretty good tennis player – in 1972 he reached the final of the national championships for those 35-and-over. Later, as Renee Richards, he would go as high as 20th in the women's world rankings.

In the 1960s Raskind travelled to Europe to seek out a famous gynaecologist in the hope that he would make him a woman. However the lady was for turning and shelved that idea to return to the states to marry and father a child.

But Raskind's longings would not go away and in 1975 he underwent sex reassignment surgery. As Richards she gained notoriety for initially being denied entry into the 1976 US Open by the United States Tennis Association, who citied an unprecedented women-born-women policy. Renee disputed the ban, and the New York Supreme Court ruled in her favour a year later. New balls please!

7. German pole vaulter Yvonne Buschbaum, 29, was crowned world junior champion in 1999 and went on to finish sixth at the Sydney Olympic Games the following year. She also won Bronze at the European Championships in 2002, making her the second best female German pole vaulter in history  … and then things went a little bit strange.

In 2007 Buschbaum retired from the sport and began gender reassignment and demanded to be called 'Balian', after the blacksmith played by Orlando Bloom in the 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven.

8. Canadian cyclist Kristen Worley, a former man, very nearly competed at last year's Olympic Games in Beijing. She would have been 40, but her gender 'transitioning' began in 1996.

Years of hormone injections followed and while she claimed that she could achieve the Olympic qualifying time for the 3,000m pursuit, the Canadian Olympic committee brought an end to her dream, stating that the times had not been achieved in correct circumstances.

If she had have gone to Beijing, she would have been the first openly transitioned athlete to compete at an Olympic Games.

9. Ewa Klobukowska was the first Olympic athlete to fail a gender test. In 1967 she was found to have 'one chromosome too many'. Three years earlier she had stormed to prominence at the Tokyo Olympics having won gold in the women's 4x100 m relay and the bronze medal in women's 100 metres.

In Prague a year later Klobukowska ran the 100m in 11.1 seconds – then a world record. Further, in 1966, at the European Championships in Budapest she won two gold medals in 100 m sprint and 4x100 m relay and the silver medal in 200m sprint.

10. World record breaking high jumper Hermann Ratjen was forced by the Nazis in Germany to pretend to be a woman at the Berlin Games in 1936. The Nazis wanted to ensure that Germany won much more medals than they had done the previous Games – and many more than the dominant Americans – and Ratjen, or Dora, as he became known, missed out on a medal that year – he / she came fourth in the high jump.

But he won the European Championships in Vienna in 1938, setting a world record for the ladies high jump with a 5 feet 5.75 inches leap.

Ratjen was only found out while travelling back from the European Championships. Although Ratjen was wearing a skirt, two women spotted him with a five o'clock shadow at a train station and a doctor was summoned and his sex revealed.

Though Ratjen never competed again, because of his 'ambiguous genitalia', in 1957 he had been made to disguise himself as a woman "for the sake of the honor and glory of Germany". He added: "For three years I lived the life of a girl. It was most dull."

(3) Houston Mayor Bill White proclaims 'Transgender Center Day'

July 28, 7:36 AM

Matt Kailey

http://www.examiner.com/x-12237-Transgender-Issues-Examiner~y2009m7d28-Houston-Mayor-Bill-White-proclaims-Transgender-Center-Day

In an important celebration for the Houston trans community, Houston Mayor Bill White proclaimed July 25, 2009 to be 'The Transgender Center Day" in the city.

The proclamation (which actually says "The Transgender Center Day," rather than "Transgender Day," which has been reported in some news stories) was issued in honor of the one-year anniversary celebration of the Transgender Foundation of America Transgender (TG) Center of Houston. The center offers a variety of services for transgender and transsexual people and their loved ones.

In addition, the Transgender Center received proclamations from other government officials, including one from the State of Texas House of Representatives.

These types of proclamations are of particular importance to our community. They reflect a changing world. They reflect a move toward acceptance of the trans community. And they reflect progress in our movement for equality.

We continue to see laws changing in our favor in the United States, particularly at the state and local levels, and we continue to see certain politicians acknowledging us not only as a population deserving of recognition and equal rights, but as a potential voting bloc.

It's true that not all trans people vote in the same way. It might surprise some non-trans people to know that there is a wide spectrum of political beliefs in our community, just like in any other.

Many people who have gone through gender transition and have assimilated into mainstream male and female culture do not identify as trans at all. They identify as men and women (no trans in front of that), and they have their own political beliefs, ranging from extremely conservative to extremely liberal — just like everyone else.

Transgender and transsexual people who are visible and are activists for trans rights tend to be socially liberal, but some are fiscally conservative or subscribe to other conservative ideas, while others hold very liberal views in all areas.

Even so, with more trans people becoming visible and vocal, a power shift is happening, and it is not unreasonable to desire and court the trans vote. After all, we do vote. And we do pay taxes. And we have expectations of equality in exchange for our full participation as citizens.

For politicians to recognize this — and to recognize us — is definitely a step in the right direction.

(4) Transgender student turned away from prom

http://www.examiner.com/x-12237-Transgender-Issues-Examiner~y2009m7d30-Transgender-student-turned-away-from-prom

July 30, 7:34 AM

Matt Kailey

Jeremy was refused entry to his high school prom when he arrived in a gown and makeup instead of a tuxedo.

KUAM, Guam's news network, reports that officials at George Washington High School in Guam refunded the money Jeremy spent for a prom ticket, but are unsympathetic about the $400 he spent on clothing and other items, and will not issue him the apology that he wants for being unable to attend the prom.

Jeremy claims that he was discriminated against when he was denied entry.

'I said, 'Where does it state in this rule in this paper that there's no cross-dressing, no individualism and no opposite genders? It doesn't say anything.' So I have a case right here. And that's wrong," he said, as quoted by KUAM.

In an earlier report, Jeremy claims that girls were being allowed into the prom in tuxes, and that he was told that those girls were wearing "female tuxes."

George Washington High School has no policy regarding transgender students (Jeremy has also identified himself as gay), and the principal, Begona Flores, says that she will follow such a policy if it is drafted, but has no intention of initiating a policy because it goes against her beliefs.

Jeremy has apparently dressed in male clothing and expressed his gender as male in school, so school personnel were not unreasonably surprised when he arrived at the prom in a gown.

However, the fact that no policy was in place suggests that Jeremy should have been allowed to attend, and a reasonable policy would accommodate trans students as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual students.

Dress codes can be a major problem for trans students and for adult trans people in the workplace. While, ideally, a dress code for school or work should not be gender specific, we have not yet reached that place as a society.

But young people are transgressing those gender norms that society has established, and by pushing that envelope, they will eventually cause those necessary changes to be made.

In the meantime, many LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) youth organizations have established their own proms, to allow LGBT youth to bring the date of their choice, to wear the clothing of their choice, and to experience a prom that they can enjoy on their own terms, rather than one that has been established around heterosexual partnerships and specific gender norms.

These types of events for youth are important in the development of positive self-esteem and self-worth, internal characteristics that all youth should be equally entitled to possess.

(5) Stu Rasmussen: transgender mayor receives reprimand for clothing

August 5, 7:26 AM

Matt Kailey

http://www.examiner.com/x-12237-Transgender-Issues-Examiner~y2009m8d5-Stu-Rasmussen-transgender-mayor-receives-reprimand-for-clothing

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Transgender Issues Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Stu Rasmussen, the mayor of Silverton, Ore., received a reprimand Monday night from the Silverton City Council for violating the dress code for city leaders.

KGW of Portland reports that the council voted 4-3 to reprimand the mayor for wearing a halter top and short skirt to speak to a group of youth.

Rasmussen, who identifies as male and uses a male pronoun, but expresses his gender as female through his clothing, hair style, and breast augmentation, said he would be more careful with his clothing choices in the future when representing the city.

(6) Equal love: same-sex marriage rights now - (Trotskyist) Green Left Weekly

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/804/41369

Equal love: same-sex marriage rights now

Rhiahnon Kennedy
26 July 2009

A national campaign calling for same-sex marriage called Equal Love has been running for five years and has attracted growing support. Its focus is to shift public attitudes to gay and lesbian relationships through a campaign involving education and direct action protests.

Its key demand is for the Australian government to legislate for equal marriage rights for all — regardless of sex, sexual orientation or gender.

Same-sex marriage is a hot topic of debate in politics in Australia and the world over. The debate extends into the queer community. However, as the Equal Love campaign emphasises, the main issue is that same-sex marriage is a human right.

The arguments against same-sex marriage can generally be broken down into one of two types. The first argument is rooted in homophobia and bigotry. Ultra-conservatives and the religious right claim marriage is a sacred institution. Marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman, they say.

This kind of outright expression of homophobic prejudice has more to do with keeping in place a family structure reinforcing traditional roles than it is about protecting 'sacred love".

The modern nuclear family is very beneficial to the capitalist class. The family provides free of charge — mostly through women's unpaid labour — the reproduction of the next generation of workers, care for the aged and sick and the care and feeding of the present generation, among other things.

Alongside the exploitation of women, the traditional family system also plays a valuable ideological role for those who defend today's unequal class society. It's one of the main ways conservative values are instilled in young people.

Homosexual relationships pose an alternative and therefore are a potential threat to the present social system, which depends so much on the heterosexual nuclear family and traditional gender roles.  ...

(7) Andrea Dworkin supported over bestiality & incest remarks

Dispelling Myths About Andrea Dworkin

July 10, 2006 by womensspace

http://womensspace.wordpress.com/2006/07/10/dispelling-myths-about-andrea-dworkin/

Over at the Den of the Biting Beaver, someone using the screen name 'Andrea D" trollishly posted excerpts from Andrea Dworkin's book, Woman Hating, to a thread about bestiality, apparently intending to create the impression that Dworkin didn't oppose bestiality so as to score a 'gotcha" on feminists who admire and respect her work. Several commenters countered that Woman Hating was Dworkin's first book, written in the 1970s, and that she had later repudiated certain things and this was probably one of them. One commenter posted the quotes in context, but nobody offered the analysis which I think needed to be offered.

BB's post focused on the harm done in bestiality to both animals and women, but particularly to women in bestiality pornography. She was speaking to important issues around rape and sexual violence in general and did some good educating about the actual mechanics and biology of bestiality and how women are harmed by it.

Andrea Dworkin, in the paragraphs she wrote about bestiality, was writing about something entirely different. The paragraphs from which the quotes were extracted are found in Part IV of her book in a subsection entitled 'Androgyny." The focus of this subsection is on the construction of gender stereotypes and heterosexuality as normative. She writes in her introduction to Part IV:

We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions of male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to destroy the structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws: all of the images, institutions, and structural mental sets which define women as hot wet fuck tubes, hot slits.

Androgynous mythology provides us with a model which does not use polar role definitions, where the definitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male=good, female=bad, man=human, woman=other. Androgyny myths are multisexual mythological models. They go well beyond bisexuality as we know it in the scenarios they suggest for building community, for realizing the fullest expression of human sexual possibility and creativity.

Dworkin then goes on to write of these androgyny myths and of human biology, as well, arguing that biologically speaking, there really are not two discrete sexes, that sex differences exist along a continuum and are not a polarity. She then writes something about sexuality, about her conception of eros, which is foundational to all of her work and which provides vital and essential context to her comments about bestiality. When she uses the term 'androgyny" here, she is talking about mutuality-celebrating relationships between people who reject dominance hierarchies, gender stereotypes and the power inequalities which accompany them.

Any sexual coming together which is genuinely pansexual and role-free, even if between men and women as we generally think of them (i.e., the biological images we have of them), is authentic and androgynous. Specifically, androgynous fucking requires the destruction of all conventional role-playing, of genital sexuality as the primary focus and value, of couple formations, and of the personality structures dominant-active ("male") and submissive-passive ("female").

…An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation generally involves the denial of many profound and compelling kinds of sensuality. An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation generally means that one is, regardless of the uniform one wears, a good soldier of the culture programmed effectively to do its dirty work. It is by developing one's pansexuality to its limits (and no one knows where or what those are) that one does the work of destroying culture to build community.

She is talking here about a wholly new, completely restructured, re-created, revisioned definition of what is erotic, to include 'many profound and compelling kinds of sensuality," and along with that the 'destruction of … genital sexuality as the primary focus and value."

What Andrea Dworkin wrote about bestiality and incest is only problematic if sexuality, sensuality, and the erotic are conflated with genital sexuality. But historically, radical feminists, including Dworkin, have sought to challenge the idea that sex ought to be shut up to genital intercourse between a man and woman and have sought to expand the notion of sex to include many kinds and forms of intimacy and connection, many forms of sensuality, and to view the erotic not as shut up to genital urges, impulses, feelings and acts only, but as a force, a human drive, a source of creative power which informs our creative work as women as well as virtually all of our relationships. Nourishing, life-giving, pleasurable sensuality need have nothing at all to do with the genitals. So the problem is not with what Dworkin wrote about bestiality or incest — although extracted from its context, it certainly seems problematic – the problem is in our own inability to view sex, sensuality or eros as anything other than a penis in a vagina or some other available orifice or some derivation of these. Because heterosexual men have been the definers, not only of gender, but of sex and of eros, then everything intimate or sensual expression outside of heterosexual genital sex has been made to be feared as criminal, gender disordered, sick, disgusting, immoral, sinful, all of which works, of course, to regulate both sex and gender.

In her subsection on Androgyny, Dworkin lists homosexuality, transsexuality, transvestism, bestiality, incest, the family, and children because taboos and ideas around all of these are central to, and therefore sites of resistance to, patriarchal power. When she says the following (posted by the trollish person at the Den),

'Primary bestiality (fucking between people and other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies. Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationships between people and other animals) is found everywhere on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town. Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly places people in nature, not above it."

she is making a statement about hierarchy and dominance. She is saying that we, as humans, are not 'above" the animals, big us and little them, we are not better than, or more equal than, they are. Instead, animals and humans beings are all part of creation, of nature; none should be subordinated to others, dominated, viewed as existing to serve the others. To illustrate the point she is making, she begins this section with this quote:

'[In the Middle Ages] copulation with a Jew was regarded as a form of bestiality, and incurred the same penances." – G. Rattray-Taylor, Sex in History

Here again, she is saying that naming others inferior, subordinate, 'beasts," different, is a function and construction of power. She doesn't condone what she calls 'primary bestiality," or 'secondary bestiality," she uses the fact that they have always existed as evidence that we are all part of creation, of nature, we share much in common and are not so different from one another as we insist that we are. In fact — and this is the point she makes throughout her book — it is this insistence that we are so very different which in the end becomes the justification for those who had the power to pronounce the different 'different" to oppress them on the basis of that same pronouncement. The 'difference" of other creatures, human or animal, becomes the basis and excuse for their subordination, exploitation and abuse.

Following is the rest of the section on bestiality:

The relationship between people and other animals, when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substance is nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticism in its pure form is life-affirming and life-enrichng was sufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime in the Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficient reason for the English in the Dark Ages to confuse sheep and Jews.

In contemporary society relationships between people and other animals often reflect the sadomasochistic complexion of human relationships. Animals in our culture are often badly abused, the objects of violence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and therefore very dangerous sexuality. Some animals, like horses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbols of ideal macho virility.

Needless to say, in androgynous community, human and other-animal relationships would become more explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe, and, with us, respected, loved, and free. They always share our fate, whatever it is.

– Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, pp. 188-189

I think it is very clear here that Dworkin is talking about an expanded and revolutionary view of the erotic and of sexuality and sensuality. She defines the erotic as 'touch and nonverbal communication." When she says relationships between humans and animals would become more 'explicitly erotic," she isn't making a statement about genital sexuality or any sort of patriarchally-envisioned or defined sexuality, she is making a statement about touch, nonverbal communication, respect, love and freedom.

If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. If, for you, sexuality, sex, the erotic, sensuality equals a penis in an orifice, then you will read these paragraphs and see a defense of bestiality. If on the other hand you are always looking to change the world, to challenge the patriarchal status quo, if you are always looking to redefine and revision and re-create what has been used to oppress and subordinate you, then what you read in these paragraphs will be very different.

While I'm here, given that this post is intended to dispel myths about Andrea Dworkin, I wanted to draw attention to this line once again:

Any sexual coming together which is genuinely pansexual and role-free, even if between men and women as we generally think of them (i.e., the biological images we have of them), is authentic and androgynous.

One of these days, people will stop telling lies about Andrea Dworkin, including the lie that she said all sex between men and women was rape.

Heart

Posted in Feminism | 9 Comments

on July 10, 2006 at 1:31 pm4 Edith

Woman Hating is actually my favorite Dworkin book, precisely for the information on androgyny, so this really steamed me as well.

There is a very uncomfortable section in Kate Millett's The Loony-Bin Trip where she speaks at length and in fairly graphic terms about the erotic feelings she has for her horse. To be honest, it still disturbs me, and I don't what to make of it. Given the larger context of her book, she could have originally written it in as further evidence of her 'mania," but as she later rejected the terms of her illness AFTER the main book was written, it's all kind of confusing. If it's no longer pathological, then what is it? It appears to be in that murky area of not acceptable, not unacceptable, not feminist, not unfeminist.

I think it makes sense that some would make an argument in favor of beastiality on feminist terms. Don't treat women like animals, treat animals like animals, or that sort of thing. Or if a woman is pro-porn, perhaps she has looser ideas about the issue of consent. As I always like to say in these situations, just like a person could technically be a racist and still be a feminist, a person can be in favor of cruelty to animals and be a feminist, too. It's all a continuum. The irony of that, considering the narrow-minded take 'Andrea D" is using on her very own section about 'continuum"!

(8) Andrea Dworkin vs the Incest Taboo

Andrea Dworkin: heterosexuality vs. bestiality and incest

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mensrights/message/2741

Dan et al,

Below is an article quoting a leading feminist scholar and icon, Andrea Dworkin, on sexuality. Dan asked about her views that I mentioned of her encouraging incest. Below is that section of the article and after that the full text and url to the article.

FULL TEXT: {No Longer at http://www.carnell.com/feminism/andrea_dworkin/dworkin_001.html}

Andrea Dworkin: heterosexuality vs. bestiality and incest

By Brian Carnell

http://www.equityfeminism.com/articles/2000/andrea-dworkin-heterosexuality-vs-bestiality-and-incest/

Andrea Dworkin and her supporters claim she has been a victim of a smear campaign from opponents who distort and mischaracterize her claims about sex. The best way to get to the truth, of course, is go to the source and examine what Dworkin actually wrote. Unfortunately for Dworkin, once you sit down and read her work in depth she comes across as far more bizarre than even the occasionally out-of-context quotes from her writing makes her appear.

Androgynous sex

Consider her 1974 book Woman Hating, for example, which includes endorsement blurbs from Gloria Steinem and Kate Millet. Although there are numerous problems with the book, this essay will focus on chapter 9 of that volume, "Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community," which incorporates many common radical feminist ideas and tries to take them to their logical conclusion. The fundamental concept which drives Dworkin's thinking here is that the sexes are a fiction, and an oppressive fiction at that,

The discovery is, of course, that "man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for the male and female both (Dworkin 1974, p. 174).

{Woman Hating, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1974}

Now at some level this is an idea which many people might agree with. Certainly roles and models of behavior can be restrictive; the role for women which largely excluded them from working outside the home, for example, was unnecessarily restrictive. But Dworkin is not attacking the specific content of roles but of the very idea of roles themselves. In its place she wants to substitute what she calls an androgynous ethic. She tries to defend this androgynous ethic by claiming that there are no biological differences between "men" and "women" which would make any classification by sex possible, and then conclude that therefore any sort of sex-based roles whatsoever are unwarranted.

The Evidence

Before looking at the implications of this idea, it might help the reader to consider the sort of evidence (or lack thereof) that Dworkin tries to marshal for this claim that there it is wrong to divided human beings into one sex or another. First she notes that since there are numerous similarities between men and women's bodies, even in the sex organs, and some religious texts talk about androgynous gods or people, "there is no reason not to postulate that humans once were androgynous -- hermaphroditic and androgynous, created precisely in the image of the constantly recurring androgynous godhead" (Dworkin 1974, p.176). This claim, that once all human beings were hermaphroditic, is the sort of absurd nonsense claimed by radical feminists. There is simply no physical evidence for this claim. The oldest physical evidence of both homo sapiens and other primates clearly indicates the presence of sexual dimorphism. Second, Dworkin attempts to get great mileage from marginal cases. Women on average are shorter than men, but on the other hand there are some very tall women. Does this mean that height is completely independent of sex? No, but in Dworkin's book it does. Finally, Dworkin sites questionable sources for all sorts of nonsense about human sexuality. She cites Robert T. Francouer, for example, on the presence of hermaphroditic behavior in animals which seems reasonable enough until Dworkin goes on to cite and agree with Francouer's claim that not only is parthenogenesis (pregnancy resulting from an unfertilized egg) not only possible in human beings but in fact common! In fact, although parthenogenesis does occur naturally in some species of insects, reptiles and birds, it is all but impossible for it to occur in mammals because, unlike other animals, genetic contributions from both sperm and egg are required for fetal development in mammals.

A multi-sexed species?

From this "evidence" Dworkin concludes homo sapiens is a "multi-sexed species, which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete" (Dworkin 1974, p.183). As such, all sexual relations must be redefined to break from this false man/woman dichotomy. This has implications for a variety of sexual behaviors.

{Woman Hating, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1974}

Heterosexuality - Out

Of course, heterosexuality has to go. Dworkin defines heterosexuality to mean specifically "ritualized behavior built on polar role definition" -- i.e. almost all male/female sexual behavior today -- and writes,

Intercourse with men as we know them is increasingly impossible. It requires an abortion of creativity and strength, a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death. It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity which are central to it. Unambiguous conventional heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity (Dworkin 1974, p.184).

{Woman Hating, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1974}

This is not to say that "men" and "women" can't have sex, but that "androgynous [sex] ... requires the destruction of all conventional role-playing ... of couple formations..."

What does this mean? As Dworkin notes, homosexual sexual relationships are far closer to her version of androgyny because "it is by definition antagonistic to two-sex polarity" (Dworkin 1974, p.185). But even it is too polarizing for Dworkin because many homosexuals have sex only with other homosexuals. Instead what Dworkin wants to see is some sort of pansexuality,

An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation, whether homosexual or heterosexual, generally means an exclusive commitment to one role. An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation generally involves the denial of many profound and compelling kinds of sensuality. An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation generally means that one is, regardless of the uniform one wears, a good soldier of the culture programmed effectively to do its dirty work. It is by developing one's pansexuality to its limits (and no one knows where or what those are) that one does the work of destroying culture to build community (Dworkin 1974, p.185).

Dworkin doesn't explicitly say it, but monogamy is clearly one of those "cultur[ally] programmed" views that would have to be discarded to experience "many profound and compelling kinds of sensuality."

Bestiality -- In

One of the "pansexual" activities which Dworkin lauds is bestiality. As Dworkin puts it,

Primary bestiality (fucking between people and other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies. Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationships between people and other animals) is found everywhere on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town. Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly place people in nature, not above it (Dworkin 1974, p.187-8).

{Woman Hating, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1974}

Of course many people might point out that is precisely what is wrong with bestiality, but Dworkin is not to be deterred,

Needless to say, in androgynous community, human and other-animal relationships would become more explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe and, with us, respected, loved, and free (Dworkin 1974, p.188).

{Woman Hating, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1974}

Incest -- In

Another sexual practice which today is condemned but would be celebrated in this pansexual utopia is incest. Again it is best to simply quote from Dworkin,

The parent-child relationship is primarily erotic because all human relationships are primarily erotic. The incest taboo is a particularized form of repression, one which functions as the bulwark of all other repressions. The incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. The incest taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them... The incest taboo does the worst work of the culture: it teaches us the mechanisms of repressing and internalizing erotic feeling -- it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual "object"; it demands that we place the nuclear family above the human family. The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism (Dworkin 1974, p.189).

{Woman Hating, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1974}

A few paragraphs later, Dworkin makes it explicitly that she seeks nothing less than the destruction of "the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture" (Dworkin 1974, p.190). The above statements do not explicitly talk about sex with children, and perhaps they could be construed as dealing only with adults. Dworkin, unfortunately for her, does not end her chapter on androgyny before making it explicit that this does indeed apply to children as well. Exhorting women to take power and transform the world to an androgynous system, Dworkin counsels that children too must be liberated. What would children's liberation look like,

As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable of participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic impulses (Dworkin 1974, p.191-2).

{Woman Hating, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1974}

Is Dworkin's reputation deserved?

You can judge for yourself the answer to that question, at least as it relates to her view of human sexuality.

(9) Obituary - Andrea Dworkin - no mention of her marriage

http://www.nwmindia.org/newsmakers/andrea_dworkin.htm

Andrea Dworkin, well-known feminist writer and anti-pornography activist, dies

Andrea Dworkin: September 26, 1946 - April 9, 2005

Biography Andrea Dworkin is internationally renowned as a radical feminist activist and author who has helped break the silence around violence against women.

In her determination to articulate the experiences of poor, lower-class, marginal, and prostituted women, Dworkin has deepened public awareness of rape, battery, pornography, and prostitution. She is co-author of the pioneering Minneapolis and Indianapolis ordinances that define pornography a civil-rights violation against women. She has testified before the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography and a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She has appeared on national television shows including Donahue, MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News, and 48 hours. She has been a focus of articles in The New York Times, Newsweek, The New Republic, and Time. And an hour-long documentary called Against Pornography: The Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, produced by the BBC, was watched by more viewers in England than any other program in the Omnibus series and has been syndicated throughout Europe and Australia. Filmed in New York City and Portland, Oregon, it included excerpts from Dworkin's impassioned public speaking and intimate conversations between Dworkin and women who had been used in prostitution and pornography, most since childhood.

The author of 13 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Dworkin is a political artist of unparalleled achievement.

"In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve," said Gloria Steinem; Andrea is one of them." Dworkin's first novel, Ice and Fire, was published in 1986; Mercy followed in 1990 to wide acclaim in the U.S. and abroad- "lyrical and passionate," said The New York Times; "one of the great postwar novels," said London's Sunday Telegraph; "a fantastically powerful book," said the Glasgow Herald. Her latest nonfiction book is Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (The Free Press). ...

The Andrea Dworkin Online Library
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/ ...

(10) Dworkin's marriage to fellow Gay Jew John Stoltenberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin

In 1974, she met feminist writer and activist John Stoltenberg when they both walked out on a poetry reading in Greenwich Village over misogynist material. They became close friends and eventually came to live together.[25] Stoltenberg wrote a series of radical feminist books and articles on masculinity. Although Dworkin publicly wrote "I love John with my heart and soul"[26] and Stoltenberg described Dworkin as "the love of my life",[27] she continued to publicly identify herself as lesbian, and he as gay. Stoltenberg, recounting the perplexity that their relationship seemed to cause people in the press, summarized the relationship by saying "So I state only the simplest facts publicly: yes, Andrea and I live together and love each other and we are each other's life partner, and yes we are both out."[25]

Dworkin and Stoltenberg were married in 1998; after her death, Stoltenberg said "It's why we never told anybody really that we married, because people get confused about that. They think, Oh, she's yours. And we just did not want that nonsense."[27] ... ==

Andrea Dworkin

1946 – 2005

Jewish Women's Archive

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/dworkin-andrea

For the last twenty years of her life Andrea Dworkin lived happily with her devoted feminist partner, John Stoltenberg ...

(11) Quotes from Andrea Dworkin's book Woman Hating

Woman Hating

Andrea Dworkin

E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1974

{p. 174} CHAPTER 9

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

Nothing short of everything will really do. Aldous Huxley, Island

The discovery is, of course, that "man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. Culture as we know it legislates those fictive roles as normalcy. Deviations from sanctioned, sacred behavior are "gender disorders," "criminality," as well as "sick," "disgusting," and "immoral." Heterosexuality, which is properly defined as the ritualized behavior built on polar role definition, and the social institutions related to it (marriage, the family, the Church, ad infinitum) are "human nature." Homosexuality, transsexuality incest, and bestiality persist as the "perversions" of this "human nature" we presume to know so much about. They persist despite the overwhelming forces marshaled against them - discriminatory laws and social practices, ostracism, active persecution by the state and other organs of the culture - as inexplicable embarrassments, as odious examples of "filth" and/or "maladjustment." The attempt here, however modest

{p. 175} and incomplete, is to discern another ontology, one which discards the fiction that there are two polar distinct sexes.

We have seen that Androgyny myths present an image of one corporality which is both male and female.

{p. 183} We are, clearly, a multi-sexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.*

{p. 184} Intercourse with men as we know them is increasingly impossible. It requires an aborting of creativity and strength, a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death. It means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect. It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity which are central to it. Unambiguous conventional heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity.

That is not to say that "men" and "women" should not fuck. Any sexual coming together which is genuinely pansexual and role-free, even if between men and women as we generally think of them (i.e., the biological images we have of them), is authentic and androgynous. Specifically, androgynous fucking requires the destruction

* For bisexuality, cf. p. 183.

{p. 185} of all conventional role-playing, of genital sexuality as the primary focus and value, of couple formations, and of the personality structures dominant-active ("male") and submissive-passive ("female").

Homosexuality, because it is by definition antagonistic to two-sex polarity, is closer at its inception to androgynous sexuality.

{p. 187} Bestiality

[In the Middle Ages] copulation with a Jew was regarded as a form of bestiality, and incurred the same penances. G. Rattray-Taylor, Sex in History

Primary bestiality (fucking between people and other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies. Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationships between people and other animals) is found everywhere

{p. 188} on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town. Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly places people in nature, not above it.

The relationship between people and other animals, when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substance is nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticism in its pure form is life-affirming and life-enriching was sufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime in the Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficient reason for the English in the Dark Ages to confuse sheep and Jews.

In contemporary society relationships between people and other animals often reflect the sadomasochistic complexion of human relationship. Animals in our culture are often badly abused, the objects of violence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and therefore very dangerous human sexuality. Some animals, like horses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbols of ideal macho virility.

Needless to say, in androgynous community, human and other-animal relationships would become more explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe and, with us, respected, loved, and free. They always share our fate, whatever it is.

Incest

I was cold - later revolted a little, not much - seemed perhaps a good idea to try - know the Monster of the Beginning Womb - Perhaps - that way. Would she care? She needs a lover. Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish

{p. 189} The parent-child relationship is primarily erotic because all human relationships are primarily erotic. The incest taboo is a particularized form of repression, one which functions as the bulwark of all the other repressions. The incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. The incest taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them, or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and hearts of other humans who are not our parents and never will be.

The incest taboo does the worst work of the culture: it teaches us the mechanisms of repressing and internalizing erotic feeling - it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual "object"; it demands that we place the nuclear family above the human family. The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism.

The Family

For if we grant that the sexual drive is at birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the total personality (Freud's "polymorphous perversity") and ... becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo; and that ... the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family; then if we did away with the family we would in effect be doing away with the

{p. 190} repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a sexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what one must know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriate to male-female polarity and the internalized mechanisms of sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclear family at the moment is the extended family, or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process of destroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity. As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they will also develop the forms of community appropriate to it. We cannot really imagine what those forms will be.

Children

The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that moreover this oppression is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children.

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

{p. 191} Two developments are occurring simultaneously: women are rejecting the female role, and life is being created in the laboratory. Unless the structure is totally transformed, we can expect that when women no longer function as biological breeders we will be expendable. As men learn more and more to control reproduction, as cloning becomes a reality, and as the technology of computers and robots develop, there is every reason to think that men as we know them will use that control and technology to create the sex objects that will gratify them. Men, after all, have throughout history resorted to gynocide as a stratagem of social control, as a tactical way of attaining/maintaining power. That is the simple, compelling reality. There are only two other options: women must seize power, or we must accomplish the transformation into androgyny.

{p. 192} Conclusion

Nothing short of everything will really do. Aldous Huxley, Island

The object is cultural transformation. The object is the development of a new kind of human being and a new kind of human community. All of us who have ever tried to right a wrong recognize that truly nothing short of everything will really do.

The way from here to there will not be easy. We must make a total commitment - no longer to take refuge in the scenarios of man-woman violence which are society's regulators, no longer to play the male-female roles we have been taught, no longer to refuse to know who we are and what we desire so that we need not take responsibility for our own lives. We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist - marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil. We must refuse to submit to the fears engendered by sexual taboos. We must refuse to submit to all forms of behavior and relationship which reinforce male-female polarity, which nourish basic patterns of male dominance and female

{p. 193} submission We must instead build communities where violence is not the main dynamic of human relationship, where natural desire is the fundament of community, where androgyny is the operative premise, where tribe based on androgyny and the social forms which would develop from it are the bases of the collective cultural structure - noncoercive, nonsexist. As Julian Beck wrote, the journey to love is not romantic. As many have written, the journey to freedom is not romantic either - nor is the way known precisely and for all time. We begin here and now, inch by inch.

BACK COVER

Woman Hating

Andrea Dworkin

"... a bold and visionary book. ... Her ideas are powerful and dangerous." - Phyllis Chesler

"Reading a fairy tale after reading Woman Hating will never be the same. Nor will the phrase 'they lived happily ever after.' " - Ellen Frankfort

"This is a particularly important book on matters of considerable significance.' - Flo Kennedy

"To see where we are going we must understand where we have been. Woman Hating is a much needed due addition toward that understanding." - Audre Loudre

"The very fact of Dworkin's book, its abrasive, outrageous quality, its ability to generate so much abuse, anger, warfare - is testament to its power." - Kate Millett

"This book is fast, pure, and angry. Just reading the chapter on foot-binding or the Story of O could turn a reader into a revolutionary." - Gloria Steinem