April 12, 2005
Funny because it's true:
(And very rarely do I ever find Mallard Fillmore to be faintly funny.)
In other news: Andrea Dworkin, the famous women's activist and flesh-covered wrecking-ball recently developed enough good sense to finally die. What a shame.
She's described in the article as an 'anti-porn crusader' but she was also the archetypal histrionic man-hater who penned such cartoonishly misandristic screeds as the following:
"In everything men make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, still their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives." -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters From a War Zone, p 214.
I don't know about you fellows out there-- but I simply love to run-around and murder people. I can't get enough of it.
Hey I know a neat trick-- why not take Dworkin's quote and substitute 'men' with 'blacks'? How does that sound?
"In everything blacks make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Blacks especially love murder."
D'oh!
But of course, Dworkin's defenders all say that she's taken out of context. But is there any kind of context in which the above statement suddenly becomes appropriate?
Seriously. I DARE you to come-up with an appropriate context that gets her off the hook with that one.
She was an utterly implacable sexist; her rhetoric was demented. It suggested collective punishment, sometimes overtly calling for violence (because men deserve it) while arguing in the next breath that victims of violence never deserve it. She was an enemy of free speech, demanding censorship for porn because it supposedly causes rape. (I wonder if women who enjoy looking at porn ever rape themselves?) Her writings were full of absurd, inflated and bizarre declarations of how women's lives were (on a constant basis) filled with atrocities and horror. These are claims that any sane female would simply find to be preposterous. If Dworkin can say that men see women only as sex objects, then I can say that Dworkin saw women only as pity objects.
Her self-discrediting melodramatic screeds and sheer magisterial gooniness makes it seem fairly easy to denounce her as a nutcase. Ah, but there is an unspoken rule among American feminists: if it has a vagina, you can not criticize it. No matter how crazy it starts to sound. As a result, Dworkin warped and contaminated the women's movement and did much to make it weird and shrill. (Her 2001 book, Scapegoat: the Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation contained the suggestion: "women need land and guns." Draw your own conclusions, folks. And try to ignore the Freudian implications of women needing "guns".)
The fact that so many mainstream feminists failed to denounce Dworkin (at best, they'd criticize her on grounds of rhetorical excess), did much to kill the moral validity of that movement in my eyes. If they ever wonder why so many mainstream women and men regard feminists as being a gaggle of raging nutcases, much of the thanks goes to Dworkin. And nay, my feminist readers (I know you're there)-- it's not because you get 'bad press' for inexplicable reasons. It's because you're a closed-minded, hypocritical bigot and most women don't want anything to do with you.
I suppose Dworkin did me a great service: it helped to open my eyes to exactly how loathsome an American female can act: saying the most single-mindedly hateful, hypocritical and insane things while wearing your victimhood as a badge and claiming the moral high-ground.
If you go-around the feminist blogs for this day, you'll see all kinds of glowing statements about how 'brave' and 'misquoted' she was and how she was only trying to fight evil, although she might have slipped in making a few wild-eyed statements every now and then. Instead of taking Dworkin's statements at face value, there are a number of amusing contortionists' attempts to argue that her most openly bigoted statements aren't really bigoted statements but are actually highly nuanced and profound insights which are merely being distorted by regressive woman-haters. They would never accept any of their own rationalizations if someone were to craft similarly-worded statements that were modified to insult, say, a nonwhite ethnic group. The effort at revisionism is quite impressive, albeit dismaying. But despite their best attempts to argue that circles are square, it's far simpler to let Dworkin's words speak for themselves: "I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig."
Oh, that's very nuanced. Yeah, great. You go girl.
Next week, these same bloggers will wonder why they get stereotyped as a pack of ugly dick-cutters. They'll never take an honest look at their dead champion and draw the most obvious conclusions.