Don't do that unless you really want to read it for yourself. I read a summary, it's just I want to make sure people know I only read a summary.
I do want to read it. I've read
Intercourse and
Pornography, which are the titles by her most commonly in print, and I thought those were really good.
Yeah, I get that. I just don't know her ideas with any depth. Porn bad, all sex is rape, etc. I'm on a shit ton of oxycodone and I've done my best to read the past few pages, but I didn't get much from it.
If I was to try and condense it, Dworkin asserts that women live their lives being defined by men. What women are "supposed" to want, to look, what they do, etc. is all defined on male terms. Men position themselves as the arbiters of reality and women as their fungible subjects and chattel. If you look at pick-me girls you can see what Dworkin means; some of them have no idea who the hell they are without defining themselves in comparison to a man.
So the men have centered sex (intercourse, really) around themselves. It's all about male pleasure and satisfaction, and female pleasure is not important. To Dworkin, trying to be a "sex-positive feminist" was tantamount to letting men on the Left violate you repeatedly and calling that empowerment. And because men fucking *hate* women, intercourse is peppered with themes of domination and violence. So too is porn. Men may notice that they need escalating levels of violence in their porn to be satisfied, but they don't really comprehend that they've been conditioned to see sex as an act of violence. But the vocabulary still shows, and so do the themes. They didn't just fuck, they "slay pussy", "destroy", "annihilate", "desecrate", etc.
I don't want to bore you, or anybody else, but my main criticism of Dworkin is applicability. She has a lot to say about marital rape, but afaik the exemption for rape within marriage has been taken off the books. She talks about the porn and sex shops and hookers on 42nd street in NYC, but that area has turned to an orgy of capitalism. She discusses gay liberation a lot, but today gays enjoy many more rights than they did in the 80's. These issues are obsolete so it's easy to dismiss Dworkin as obsolete.
I do think a lot of what she has to say is still rings true. There may not be an explicit law defending a husband's right to rape his wife, but the husband-wife relationship still has overtones of domination and control. (I used to joke: "I can do whatever I want, so long as my husband's OK with it!") Men don't buy porn at brick and mortar stores anymore, but it's proliferated on the Internet to cater to every fetish, and it conditions men to equate sex with violence against women. Gay women may be allowed to marry now, but TRAs still threaten to erase gay culture and replace it with a Frankenstein heterosexuality.
So there's a lot of content there, big ideas, difficult for moidlet brain to comprehend without pictures.
I did find chapter 3, "Abortion" (and only chapter 3) of
Right Wing Women online. It's interesting, it repeats some themes from Intercourse maybe too often, but the information about how men see themselves in the aborted fetus is new to me, and tbh explains a lot about why moids seem to care so goddamn much about black fetuses and not a whit for the babies once they're born.
