Moving forward in this series, we hear
this story from The Pantheon, Marshall University’s student newspaper:
A
Women's Studies class from Marshall University is extending a list they
compiled from a writing assignment in hopes to raise awareness during Domestic
Violence Awareness Month. The
students in Laura Diener's Women Studies 101 class compiled "I want a
twenty-four-hour truce" from their own papers. The idea for the list came
from a speech given by Andrea Dworkin in 1983.
The article later says:
“The
idea is that coming from the Andrea Dworkin piece," Diener said. "We
can't have a 24-hour truce with rape, it's impossible, which is such a sad
thing. We can't have a truce with no violence, we can't have a truce with no
rape, we can't have one with no cruelty but we want that and the fact that we
can't have these simply things show some of the major problems in our
society"
Diener
said this assignment is in context with other assignments where students write
down their biggest fears, and amazingly they always include sexual assault and
violence.
"The
overall goal is to show the way that individual students are responding to some
traditional feminist pieces," Diener said. "The way that this piece
was written several decades ago, the way that it's still really relevant today,
the way it shows that rape and sex violence is a fear that really haunts
Marshall University students today."
Andrea
Dworkin is a Radical Feminist. To give a picture of her particular flavor of
Feminism, in her book Letters from a War
Zone, the same book in which her speech on a 24-hour truce is found, she
writes things like this:
"One can know everything and still be unable to
accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so
that the one without the imminent possibility of the other is unthinkable and
impossible." - Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 21.
Elsewhere in the same book she says:
"The newest variations on this distressingly ancient theme center
on hormones and DNA: men are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were
awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into
murder and rape." – Andrea Dworkin, Letters
from a War Zone, p. 114
And from another publication:
“Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also
the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman," - Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood, p. 20
"Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.
Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage
meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession
of, or ownership. Only when manhood is dead--and it will perish when ravaged femininity
no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be
free.” – Andrea Dworkin, Pornography
These are a few of the many morally questionable statements by Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin was one of the most vitriolic preachers of hatred that has ever walked the Earth, and one thing she devoted an inordinate amount of time to was equating the normal desires and functions of men with rape.
 | |||||
| "She Fears You," by Keith Edwards |
But let us consider her speech, which the students were required to read in professor Laura Diener’s women’s studies
class. Andrea Dworkin originally gave this speech at the National
Organization for Changing Men, which was later renamed the National Organization of Men Against Sexism,or NOMAS. NOMAS, as they declare on their website, is a part of the
pro-feminist men’s movement. This puts them in the same ideological camp as
Keith Edwards, who gave the presentation “She Fears You” at 60 colleges and
universities, and who we discussed in the last post in this series. NOMAS is also, as you
might guess, an organization of academics, particularly from Men’s Studies, a
field often hosted by those who bear the same attitudes as Keith Edwards.
In her speech, Dworkin calls
upon the men at NOMAS to organize among all men a day in which rape does not
occur. Due to space constraints I will not present her entire speech here, but
rather a few selections. Keep in mind as we go through her statements that this
is how Dworkin treated those who are the most sympathetic to her worldview. She
says:
“I have thought a great deal about how a feminist, like myself, addresses
an audience primarily of political men who say that they are antisexist. And I
thought a lot about whether there should be a qualitative difference in the
kind of speech I address to you. And then I found myself incapable of
pretending that I really believe that that qualitative difference exists. I
have watched the [pro-feminist] men's movement for many years. I am close with
some of the people who participate in it. I can't come here as a friend even
though I might very much want to. What I would like to do is to scream.”
"I think
that you rightly perceive--without being willing to face it politically--that
men are very dangerous: because you are."
“What's involved in doing something about all of this? The [pro-feminist]
men's movement seems to stay stuck on two points. The first is that men don't
really feel very good about themselves. How could you?”
"Have
you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It's not
because there's a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we
believe in your humanity, against all the evidence."
“The shame
of men in front of women is, I think, an appropriate response both to what men
do and to what men do not do. I think you should be ashamed."
"I mean that there is a relationship between the way
that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that
grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like
that woman went through Larry Flynt's meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn
well better believe that you're involved in this tragedy and that it's your
tragedy too. Because you're turned into little soldier boys from the day that
you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of
women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the
world in which you live. It is also part of the economy that you frequently
claim to protest."
“And the problem is that you think it's out there:
and it's not out there. It's in you.”
“And I want one day of respite, one day off, one day
in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to
the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for
less--it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even
in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for
one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.”
As we can see, Dworkin believes that men
as a group make war upon women as a group, a situation for which all men are collectively
guilty. She believes all men are socialized with the proclivity to rape. She
believes there is no qualitative difference between men who are sympathetic to
her concerns, and men who are not, and that all men deserve to be collectively
punished and shamed. My concern is that when women’s studies professors teach
the writings of Andrea Dworkin, they are not just teaching students her words;
they are teaching students her attitudes.
And although the misandry in Dworkin’s
writings vary in terms of how explicit and extreme it is, the same
dichotomization of “us versus them” with “us” being all women and “them” being all men, the same characterization of
men as a group being “all in it together,” and the portrayal of women as
completely devoid of agency, is a consistent theme in her work. But how prominent
is work like hers in academia?
 |
| Feminist Jurisprudence |
 |
| Intro to Feminist Jurisprudence |
If you read the anthology Feminist Jurisprudence, which primarily features
the work of Feminist legal theorists in academia, you will find not only the
writings of Andrea Dworkin’s, but also the writings of Radical Feminist
professors such as Catharine MacKinnon and Ann Scales. In this anthology, you
will find a section devoted exclusively to Radical Feminism, where the ideology
– which is widely regarded as one of hatred and intolerance – is instead presented
as a legitimate school of thought worthy of sanctuary in our academic
institutions. In another academic publication Introduction to Feminist Jurisprudence, which is taught in classes
on legal theory, you will find similar sections set aside for Radical Feminism.
A dissenting Feminist and former women’s
studies professor named Daphne Patai says in her book Heterophobia:
In late
February 1998, I attended a conference on sexual harassment held at Yale
University…many luminaries were there, including Catharine MacKinnon herself.
At the conference’s opening session, Andrea Dworkin, the radical
feminist…informed the audience of several hundred people that the “backlash”
began when white middle-class men saw that sexual harassment law was going to
affect them. This reaction, Dworkin thoughtfully suggested, showed us that
“millions of men wanted to have a young woman at work to suck their cock.”
"Did anyone
rise to contest such outrageous slander directed at all or even most men? On
the contrary. It is hard to imagine any other group of people in the United
States today who could be so crassly maligned in a public setting without
arousing immediate protest (6-8)."
I would like to take a second to
accentuate the fact that these things are occurring at such schools as Harvard and
Yale University. The infamous 2006 false rape case, in which 88 faculty
speaking for five academic departments and 10 academic programs ganged up on
three falsely accused students and presumed their guilt based on nothing more
than their genetic code, occurred at Duke University, a school which is
nicknamed “the Harvard of the South.” In their in-house publishing company,
Princeton University publishes The Canon
of American Legal Thought. A canon, in academic terms, is what the
Victorian poet Matthew Arnold said, “the best that has been thought and written.”
In the table of contents for this publication, we find that for each stratum of
philosophy there are a variety of authors giving voice to each. But when we
come to section where gender theory intersects with legal theory, we find one voice alone representing that school of legal thought: Radical Feminist professor Catharine MacKinnon. We will discuss MacKinnon in more detail later.
What is important to take away from this
is that these are not backwoods community colleges tucked away in a geographic
corner and marginalized from the discourse on what constitutes acceptable
academic practice and philosophy. These are Ivy League institutions that set
the standard not only for their respective schools, but for much of the
academic establishment in the Western world. What is supported by one Ivy
league school will be supported by a thousand more for that fact alone.
The prevalence of misandry in some of our
most prestigious schools is not that surprising when you think about it. Being
among the top tier institutions, they have a natural incentive to recruit the
newest and most cutting edge scholars who promote philosophies that push the
boundaries. Unfortunately, one of those newest philosophies is Radical
Feminism.
Cathy Young is an
old-school Feminist who disagrees with what she calls “establishment Feminism.”
In an article in the Boston Globe, she writes:
“Critics of radical feminism
have been often accused of exaggerating the importance of a handful of
male-haters in the movement. Yet Dworkin was never relegated to the lunatic
fringe where she belonged: her texts have been widely assigned in women's
studies courses, and prominent feminists from activist Gloria Steinem to
philosopher Martha Nussbaum have offered their praise, treating her
hatemongering as extremism in defense of the oppressed.” – Cathy Young, Boston
Globe, April 2005
But Andrea Dworkin’s work is not just advocated in classes on Women’s
studies. Her work is also picked up by other academics, such as professor Robert Jensen
of UT Austin, who in his closing speech at the [pro-Feminist] Men's Action Network concludes with the closing remarks of Andrea Dworkin's "truce" speech, saying to men:
"We do not want to do the work of helping you to believe in your own humanity. We cannot do it anymore. We have always tried. We have been repaid with systematic exploitation and systematic abuse. You're going to have to do this by yourselves from now on, and you now it."
Jensen later says that "that is really the challenge: for us to take up the gift that Feminism has offered us." I do agree with professor Jensen on some
things: extreme Feminism does present us with a challenge. And I also agree
with professor Jensen that men do need to assert their humanity, and that
Radical Feminism will not be helping us get there.
We will explore more of the
phenomenon of rape hysteria by faculty and administrators in our next post in
this series.
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