What will Camille Paglia say?

Andrea Dworkin is dead.  She died on Saturday, and as of 4:30 EST Monday, this is the only news source that has yet reported it.    The feminist blogosphere, I might add, has known for hours.

Let me get this straight: Derrida dies, and the world goes nuts.  Prince Rainer, ditto. 

But Andrea Dworkin, feminist icon, kicks it, and no one in the mainstream media so much as notices for two days?  Regardless of whether you believe in her politics, this is unbelievably, undeniably sad.  Appears it's a man's underworld, too.

Here's a great reflection on Dworkin by Susie Bright.

From Dworkin's speech, "I want a twenty-four hour truce in which there is no rape:"

It is an extraordinary thing to try to understand and confront why it is that men believe--and men do believe--that they have the right to rape. Men may not believe it when asked. Everybody raise your hand who believes you have the right to rape. Not too many hands will go up. It's in life that men believe they have the right to force sex, which they don't call rape. And it is an extraordinary thing to try to understand that men really believe that they have the right to hit and to hurt. And it is an equally extraordinary thing to try to understand that men really believe that they have the right to buy a woman's body for the purpose of having sex: that that is a right. And it is very amazing to try to understand that men believe that the seven-billion-dollar-a-year industry that provides men with cunts is something that men have a right to.

That is the way the power of men is manifest in real life. That is what theory about male supremacy means. It means you can rape. It means you can hit. It means you can hurt. It means you can buy and sell women. It means that there is a class of people there to provide you with what you need. You stay richer than they are, so that they have to sell you sex. Not just on street corners, but in the workplace. That's another right that you can presume to have: sexual access to any woman in your environment, when you want. Now, the men's movement suggests that men don't want the kind of power I have just described. I've actually heard explicit whole sentences to that effect. And yet, everything is a reason not to do something about changing the fact that you do have that power.

Comments

[davey]

there is a brief essay on the Sunday Edition this morning... here is the description:

"merican feminist, author and activist Andrea Dworkin died this week at the age of 58. She was a radical within a radical movement. In writings such as "Women Hating," and "Pornography and Civil Rights" she confronted the world and told it it was perverse. She found within even consensual sexual relations a disturbing power politic, and was famously and repeatedly misquoted as believing that all sex is rape. She succeeded in agitating observers right up to her death ... obituaries and memoriams ranged in tone from the mournful to the dismissive.

Toronto writer and broadcaster Susan G. Cole worked alongside Andrea Dworkin trying to come up with novel ways to deal with pornography and the law in Canada. She shares her memories of a woman who lived, and died, as a lightning rod for controversy."

It is only 4 minutes long.

david.