It was great, had two academics come up to me to apologize about how they talked about sex work
Tag: proletarian feminism
Does she look feminist enough? Does she fuck like a feminist?
Are just “is she pretty enough” and “does she fuck like a nice girl or like a slut” by other names with different but equally restrictive demands placed upon women.
Effort spent monitoring whether women’s appearances and sexual behavior are acceptable by a set of arbitrary standards is never feminist
Ultimately Dworkin is writing from her time, and from her vantage point without bothering to fact check much, and without challenging her own assumptions. She’s a bourgeois child of the new left and I cannot find it in myself to like her, or commend her intellectual laziness
What it comes down to is this: through the use of drugs, through sexual living out, through radical political action, we broke through the bourgeois mental sets which were our inheritance but retained the humanism crucial to the liberalism of our parents.
Andrea Dworkin. This is the bougiest shit I have ever read
We are, at least in our Amerikan manifestation, white, children o f privilege, children of liberals and reformists. We were brought up in pretty, clean homes, had lots of privacy, friends, companionship from family and peers. We are unbelievably well educated—we went to fine suburban schools (mostly public) where we experienced physical and intellectual regimentation which we found unbearable; we went to the best colleges and universities (mostly private)
Andrea Dworkin, proletarian feminist my ass
Actually I think Dworkin’s fundamental misunderstanding of the sex industry leads her to a flawed analysis of patriarchy, as well she misses some stuff on class based differences in gender presentation and misses a most fundamental point on beauty labor, which is that the patriarchy only likes that if we respectably hide the labor involved
Is There Good Stuff On Like The Masculinization Of Violence
Like by denying women recourse to violence you’re committing a strategic act of oppression, and by positioning women as non-violent even if you’re praising them for that it’s a way of preventing women from fighting back against patriarchy.
Caliban and The Witch
The history in Caliban and The Witch is making me mad because it’s wrong. Why is there so much bad history? Like I don’t mind getting off on critical theory tangents, but get the underlying history right, including the class make up of the Cathars, the demographics and mechanics of witch trials (they were usually an expression of popular dissatisfaction and in fact the church tried to excommunicate the guy who started the witch panic) and the fact that priestly dress is not an imitation of feminine garments because THAT’S WHAT MEN’S CLOTHES LOOKED LIKE AT THE TIME and gender norms were much different. Like I have theories on the changing form of patriarchy as capitalism developed, but these aren’t them. Also, no witch trials did not target midwives, they tended to target those who had some money (but weren’t gentry) but were also unpopular
Okay so I’m not even particularly well read in terms of theory
But I’ve found that I’ve done more theory reading than most leftist women I know, like a lot of them are very well read and can talk deeply about feminist theory, but in terms of broad economic and political theory, they’ve usually read much less.
Why is this?
Why do we restrict ourselves to reading and writing about gender? Surely our class position must also affect our lives, and yet we have internalized the idea that we should leave that one to the men? Why do we not write on the topic of organization like Malatesta or even Lenin (who was wrong and a dick, but he did write about how to create political organization)? Why do we not write on the economic order of society like Marx? Or the possible order of society like Kropotkin?
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 