Pornography: Men Possessing Women

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I don't know that "the boys are betting," at least maybe not consciously for most of us. But shit, I sure hope "the boys are wrong." I started writing down favorite lines from this and eventually realized I'd be copying damn near the whole book. But how can one resist with lines like this: Although rarely described as such, Dworkin was an intellectual. The book she was working on when she died is Writing America: How Novelists Invented And Gendered A Nation, an exploration of the contribution that writers such as Hemingway and Faulkner have made to American identity. N1 - Bob Brecher, Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: men possessing women – a reassessment, 2015, Palgrave Macmillan UK, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive, published, version of record is available here: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137015112 What remains in question here is the nature of pornographic depictions of women (and men), and what animates them. Dworkin is explicit: porn is ‘the elucidation of what men insist is the secret, hidden, true carnality of women, free women’. Perhaps more accurate, I'd suggest, is that it expresses a fantasy of women's ‘carnality’, rather than a secret belief – but implicit in both those descriptions is the problematic idea that women don't in fact have a hidden carnality that society has done its best to suppress, and many women have been trying to say exactly the reverse.

Its somewhat of a vicious circle. You, a man, hitting puberty and start to get your knowledge abt yourself and women as sexual beings only through the hyper real and male centered and misogynistic medium of pornography. You start to think this is normal, that this is what boys and girls are made of, that they-women- are all whores, who want it to take deep inside every hole. She wants it. She likes it. She is a slut, bitch, whore. Or to put it more simply:she is a cunt.For De Sade raping a fifteen year old virgin was not an offence. Dworkin draws the links to modern pornography and provides examples in passages of descriptive analysis. The availability of pornography has changed since the advent of the internet, but maybe not its nature. For Dworkin pornography stems from patriarchy and the nature and role of men and this is also from the 1983 speech: Dworkin was born in New Jersey and had what she described as an idyllic childhood in many ways. She attended a progressive school and grew up to lead a bohemian life in the 1960s. As for porn's effect on society and all of us, for Dworkin it couldn't be worse. She links it directly to rape, violence, incest, murder, and an assortment of related evils. Indeed to make her point, no comparison is too outrageous:

In 1999 she wrote of being drugged and raped in a hotel room in Europe, the trauma of which led her to take heavy medication to enable her to sleep. Cameron, D. and Frazer, E. 1992. ‘On the Question of Pornography and Sexual Violence: Moving beyond Cause and Effect’ in C. Itzin (ed.) Pornography: Women, Violence and Civil Liberties: a Radical New View. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 359–383.This review isn't for this book necessarily, but her writings and her positions as of 1983-1984 when she co-taught a women's studies class I was in, here in Mpls, and co-led an effort to have Minneapolis put in place a process within which women could sue the makers/distributors of a piece of pornography if she felt it harmed her. Dworkin analyzes (and extensively cites examples drawn from) contemporary and historical pornography as an industry that hates and dehumanizes women. Dworkin argues that the industry is implicated in violence against women, both in its production (through the abuse of the women that are used to star in it) and in the social consequences of its consumption by encouraging men to eroticize the domination, humiliation and abuse of women. [3] [4]