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April 14, 2005
The Feminist Sex Wars revisited
I've been reading blog eulogies for Andrea Dworkin, and remembering the Feminist Sex Wars of the early 80s, when the Dworkin-McKinnon anti-porn movement was in full swing. The anti-porn wing generated an opposition which became known as the pro-sex wing, whose most well-known theorists were Ellen Willis and Joan Nestle, and whose most well-known activists were Pat Califia and Susie Bright. (And when I say "sex wars" I mean the same level of vilification and vituperation and friendships and organizations torn asunder as we have seen over the Iraq war and Terri Schiavo.)But Ellen and Joan and Pat and even Susie never quite generated the buzz that the anti-porn activists did, because dour puritanical professional-victim feminists who reinforced Victorian stereotypes about women's sexuality were much less threatening to mainstream media than randy gender-bender dildo-wearing role-playing polygamous porn-producing feminists who refused to consider themselves sexual victims. (And still are, to judge by some of the appreciations of Dworkin emanating from the conservative press.)
So Dworkin remains the face of feminism to too many people, which makes it difficult for me to mourn her. My favorite obit is from Reason's Tim Cavanaugh:
Villainess of the porn wars, ur-feminazi, foe of heterosexual intercourse, prison reformer, signifier of all things PC/radical-feminist/anti-patriarchal/insane, and irresistable target for reasonable people everywhere has died at age 58. Elaine Showalter once said nobody would wake up at 4am to watch Dworkin's funeral, but looking over the range of people from the left, right, and center who came together to despise her, we begin to see Dworkin's real legacy: She was a uniter, not a divider.Susie Bright is much more generous than I am, and has less reason to be. (via Ann Althouse)
RELATED: In googling some of these names, I find that Ellen Willis is just a bit of a hawk. I'm not surprised; although she's way more Leftist than me, I always liked reading her because she didn't give a shit about political correctness.
UPDATE: An email from Soccer Dad reminds me that Ellen Willis delivered a kick-ass rebuttal of leftist antisemitism in her first collection of essays, Beginning to See the Light. The essay was written in 1979. The more things change . . .
UPDATE: Finally, I'm not alone: Cathy Young castigates the eulogizers.
Judith | 04/14/05 at 08:02 AM | Categories: Competing narratives
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Comments
Pat Califia is still around.He has a regular column in Girlfriends magazine.
shoshanna | May 7, 2005 10:14 PM
