Reply #167: agree -- sorry about the grief, sorry about her terrible life

[amazona]

My feeling is that we did Dworkin no favor by pretending that her hysteria was original thought or that her thoughts on intercourse and marriage were any different from the thoughts on intercourse and marriage that we heard from our mothers and our grandmothers. The feminist movement enabled her illness, the media enabled her illness, her "mate" of 30 years about whom she ran about bragging she didn't sex with enabled her illness.

In Susie Bright's large-hearted essay, she comments that "no one"
noticed that Fire and Ice was a reworking of de Sade. That isn't quite true, is it? Everyone noticed. It was sort of a backyard joke that she wanted male-produced pornography banned to cut down on the competition. After all, if I have a copy of Hustler in one hand and Fire and Ice in the other, no question which I'll read first and which wins in a free open marketplace of ideas. De Sade simply wasn't as new to the rest of us as he apparently was to Dworkin.

She wanted it both ways -- to whine that she couldn't make a decent amount of money from pornography (and whatever else it may be, Fire and Ice is pornography or the word has no meaning) and yet she wanted to claim that pornography was rape. I happen to believe that before you can have an original thought, you have to be capable of sufficient logic to understand the thoughts of those who have gone before you.

Dworkin was ill. She was very ill. She was very unhappy. If she had not been rewarded with media attention, then perhaps at some point she might have gotten help and made some changes.

We all failed her. As far as I know, to the end of her days, she was imagining rapes and other crimes being perpetrated against her. She was imagining that no one cared and that no one would help her. In the end, we got more pleasure, apparently, from pretending to be all intellectual and enjoying the outrageousness of such silly productions as Intercourse. We all want to pretend to be deep.

But sometimes hysteria isn't deep. Sometimes nonsense isn't deep. Sometimes it is what it is. And there can be a thin line between respecting someone and completely ignoring what they are actually saying. Her life was a scream for help.

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out,
even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72