Josh if you don't think this is worth it, I'll pay-pal you the 5 bucks. But I think, in this time of uncertainty, this - and more of this - is exactly what we need.
Also, another for today:
via IM
Someone who feels the same way I do about dead Andrea Dworkin: The world of pornography is safe. Andrea Dworkin is dead. Huzzah.
Bitch was whacked. What space-travel for everyone was to the white-males of the 50s and 60s. Dworkiin-styled feminism and pursuits were for nascent, politically conscious types in the late-eighties, early nineties. By that, I mean it wa a fantasy, a rubes game, a failed strategy, an all too fantastic idea, eagerly embraced by the hopeful the very nature of which hope allowed them to be manipulated by other more powerful forces. She was a bad intellectual and bad for the movement. I don't give a shit if you're dead or alive. If your ideas cause more problems than they solve, your public life was a wash. Goodbye, Andrea, you don't even get a Walter Benjamin memorial JPG. That's how much you sucked.
brandon [email] said at 2:03 PM 04-13-2005: Look, I can't deny it. My longing for Kara is years in the making. But I'm just not in her league. No, but Amanda, here's a girl that I can mold. Mold into, well, Kara.
kiche [email] said at 11:48 PM 04-12-2005: oh yeah, and her undead corpse is presently trying to claw it's way out of the grave to rip off your raping rape tool, rapist. because in your obit of her you posted hateful, mysogynistic pornography. at least one woman will be raped with a rape tool by a rapist because they saw this picture you rape enabling mysoginist.
you're just as bad as the patriarchal mysogynists in queer studies who are raping feminism by destroying women's studies programs and replacing them with gender studies programs.
brandon [email] said at 7:41 AM 04-13-2005: Yes, I did, and well it didn't surprise me. I thought it was pretty disgusting. Kind of like Fiona Apple's bizarre and hard-to-believe, ripped from a harlequin novel rape story. I'd say about as much careful thought when into Dworkin's books as did Fiona's "Tidal". Why am I reacting to this so badly. Well, I took about 15 hours of W&GS, and we had to wade through this shit-pig in least two classes. Oh, and kids, the girls in W&GS are seldom hot. I don't know who told me that tale, or why I continued testing it.
kiche [email] said at 12:49 PM 04-13-2005: Why am I reacting to this so badly.
why are you even asking that question?
frankly, i'm glad she's dead. it's really sickening to see all her fans try to do an "insta-reform" of her reputation a la susan sontag.
i got news for them, though. NOT GONNA HAPPEN. susan sontag was much maligned and slandered. when she died people familiar with her took it upon themselves to set the record straight.
well now that ms dworkin is dead, what we're left with is the legacy of an anti-porn anti-sex crusader who cut deals with and aided the religious right while bemoaning the patriachalism of freedom of choice and liberalism.
now we get to listen to mental giants moan about how "misunderstood" she was.
so what's that leave us with? a bizarre rape allegation that's extraordinarily loopy and just happened to occur at a time when her career was down the tubes and she was a nobody.
oh, and we get to listen to her follows talk about how the fact that she was overweight, unattractive and had piss poor fashion sense was a blow against the patriarchy. well, if all you have to do to have your ideas taken seriously, is be overweight, unattractive and have piss poor fashion sense maybe we should start taking the ku klux klan seriously. because that's a spot on description of most of their members OF BOTH GENDERS.
i want to point out that i had no idea that she was fat, ugly and dressed like a homeless person until she died. that's when all her fans started claiming that people didn't take her seriously because she looked like a hippopotamus jammed into a pair of overalls bought from goodwill.
call me old fashioned but i think public intellectuals should be judged on their ideas and actions, not their personal appearance. and when you start bringing up their personal appearance in an attack or defense, well, you just don't have a leg to stand on.
saying she was butt-ugly to defend her is only slightly less of a defense than going on about how she was friends with michael moorcock.
so goodbye, andrea dworkin, and may you have fun with terri schiavo and pope jp2, thanks for your antiporn crusade back in the 80s that went all the way to congress and helped facillitate the rise of the american taliban. take that patriarchy.
brandon [email] said at 11:51 AM 04-13-2005: Oddly enough I recognize all of those girls and have had a conversation with the one in white on the end, I just can't place her. Those aren't... strippers are they?
shauna [email] said at 2:26 PM 04-13-2005: i'll be non-mourning her passing this evening by screaming passages from "our blood" standing naked on my head while rocco bangs me until i pass out. dirty! dirty!
i wonder if catherine mackinnon realizes that she's been willed to be entombed alive with andrea, egyptian style.
then i'm gonna go see camille paglia at politics and prose and remember that there's no such thing as middle ground. power to the people!
brandon [email] said at 2:58 PM 04-13-2005: Camille Paglia pisses me off just as much. I wallowed through Sexual Persona and came out angry - there's no substance! - half of it is her discussing how smart and intelligent and beleagured she is. The rest is anecdotal tales about Harold Bloom - Christ did she ever take classes from anyone else? What remains is the most poorly fleshed out, non-historically balanced, flakey rigamarole: bash the French schools elevate Freud - it's distasteful, not for the subject matter, but for everything it lacks. I'll admit, I read her collection of essays too, and even laughed at them. I'll probably even glance at this, if it comes into the library. But, primarly, to me that's what she ought to stick to, essays, gossipy pieces, that kind of thing. Because she can't handle book-length treatments, fleshing them out as she does with what substitutes for thought as mere verbal intimidation: Example, oh, this poem concerns a dog, obviously it taps into the archetype of the Ephebic Bisexual Werewolf as evidenced by the wine Ionian wine-kraters of Anaximandinges, as a lesbian Italian Catholic, I have no problem seeing this, as my former teacher Harold Bloom would say...."
What I also dislike about her is the extremely off-handed way that she'll claim credit for some one change or another, as she constantly did in her column on Salon, and did recently in an interview Salon did with her concerning her latest book something along the lines of "Before me, cultural studies professors were not public figures." etc. Well maybe they were and maybe they weren't, however, they were most certainly doing something, as a whole, not entirely evinced by her own writing - namely, research, PUBLISHING, contributing to the academic landscape. For me, she's got a lot in common with William Blake - they're both outsiders, both given to showcasing highly critical statements of the status quo, the nature of which are captain-obvious achievements at best and couched in highly questionable solecistic grammar - questionable, because it seems to pile up hindrances to understanding in order to barracade the reader from the lack of anything behind the facade, contributions that are by themselves highly over-praised, neither Blake nor Paglia created a school or gave/will give rise to proteges. They're too idiosyncratic, too soi-disant to have ever accomplished that. I'm no great respecter of so-called mad genuises, I don't think that they bring anything to humanity, except for the pageantry of their own cult.
brandon [email] said at 4:14 PM 04-13-2005: Right, in no way is she evil. She's an outsider and she's very shrill. And she's a bright kid, but she didn't have the humility to work the academic system and develop the prestige that it's so painfully obvious she desires. She's brewed her career out of sour grapes.
shauna [email] said at 5:59 PM 04-13-2005: i agree. i've been surrounded by this theory stuff too long to care anymore. feminist academics are always going to be out of touch and barely connected to anyone not white and middle class. it's their job. get outta college and do a stint at a battered womens' shelter and all this stuff is meaningless. you don't need a textbook to grasp the concept of the feminization of poverty. especially if you've ever been poor. and madonna is hardly gonna lift you up.
everyone loves the feminists who wanna screw without shame. susie bright and violet blue,annie sprinkle, chloe. um, patricia highsmith? i think she's dead.
i do, too. but they manage to combine fun and self-effacement with their message.
in my experience, feminism has more to do with basic things like showing teenage girls what it's like to be supported by their girl friends instead of mentally warped by them. or helping someone through the system to get an apartment after they finally left the dude who's been hitting them for ten years.
i bet jennifer baumgartner is writing another book right now, with some terribly expensive pen. it will be about how 15 year old pregnant girls from harlem don't identify themselves with the word feminism. she drives me nuts.
