"Dworkin . . . saw Republican women as savvy, not dumb. They were, Dworkin observed, making a rational decision. 'Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms.'"

it's
called
Stockholm
Syndrome and
sans, the Patriarchy'd
last about 24 fucking seconds.

FREE our
Womenfolk:
allow Humanity
to fucking THRIVE.

it's
Higly
Unlikely
they'll re-
ciprocate
for past in-
justices, boys

but it's a
Risk we're
running outta
fucking Time to Take.

@1: “it’s called Stockholm Syndrome”

Ha ha ha it’s too perfect, Kristofarian mansplaining Andrea Dworkin! 😂🤣😂🤣

bugger Off Wormtongue
eastword, babbleson
whoever tf

cool now do Shulamith Firestone

"Finally ready for Dworkin" right now? Divide us plebs even further right at the moment we need to come together? Perhaps it becomes more evident every day how isolated Seattle is in its rich bubble, a bubble which seems to be becoming ever more opaque. Well, I guess we can all look forward to the success of the Trump revolution, then. We've got our assets, let's fight amongst ourselves!

Great article but a small point- please stop using the term “antisemitic” (Used here as one of the insults against Dworkin) for being anti-Jewish. Antisemitic is a manufactured and inaccurate and political word that is being used to damn and arrest people who fight the genocide of Gaza.

@6, nah, there's still some punching down to do before we squabble amongst ourselves. The cast members/guest workers can't be allowed to get uppity. Imagine the uproar if she came for cars and parking…that would unite the masses.

Apologies to @3 but there is a certain amount of self-interest in women allying with men who don't have their interests are heart, who offer them power over other women in exchange for surrendering their agency. These ideas are more obvious outside the bounds of the Seattle theme park.

Exciting to see Dworkin's work re-released.
We're past due for another (true) feminist wave.
May younger women discover the liberatory brilliance here.

I think Dworkin is as challenging as she is - and I've only read a little, back in college times, because even speaking as an out gay man she was...unpopular - because to live in that space of critical absolutism is hard. So hard, in fact, that I just about literally couldn't hack it - it was the stuff of my addiction (there's always underlying childhood trauma - mine was around being the son of two undiagnosed narcissists, and a kid actor/model who was also abused in that context - but my adult grievances and resentments were all very tied to being an out gay man in Straightworld).

At the tail end of my active use, I got into a massive fight with three of my closest friends from coming up - a woman and two men, all straight-identified (and at least one of them closested) - over the fact that one of them (who had stopped talking to me years earlier, mostly I think for status reasons) was not just the husband of an Asian-born woman, but previously had been...her john. (I don't know if when they first met she was a minor, but she may have been, and in any event she was almost certainly being trafficked.) These two other friends - all woke, all liberals, all of them academics too (the woman is a dean at a certain western Washington college) - took his side, in large part I think because...I'm a f*g. (Also: that thing about certain former child actors being kicked to the curb in adulthood - that's been my life, basically. But the fact that people you counted as friends might treat you this way as well is very upsetting.)

So, for me, that Dworkinian space was not just tantamount to addiction - it was addiction itself. And if Recovery people sometimes seem as though we're living in Unreality, it's because a lot of us spent a whole lot of time living in Overlyrealreality. Choosing Recovery as a queer person means finally living in a space where I see not only what's bad about the world, and people, but what's good about the world, and people. And yeah: it means finding the people who are worthy of that, and you.

I remember in high school writing my first term paper about Songs of Innocence and Experience, and thinking: what comes after Experience - it all just sounds so dark. Well, this is what comes after that - if you want it.

One of my big grievances cum resentments as an out gay man was that people (including the aforementioned people) always seemed to want me to sacrifice for them - be their own person Jesus. And you know what? I think I was spot on in recognizing this. But it's also what made my Recovery possible - reclaiming and owning that, I mean.

Back in the day, the men who repped me as a kid used to call boys like me Simons - for Simon from Lord of the Flies. These were the shy, sweet, vulnerable kids who could emote on command, and melt the hearts of adults. And of course the same qualities sought by casting directors are the ones sought by...very bad adults.

But, I mean, who was Simon, right? As your 9th grade English teacher would tell you, he's the Christ-like one, the martyr - mistaken for the Beast, after all, and killed by the other kids. Also: Simon is... a little gay. (Psst: just like a lot of the Saints, me thinks. Who got canonized after all? It was priests and monks and bishops. And who back then much like today became priests and monks and bishops? Well, guess [psst: gay men].)

So basically my inner Simon is my best self - that sweet, vulnerable kid who I only rediscovered in adulthood writing my first feature (which is about the first 18 years of my life, and films in its first iteration next year) - and I had disowned him in teen times because you see he was the problem: he was the one attracting all the abuse. (Obviously, this was classic self/victim shaming, but it didn't seem that way to me at the time. That I also knew myself to be gay by then and the fact that Simon was a little bit Christian too made it all the more likely I would leave him in a ditch by the side of the road.) But abandoning him meant abandoning my best self, my humanity and capacity for connection.

This is all so hard to explain to other queer people, because unless they've lived in this space they just maybe think it's all Recovery people bs - this is exactly what I thought for many years. But finally getting and staying clean, finding actual belonging in this world, meant embracing my inner Simon, and accepting the fact that this is how society still sees a certain swath of gay men - the ones like me. Just know that in this space there's a buffer for all the hurt, and maybe unsurprisingly that buffer is...forgiveness. (It's also in an intellectual sense choosing your battles - something our current president, a narcissist like my parents, has failed to learn in adulthood.)

One of my first boyfriends - this is the one you didn't get over for nearly a quarter century - on one of our first dates (keep in mind here we were teens and his parents were very, very Catholic and conservatives) wrapped his arms around me and stuck his tongue in my mouth in full view of his house and the neighbors; this was a very bold thing to do in suburban LA in the 1990s. I mention this story because I will be appearing, as myself, with my current boyfriend, as himself - he's a Hungarian-Canadian former child actor (if you watched the CBC in the 80s you probably knew of him: he looks like Wil Wheaton) - in the aforementioned first iteration of my coming of age story (there's a present day storyline to this one), and in the final scene we kiss (which is his big eff you to certain members of his family, and Orban). (It's also going/likely to be set to Alphaville's Forever Young - cheesy, I know, but that's kind of the point here: it's basically an after school special, but for middle aged people - which was the go to prom song for the prom that queer kids didn't get to have back then, so we're taking it back.) This is the Simon way of not just making art, and telling stories, but doing activism (which according to my narcissist mother I'm not doing enough of in the age of Trump, because I'm never doing enough of the right thing in her eyes). And yeah: it's also me giving the finger to all the people in Straightworld who for many years just saw me as this washed up loser whose life would never get better. And, you know: I probably have people like Dworkin to thank for being able to live this way, to finally find Belonging in Straightworld. So, gratitude.

TERF

"She never said sex was rape"
... a few grafs later...
"Heterosexual sex is... a personal death... annihilating all self-respect... masochism, self-hatred... worst betrayal of our humanity"

Well, that's alright then