none of this was a surprise

hi i want to start reading andrea dworkin but i have no idea where to start, any recommendations?

How are you? You have been quiet for a little while. I hope you're happy, healthy and thriving!

We live in a culture in which the sex domination nexus is so tight that victim and victimizer alike often do not recognize the violence in acts that the society has deemed violent enough to be illegal. That’s a rape culture.

[I]n this patriarchy in which we live, men generally are trained through a variety of cultural institutions to view sex as the acquisition of pleasure by the taking of women. Men are trained to see sex as a sphere in which they are naturally dominant and women are naturally passive. Women are objectified and women’s sexuality is commodified. Sex is sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate; power is eroticized.      The predictable result of this state of affairs is a world in which violence, sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex is so common that it must be considered to be normal—that is, an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of the norms. That doesn’t mean the culture openly endorses rape, but it does endorse a vision of masculinity that makes rape inviting.

Analizing Pornography

    “How do we explain the fact that most people’s stated philosophical and theological systems are rooted in concepts of justice, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people, yet we allow violence, exploitation, and oppression to flourish?”

Masculinity in three acts: Attempts at dominance through (1) force and humiliation, (2) words and argument, and (3) raw insults.

     “If pornography is increasingly cruel and degrading, why is it increasingly commonplace instead of more marginalized? In a society that purports to be civilized, wouldn’t we expect most people to reject sexual material that becomes ever more dismissive of the humanity of women? How do we explain the simultaneous appearance of more, and increasingly more intense, ways to humiliate women sexually and the rising popularity of the films that present those activities?      As is often the case, this paradox can be resolved by recognizing that one of the assumptions is wrong. Here, it’s the assumption that US society routinely rejects cruelty and degradation. In fact, the United States is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. Think of the way we accept the use of brutal weapons in war that kill civilians, or the way we accept the death penalty, or the way we accept crushing economic inequality. There is no paradox in the steady mainstreaming of an intensely cruel pornography. This is a culture with a well-developed legal regime that generally protects individuals’ rights and freedoms, and yet it also is a strikingly cruel culture in the way it accepts brutality and inequality. The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn’t be surprising, because they represent mainstream values: the logic of domination and subordination that is central to patriarchy, hyper-patriotic nationalism, white supremacy, and a predatory corporate capitalism.”

People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it’s about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men’s cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for people—men and women—to face.

Hello! Thank you for taking the time to make a reading list. Some of the links seem to be broken for me, however. Please could you share the pdf of Gender Hurts, if possible? I've been meaning to read it for a while. 💛

“The term transgender was coined by the male—and according to his protestations, heterosexual—cross-dresser Virginia Prince, who sought to distinguish himself from those identified as transsexuals, and to create a more acceptable face for a practice previously understood as a ‘paraphilia’—a form of sexual fetishism (Prince, 2005b).”