Missed the homework? See the original reading list post.
References
G.K. Chesterton on the democracy of the dead:
Tradition is only democracy extended through time; it may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are merely walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. (Orthodoxy, ch 4)
“Democrat Party” as an epithet. Though George learned this from life, not Wikipedia…
Over 75% of young people do not qualify to serve in the Armed Forces
“Abortion” is a terribly vague term, because it doesn’t distinguish between an elective procedure on a (to date) viable pregnancy and a no-longer viable pregnancy.
“I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” Not Arlo Guthrie, George! That was Will Rogers!
Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas
Phyllis Schlafly was born in August 1924 and got her law degree from Washington University School of Law in 1978, so around age 54.
On Andrew Long Chu, who has won a Pulitzer for Criticism…
Article we read about the Barnard Conference “Scholar & Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” held in April 1982.
Lots more info from a Barnard College site; there is even an archive!
This Book is Gay; Gender Queer, though, is really the one whose explicit drawings have garnered the ire of parents.
FWIW, we’re not pro-censorship, we just see why parents may not want their school teachers passing around this material without their knowledge…
Image shared by Prisha, a detransitioner (twitter.com/detransaqua)
“Take them and leave me alone.” Psychotechnology (John Vervaeke’s term)
Once again, George’s piece on the marriages in Pride & Prejudice
Dworkin reading from “It’s the Perpetrator, Stupid”
National Coalition Against Domestic Violence statistics on violence against women
Volunteering opportunities at a hotline or at a rape crisis shelter
Amber Heard’s testimony about her rape
Amber Heard as the scapegoat for #MeToo collective overwhelm
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” (spoiler alert)
Quotations from featured texts
Page numbers refer to Dworkin’s Last Days at Hot Slit and Schlafly’s Feminist Fantasies.
Dworkin, “My Life As A Writer”
As a child with an immense ambition to live, to know, to feel, I moved toward everything that frightened me: men, night, the giving up of my own body… I had a high school teacher who said that most girls of my social class who worked (the ideal was not to work) became hairdressers, but I was so smart that I could become a prostitute, which at least was interesting. He was my tutor in sex; a guide; a charlatan and an exploiter. But he made the sameness of art and opening my legs palpable, urgent: there wasn’t one without the other… I was a motherless child with spirit and intelligence in a world that abhorred both in girls. (324)
Schlafly, “Making Heroes Out Of Rapists”
All these story lines have desensitized viewers to the crime of rape. They present rape as the route to success and good sex. A campaign to get the soaps to cease and desist from such anti-woman garbage would be a good project for the feminists. It’s not only insultingly sexist but socially repugnant. But I’m not holding my breath because the feminists have such a warped idea of what “sexism” is. They would prefer to continue attacking as “sexist” a husband who puts his wife on a pedestal and treats her like a queen. (24)
Schlafly, “Pornography’s Victims”
If persons in a public or private place commit rape, assault, or battery, they will be arrested — and should be arrested. Rapes, whippings, beatings, and unwanted touching of another's body are against the law, and society will and should punish the offender. Why, then, is it not likewise against the law to show a picture of these acts? Do they become socially acceptable just because they are presented on paper or film?
Those who answer yes to those questions invoke the First Amendment to clothe their illegal acts. They cry "censorship" to intimidate anyone who wants to stop their public display of, and commercial profiting from, these illegal acts.
Now add another element to this latter question. Suppose all the persons who were the target of these illegal acts were blacks, or Jews, or Native Americans, or children. The entire array of civil rights legislation and litigation developed in the last twenty-five years would move into merciless action. Our prevailing social mores would find such recordings on paper or film socially unacceptable. Publishers, periodicals, entertainment houses, and retail establishments would not risk releasing written or filmed presentations that suggest enjoyment of violent race discrimination, even if the cry of "censorship" were raised, which it would not be.
Why, then, are these acts not likewise against the law when the group targeted for rape, assault, battering, degradation, humiliation, or other abuse is women? Can these things be socially acceptable just because women are the victims? Are the civil liberties of the abusers ranked higher than the civil rights of the abused? …
Pornography changes the perceptions and attitudes of men toward women, individually and collectively, and desensitizes men so that what was once repulsive and unthinkable eventually becomes not only acceptable but desirable. What was once mere fantasy becomes reality. With the poet we say, “Truth being truth, Tell it and shame the devil.” (219-221)
Dworkin, “Pornography”
The word pornography does not mean “writing about sex” or “depictions of the erotic” or “depictions of sexual acts” or “depictions of nude bodies” or “sexual representations” or any other such euphemism. It means the graphic depiction of women as vile whores. In ancient Greece, not all prostitutes were considered vile: only the porneia.
Contemporary pornography strictly and literally conforms to the word’s root meaning… The word has not changed its meaning and the genre is not misnamed. The only change in the meaning of the word is with respect to its second part, graphos: now there are cameras — there is still photography, film, video. The methods of graphic depiction have increased in number and in kind: the content is the same; the meaning is the same; the purpose is the same; the sexuality of the women depicted is the same; the value of the women depicted is the same. With the technologically advanced methods of graphic depiction, real women are required for the depiction as such to exist.
The word pornography does not have any other meaning than the one cited here, the graphic depiction of the lowest whores. Whores exist to serve men sexually. Whores exist only within a framework of male sexual domination. Indeed, outside that framework the notion of whores would be absurd and the usage of women as whores would be impossible. The word whore is incomprehensible unless one is immersed in the lexicon of male domination… The force depicted in pornography is objective and real because force is so used against women. The debasing of women depicted in pornography and intrinsic to it is real in that women are so debased. The uses of women depicted in pornography are objective and real because women are so used. The women used in pornography are used in pornography. (146)
Dworkin, “My Life As A Writer”
No one really believed me about my husband. I had a deep experience of the double standard but no systematic understanding of it. The writers I had loved and wanted to emulate—Baudelaire or Artaud or Dostoevsky or Henry Miller or Jean Genet—were apparently ennobled by degradation. The lower they sunk the more credibility they had. I was lowered and disgraced, first by what was being called sexual liberation, then by the violence of domestic sexual servitude, without any concomitant increase in expertness: I paid my dues, baby, I know the price of the ticket but so what? When I emerged as a writer with Woman Hating, it was not to wallow in pain, or in depravity, or in the male romance with prostitution; it was to demand change. (329)
Dworkin, “Right-Wing Women”
Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men.
They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex—their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ”
Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.
Schlafly, “What’s Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?”
Of all the classes of people who ever lived, the American woman is the most privileged. We have the most rights and rewards, and the fewest duties. Our unique status is the result of a fortunate combination of circumstances.
We have the immense good fortune to live in a civilization that respects the family as the basic unit of society. This respect is part and parcel of our laws and customs. It is based on the fact of life which no legislation or agitation can erase that women have babies and men don't.
If you don't like this fundamental difference, you will have to take up your complaint with God because He created us this way. The fact that women, not men, have babies is not the fault of selfish and domineering men, or the establishment, or any clique of conspirators who want to oppress women. It's simply the way God made us.
Our Judeo-Christian civilization has developed the law and custom that, since women bear the physical consequences of the sex act, men must be required to pay in other ways. These laws and customs decree that a man must carry his share by physical protection and financial support of his children and of the woman who bears his children, and also by a code of behavior that benefits and protects both the woman and the children.
This is accomplished by the institution of the family. Our respect for the family as the basic unit of society, which is ingrained in the laws and customs of our Judeo-Christian civilization, is the greatest single achievement in the history of women's rights. It assures a woman the most precious and important right of all — the right to keep her own baby and to be supported and protected in the enjoyment of watching her baby grow and develop.
The institution of the family is advantageous for women for many reasons. After all, what do we want out of life? To love and be loved? Mankind has not discovered a better nest for a lifetime of reciprocal love. A sense of achievement? A man may search thirty to forty years for accomplishment in his profession. A woman can enjoy real achievement when she is young by having a baby. She can have the satisfaction of doing a job well — and being recognized for it.
Do we want financial security? We are fortunate to have the great legacy of Moses, the Ten Commandments, especially "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land." Children are a woman's best social security, her best guarantee of social benefits such as old age pension, unemployment compensation, worker's compensation, and sick leave. The family gives a woman the physical, financial, and emotional security of the home for all her life.
The second reason why American women are a privileged group is that we are the beneficiaries of a tradition of special respect for women that dates from the Christian Age of Chivalry. The honor and respect paid to Mary, the Mother of Christ, resulted in all women, in effect, being put on a pedestal.
[She goes on to list many other practical benefits and privileges American women have.]
It's time to set the record straight. The claim that American women are downtrodden and unfairly treated is the fraud of the century. The truth is that American women never had it so good. Why should we lower ourselves to "equal rights" when we already have the status of special privilege? (89-93)
Dworkin, “It’s the Perpetrator, Stupid”
On the same day the police who beat Rodney G. King were acquitted in Simi Valley, a white husband who had raped, beaten, and tortured his wife, also white, was acquitted of marital rape in South Carolina. He kept her tied to a bed for hours, her mouth gagged with adhesive tape. He videotaped a half hour of her ordeal, during which he cut her breasts with a knife. The jury, which saw the videotape, had eight women on it. Asked why they acquitted, they said he needed help. They looked right through the victim — afraid to recognize any part of themselves, shamed by her violation. There were no riots afterward.
The governing reality for women of all races is that there is no escape from male violence, because it is inside and outside, intimate and predatory.
While race-hate has been expressed through forced segregation, woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare. For this reason, no matter how many women are battered… each one is alone.
Surrounded by family, friends, and a community of affluent acquaintances, Nicole Simpson was alone. Having turned to police, prosecutors, victims’ aid, therapists, and a woman’s shelter, she was still alone. Ronald L. Goldman may have been the only person in seventeen years with the courage to try to intervene physically in an attack on her; and he’s dead, killed by the same hand that killed her, an expensively gloved, extra-large hand.
Though the legal system has mostly consoled and protected batterers, when a woman is being beaten, it’s the batterer who has to be stopped; as Malcolm X used to say, “by any means necessary”—a principle women, all women, had better learn. A woman has a right to her own bed, a home she can’t be thrown out of, and for her body not to be ransacked and broken into. She has a right to safe refuge, to expect her family and friends to stop the batterer—by law or force—before she’s dead. She has a constitutional right to a gun and a legal right to kill if she believes she’s going to be killed. And a batterer’s repeated assaults should lawfully be taken as intent to kill.
Everybody’s against wife abuse, but who’s prepared to stop it?
Schlafly, “Family Violence Is Everyone's Concern”
While the main source of fear for most people is violent crime by strangers, some Americans find that their own family members are the source of their most intense fear. They do not have to step outside their own houses to be abused, assaulted, maimed, or killed.
Usually it is the man in the family who abuses his wife or children. The head of the household, the very one charged with providing support and safety to the family, may actually inspire anything but secure feelings. The home, instead of a haven from outside forces, becomes a prison of hopelessness and of demeaning, violent behavior. Women are pushed, punched, kicked, beaten, hit with fists, slapped, or attacked with a weapon. Some are killed…
Most Americans do not want to admit that family violence is a real and enormous problem. Somehow, our society seems to have a collective unwillingness to admit that violence within family life is a tragedy of our time. We tend to ignore the violence, or condemn the victim, or choose sides, while allowing this terrible problem to evolve into a legacy of abuse. Only when we realize that violence touches our neighbors, our friends, and even our own families will we be committed to purging it from the homes in America. Hiding the crime, or hiding from the crime, may be almost as wrong as perpetrating it.
Tom Clifford of the Newport News (Virginia) Daily Press-Times Herald says, "People who live in domestic violence live in a tyranny of terror." Their plight is grievous because they believe they have no place to go where they can be safe and no one to whom they can turn who will listen with an understanding heart. They wear a mantle of guilt which has been placed on them by themselves and society.
Family violence is not just a political issue. It is a pro-family issue, a man's issue, a woman's issue, a church issue, a civic issue, and a criminal issue. Family violence is everybody's issue. We must all act in ways to intervene, prevent, support, and protect the victims. It is a human rights issue for which we all must take responsibility… (221-223)
