Talk:Andrea Dworkin/Archive 2

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The Guardian article points to us, the Dworkin page points to it. The obits are in. Let us now focus on the historically relevant material, including her ideas, if they can be expressed briefly. Amorrow 05:53, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Credibility and Dworkin's autobiographical statements

Is there any reason to believe Andrea Dworkin's account of her own life? Is there independent confirmation of her having "bled for days", worked as a prostitute, or all the other dramatic things that she reports have happened to her. She seems to have been singularly unlucky. I might add that there is nothing in what I have read of her writing that implies common sense or truthfulness. She made no impression on the tv show "Politically Correct," beyond being almost morbidly obeseSeminumerical 00:50, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

As with anyone else's autobiographical statements, there is a presumption in favor of taking her at her word unless there is some specific reason not to believe what she tells you. If you have specific, documented reason for raising doubts then feel free to qualify her statements about her own life in light of those reasons; but barring that, it's unclear what grounds you would have except for the tendentious claim that you are a more trustworthy authority on what happened to Andrea Dworkin than Andrea Dworkin is.
As for her weight, it obviously has nothing at all to do with anything at all pertaining to the article.
Radgeek 01:59, 22 December 2005 (UTC)


I was struck, at the time when she was on the ascendant, by the thought that although the individual things that "happened" to her were plausible enough, taken as a whole they formed an implausible pattern. The prostitution is, by itself plausible. Many women have turned to prostitution (.02% of women?) of necessity (to support children for instance) or because they were coerced or because they wanted to because it interested them (the last do exist). But one wonders why an educated woman would do that rather than, say, clean carpets for a year until she was back on her feet, or why she didn't go to the embassy and ask for help in getting home (I chose those two examples because I have done both). Well maybe she was coerced or unable to think clearly or terribly desperate at the time. Or maybe it never happened or only happened once. I have met maybe five pathological liars in 40 years (two of them women) and I can't help but notice, as Dworkin's life drama unfolded, how she reminded me of them. Terrible attention getting trauma, no witnesses who can come forward, drama that is trendy at the time (she wasn't mesmerized, or attacked by a phrenologist, nor was she seduced online). I see profit of a sort: dining out on publications and lectures. Fading from the public eye? New terrible attention getting drama. I also can't help but notice that the terrible North American epidemic of rape and incest just stopped, like turning off a tap, as even the press came to grasp that the epidemic was a fabrication by some smart/stupid academics of questionable femininity (note that the epidemic was a fabrication, not the reality that these things occur and I do not denigrate those of questionable femininity as people, only those that publish elaborately nonsensical theories).
As for her weight, well that amount of obesity can happen for medical reasons, but it can also happen because of greed, drink, pills, or indolence. That forming first impressions about someone's character based on their physiognomy has gone out of fashion because it is unfair doesn't mean that it isn't a useful skill widely used by humans. Anyway, I was just inquiring as to whether anyone out there in cyber space has any evidence to back up her assertions. My life experience, and that of most mainstream people, says she was either a liar or a schlamozel. I'm betting on the former.
yes yes I know I am a troll and I need a spellchecker. And therefore you don't have to reply. Seminumerical 14:36, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Very important points, Seminumerical. Why should we believe ANY of her hyperdramatic allegations? She was mentally ill, end of story. Doovinator 04:03, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
Setting aside that the epidemic was 1)real, 2)global, and 3)ongoing, I have to echo Radgeek here: if you want to put anything along the lines of "She was mentally ill, end of story" in the article, you need more reason than that you just don't want to believe her. The Literate Engineer 16:12, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
Setting aside that the epidemic was a fat lie, I see no reason to belive the fat liar. I have no intention of wasting my time debating about a fat liar, so I won't. Doovinator 00:07, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
The epidemic was not real. You can expect that the rate of sexual crimes to be approximately constant, and low (of course never low enough), over time within any civilisation. All human cultures have an instinctive hatred of rape (if you bore me enough I can find citations). There are subcultures that practice rape (the Bloods' initiation ritual for example), and there is rape between "civilizations" during war: Darfour or the violence against Vietnamese woman during that war are not exceptions to the within "civilizations" thing. Here the large city I come from, back in the mid 90's the judicial system disbanded the prosecution team that was created specifically to deal with sex crimes, because they realized that there was, thanks to dworkin and macKinnon and the rest of the lesbian right, an epidemic of false accusations. Those little monsters have been safely neutered, though anyone who took the time to read the Archives of Sexual Behaviour at the time would have quickly grasped that it was a fad, like the hula hoop. I am not making light of sex crime, just observing what has often been observed before.
I don't want to edit the main article because I would actually have to do serious research outside my fields of interest, and I have other interests. I am asking for someone who does have an interest to deliver the knockout punch to Dworkin for me. The fact that she was weak and fat doesn't make her any less evil than, say Stalin. It just means that she had to use the only skills she had to practice her witchcraft: a poisoned pen and a vivid imagination. I mourn her passing as I mourned Mao's. If she had been a man she could have done a lot more damage to the world, but she did enough.Seminumerical 20:57, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

You might consider the observation that many have that some women who have been abused tend to end up in relationships which leads them to be abused or dominated again. That doesn't explain rape or assault happening in public or prison (women being abused in prison was so commonplace, it some states, that massive reforms were initiated), but it might explain some of the rest of the accumulation of bad things happening to one woman. 66.57.225.77 04:54, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A Note on Bias

Seminumerical, you have not raised any substative critiques about Dworkin, but have instead indulged in the most base misogyny to ever be published on a Wiki forum. If I am to read your last post correctly, much of the details of Dworkin's biography are "outside [your] fields of interests," which indicates to me that you have no real knowledge of the disciplines that applied to her work. How Dworkin is or is not remembered should be of no import or interest to you.

To everyone else reading this, let me also state that on Wikipedia, the task is not to "deliver the knockout punch" to Dworkin or any person, but to create biographical articles that are as fair, thorough, and factually accurate as possible. You may want to revisit the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. This is an official policy of Wikipedia.--Pinko1977 00:36, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

A NEUTRAL point of view is exactly what Seminumerical has. Dworkin was a prostitute, besides being a complete wacko, with a DECIDEDLY misanthropic, twisted view of the world. Let's take a look at YOUR OWN thoroughly biased comment: "...the most base misogyny to ever be published on a Wiki forum"? What exactly do you not understand about what constitutes NEUTRAL??? Her sickening lies are "outside of my fields of interest" too, because I am a happily married man of long standing with a young daughter whom I THANK GOD will never know the putrefying stench of Andrea Dworkin infesting her world, as it did mine. Doovinator 04:27, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
These are overt arguments ad hominem from folks who have provided nothing but that, at great length and in lurid detail, who have contributed no substantive work of any kind to the article, and who have openly confessed that they have not done, and do not intend to do, any research so as to make themselves less than ignorant about the people or positions that they are loudly ranting about. You are simply trolling this Talk page with useless rubbish and I suggest you find a less pathetic way to fill your empty time. Radgeek 06:16, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
You are a pseudosophisticated bigot sitting in front of a monitor, pissing in your pocket. I have better things to do. Doovinator 02:19, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
Sorry about provoking this with my poor choice of tone. I am not a troll, just a veteran of 15 years of internet flame wars, which I gather are not acceptable here.
How Dworkin is remembered is of great importance, since her writings caused men to be falsly accused of rape, and diverted police and prosecutorial resources away from genuine cases of rape (this I witnessed at McGill University). Debunking her rants and provocations is simple if one is talking to a person of common sense, but to dismantle her in a way that would be acknowledged by a feminist academic or an armchair philosopher of the left would take scholarship that someone with my background does not have. Who knows who is doing that sort of work? I seem to remember reading essays back in the early or mid 90's, I think in the New York Times, written by another Dworkin (Ronald Dworkin?) that dealt with her on this level. I want to see this done, for the good of young people with impressionable minds that read Wikipedia. I'll look up the other Dworkin if I don't hear back. Seminumerical 06:39, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
I agree completely, Seminumerical, but question the need for a higher standard of scholarship than used by Andrea Dworkin herself. I'm sure made-up statistics will serve very well. They did for her. Doovinator 18:45, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Seminumerical, the following: "Debunking her rants and provocations is simple if one is talking to a person of common sense, but to dismantle her in a way that would be acknowledged by a feminist academic or an armchair philosopher of the left would take scholarship that someone with my background does not have" is simply not the purpose of a WikiPedia article. Sorry. Radgeek 10:20, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
While these two represent an extreme end, referring to published criticism of her "teachings" is certainly within the scope of Wikipedia. --B. Phillips 08:33, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A note on grammar

I have no problem with making it clear that public doubts were raised about Dworkin's allegations that she was drugged and raped in Paris. However, the effort to acknowledge these doubts should not come at the expense of basic grammatical sense. Dworkin did not claim that her crippling osteoarthritis was caused (or exacerbated) by wounds from an alleged rape; rather she alleged that it was caused (or exacerbated) by wounds from an actual rape. Of course Bennett et al. have stated doubts about whether there was an actual rape; but qualifying the states by Dworkin with their doubts leads to a comical distortion of what she said.

Radgeek 04:13, 17 October 2005 (UTC)


[edit] A note on grammar and NPOV

This article could do with some editing help. Some of the rewriting is pretty simple-- the sentence,"That she endured molestation, rape, battery, poverty, prostitution, and on-going contempt from critics is not in question" simply needs to be rewritten so it doesn't imply that critics caused the battery, poverty, etc. A bigger problem is the POV language throughout the article. The section that reads, "She was one of the most articulate and passionate spokespersons for justice for women. Among the areas of her insightful interrogation of men's inhumanity was a thorough re-examination of pornography, exposing it as an industry of damaging objectification and abuse, not merely a fantasy realm of men's minds" exudes POV. And one doesn't need to describe Dworkin's work as "important" to note that some "mischaracterizations of her ideas are commonly attributed to her as a way to discredit her important work." Just as blatant is the section that claims she was criticized "because she was such a powerful speaker, bringing much needed attention to matters of sexual violence against women." The article appropriately notes that she was incorrectly accused of man-hating, but its rebuttal reads like a hagiography: "She was, rather, a lover of justice for women. The man-hating charge was especially silly, given that she was very close to her father, brother, and, of course, her activist-writer partner of thirty years, her husband John Stoltenberg." The former sentence is cloying and the latter is a non sequitur. (Isn't it generally considered absolute proof that a person is a bigot when he tries to claim "Why, some of my best friends are X"?) And of course the summation of that section, "She was, above all else, a humanitarian, caring deeply and compassionately about women's humanity," sounds like a peroration from her eulogy rather than a statement in an NPOV article. I note that virtually all of these comments were made by a single user three days ago. A reversion might be too radical a step, but this article needs to be fixed by someone who can be neutral about Dworkin but who is familiar enough with her work to write intelligently about her (which is why I won't do it myself-- I am not a Dworkin scholar). -DCB4W

I agree with the above. I'm going to try to make a pass through this (when I get a second) and remove some POV and non-wiki stuff. If anyone has any questions or caveats, please feel free to make them. IronDuke 03:34, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
Went through and culled some pretty overtly POV stuff, beefed up the critics section, added some sources. IronDuke 00:24, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I have just added the following in, it is very important period in the central work of Dworkin's life (anti-pornography) and in recent American history, and it has to be included. I have meticulously researched and sourced it, it is short, dry, factual, not POV, and I kindly don't want it taken out because someone who may find it politically inopportune wants it withdrawn:

In 1986, her anti-pornography testimony before the Meese Commission was praised and reprinted in its final report,[1] and Dworkin and MacKinnon marked its release by holding a joint press conference.[2] Meese Commission officials successfully demanded that convenience store chains remove from shelves popular men's magazines such as Playboy (Dworkin wrote that the magazine "in both text and pictures promotes both rape and child sexual abuse") [3] and Penthouse.[4] The ban spread nationally and intimidated some into also withdrawing photography magazines and the like[5], until being quashed with a First Amendment admonishment against prior restraint by the D.C. Federal Court in Meese v. Playboy (639 F.Supp. 581). Thanks, Mare Nostrum

Mare Nostrum, very nice edit, if I may say so. Two things: 1) I'd love to just tweak what you put in for clarity (not content). 2) I'm thinking that there should be a separate section on Dworkin in the legal system. Basically, we'd just be moving stuff that's already there into its own section. Thoughts? IronDuke 16:50, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

No disagreement, IronDuke, however you like it. I just want it in there as it is an important set of developments and people had to go to Federal Court to have the right to have magazines sold in 7-11s, and this is something that many people don't realize. Mare Nostrum

[edit] "Perhaps it was the disputed rape account that emboldened..."

The following sentence:

Perhaps it was the disputed rape account that emboldened even some feminist writers to question her crediblity,[6] and otherwise distance themselves from her views.[7]

Is, as the "Perhaps it was" signals, a half-hearted attempt at original research. Without the citations it would be baseless speculation. With the citations, it is an attempt to determine, rather than simply reporting, the underlying causes behind the author's distancing from Dworkin. Dishonestly so, since the first column reports the Paris rape story as fact rather than questioning it, and the second does not mention it at all. Because it was written before the story was published.

Please do not try to intimidate people away from making edits on the assumption that they won't read the links you your edits with. Radgeek 17:11, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Radgeek, you have taken out evey edit I have put in, systematically, and twice now, and you have the gall to try to accuse me of intimidation. If you want to call me names, send me an e-mail. Dworkin is not a credible figure, not after the 1999 misadventures, almost any more than fabulist James Frey is. Her preposterous account of an alleged rape is not accepted by virtually anyone, except possibly you, even though there exists the most miniscule chance that it could be true. So you can't keep rejecting every formulation of her death that does not reconfirm the dubious position that "the rape" may have caused her death. The *rape she reported* may have caused her death, according to her. Whether you like balance or not, you have to deal with it. And you ought to let other people breathe, too, I think that might be the Wiki way. Mare Nostrum

Radgeek, Mare Nostrum, I hope neither of you will take it amiss if I say that you're both doing good work here, and there's no reason you can't work together on this. Maybe you guys would be willing to consider softening your tone, as a beginning. Is that fair? IronDuke 17:51, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
Mare Nostrum, I have not "taken out every edit you have put in." I have no objections, just to pick a couple of examples, to the paragraph on the Meese commission and I have replicated some of the edits you suggested (e.g. replacing "exposed" with "depicted," deleting POV additions, etc.) in the mass of edits that I reverted yesterday. If you would like more constructive work and less reversion, I suggest that (1) you respond to explicit discussion on the Talk page about specific changes that other people have already tried to make before you and others have already objected to, and (2) you make edits in a series rather than bundling together numerous completely unrelated edits on different sections into big masses that make the history hard to follow.
There is no claim, here or from Dworkin, that the rape in Paris caused her death. There is the report of her claim, in her final article for the Guardian, that her health problems were connected with the rape. Note that she did not claim that her health problems were caused by an alleged rape; she alleged that her health problems were caused by an actual rape. This doesn't have anything to do with whether I believe this claim or not (I have no idea whether it's true or not; how would I know?). It has to do with accurately reporting what she said, not mangling it and stomping all over simple matters of grammar, just so that you can make sure you use the word "alleged" or "reported" or "claimed" one more time, just in case we had somehow forgotten that it was used earlier in the sentence, or discussed extensively a couple of paragraphs up.
As for your personal point of view on Dworkin's credibility, or about her reports of being raped in Paris in particular, I couldn't possibly care less; and expressing that POV is explicitly not the purpose of WikiPedia. The specific sentence I noted removing here, with explanation, attempts to draw a connection based on weasel-worded speculation adorned with two links to external articles that have nothing to do with the event you are discussing. If one of your sources reports the rape as fact and the other was written before the account of the rape was published, you can hardly claim them as evidence for the claim that those feminists who distanced themselves from Dworkin did so because of the rape account. If you think you're entitled to engage in that kind of rubbish, or that others aren't entitled to criticize you for engaging in it, then you need to think harder about what you are writing.
Radgeek 18:16, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I am new here, and as a new guy I need some help. Radgeek is now accusing me, in the history, of making a "misrepresentation of fact" in noting that Dworkin's dubious rape account occured/didn't occur during daylight. Misrepresentation is a very serious charge, it means that I stated something false with knowledge of its falsity. It is not indicating that I made a mistake (which we could discuss), it is accusing me of willful fraud, i.e., Radgeek is specifically impugning my character. However, by Dworkin's own words in the Guardian article, ** "it was daylight," ** which is precisely what I said. The reference to dinner which Radgeek breezily misstates is elsewhere and has nothing to do with the "rape," as anyone can see from the most cursory reading of Dworkin's words. Yet this utter carelessness is enough basis for Radgeek to accuse me of a "misrepresentation of fact".

This abuse has to stop. How can I make a formal complaint, please, in Wikipedia, about defamatory mistreatment by Radgeek? (The court procedures available for this defamation I know myself.) Someone please tell me the procedure for a Wikipedia complaint.

As a side note, the daylight drugging and rape of this hideously ugly woman (of all people) was not reported to the police, nor to medical staff, nor to the hotel (all details fiercely dismissed as irrelevant by zealots, I know), and neither does Dworkin **even claim to have memory of it.** It is just somehow true, like all of the other unverifiable misfortunes of her life that our article defiantly states as having occured (bled for days, abused by husband, worked as prostitute) despite Seminumerical's concerns and all attempts to add the mildest qualifiers such as "as she relayed." Meanwhile, inconvenient details like the fact that the "rape" occured in daylight by Dworkin's own words, are routinely and instantly excised, truth be damned. So yes, the neutrality of the text continues to be questioned, unfortunately. Thank you, Mare Nostrum

"It was daylight" refers to when and where she had the drink, not when or where she was raped. She explicitly states that the rape itself happened in her hotel room at dinner-time, not in daylight. Here's her saying so, in the second paragraph of the story:
"Then a boy was in the room with dinner. He had served me the second drink. I tried to get up and I fell against the far wall because I couldn't stand. I signed the cheque, but could barely balance myself. I fell back on to the bed. I didn't lock the door. I came to four or five hours later. I didn't know where I was. The curtains hadn't been drawn. Now it was dark; before it had been light, long before dusk."
And a couple more paragraphs down:
"I couldn't remember, but I thought they had pulled me down toward the bottom of the bed so that my vagina was near the bed's edge and my legs were easy to manipulate. I thought that the deep, bleeding scratches, right leg, and the big bruise, left breast, were the span of a man on top of me. I had been wearing sweatpants that just fell right down. I had been wearing an undershirt. Usually I covered myself, but I had felt too sick to manage it before the boy came in with the dinner. Besides, I don't know how he got inside since the door was dead-bolted. He appeared suddenly, already in."
To claim that Dworkin claimed to have been raped "in daylight" and not in her hotel room is simply to misrepresent the facts whether through the intent to deceive (as I think is unlikely) or through sheer carelessness (as I think is likely). You can clarify this for yourself by reading the articles that you claim to be discussing.
I'm not interested in discussing with you whether Dworkin's claims about what happened to her in Paris are credible or less than credible. Fortunately that is not the purpose of this Talk page anyway. NPOV requires that we discuss the controversy in the article, not that we work out a way to resolve it.
As for "defamation," please spare us the melodrama. Radgeek 08:58, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
Mare, I can give you advice about where to go to take this dispute to another level. Before I tell you how to do that, I'd like to give a few cautionary notes. First, I don't think your dispute, such as it is, with Radgeek merits appeal to any Wikipedia "court" at this time. You may disagree. I would also urge caution in your use of phrases such as "(The court procedures available for this defamation I know myself.)" You aren't quite threatening Radgeek with legal action, but you're maybe closer than you want to be. There is a Wikipedia policy against this here: [[8]]
As for dispute resolution, I would first recommend that you start what is called a Request for Comment, which you can make here: [[9]]. This alerts other Wikipedians to a difference of opinion in progress, and invites them to come to this page and give their two cents. If, for some reason, this fails (for example, no one ends up wanting to come to the page to drop a comment, as sometimes happens), and you and Radgeek are still at loggerheads, I would recommend the Mediation Cabal [[10]], which are a group of volunteer mediators (with no power to enforce decisions, just to help iron out differences in a calm way). I just resolved a dispute (partially) with some excellent help from them. I would also be glad to mediate if things get out of hand here (which I don't think they have) but I have been a contributor to this article, so I may not be the best person to do it. Cheers. IronDuke 21:38, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dispute resolution between Mare Nostrum and Radgeek

IronDuke, I went where you kindly said and it indicated that the first thing I should do is try to settle with the individual, and I also take your suggestion to soften my tone (and took the Wikipedia advice to take a break from the disagreement), so here goes:

(A) Radgeek, I kindly want the word "factual misrepresentation" out of the history, along with the insult "RTFA" from the same line. A better term might be, "disagree with factual interpretation", for example. I do not think your reconstruction of Dworkin's article is conceivably correct (your interepretation of this daylight business baffles me but I won't belabor it here), but if we merely disagree on the interpretation of an article, I kindly offer that Wikiettiquette still does not allow you to accuse me of misrepresentation or permit the eptithet "RTFA" ("Read the F------ Article!").

(B) I won't argue that the statement of her losing credibility needs to be there (but see (C1/C2) below), but I want those two references out of the history [and if it "can't be done" or "the history can't really be changed", then I will have to take this further], at least for the reasons that they are inconsistent with several points of Wikipedia Etiquette (guidance but not "policy"), which see. [11]

Mare, I do not know of any way to edit comments on revisions in the history and I frankly would not be interested in doing so if I did. Dworkin clearly states in the article that she was raped in her hotel room. This is easily gleaned from the article and was widely reported as her claim in other sources (cf. [12], [13], [14], Bennett, Gracen, etc.). I'm sorry if my choice of words offends you, but if you think you are entitled to editorial leniency when make this kind of careless mistake you need to think harder about that. Radgeek 20:27, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

(C1) I also want "reported rape" (or similar) as her allegation of cause of death, not "rape." For us to say, as you have argued repeatedly that we should, that she-alleged-that-the-rape-caused-her-death, means

(i) that we agree that there was a rape, and (ii) she alleged that such undisputed rape caused her death. (It does *not* mean that she alleged that a real rape occcured and also alleged that it killed her.)

That is simply not the implication of the phrase "alleged that X caused Y." Some people allege that the Illuminati cause major political events; my saying so does not commit me to the claim that there is any such elite global conspiracy. Here, however, is my suggestion for avoiding continued conflict: the best thing to do on this point is simply to quote Dworkin making the claim in her Guardian column. E.G.: "I blame the drug-rape that I experienced in 1999 in Paris. I returned from Paris and finished Scapegoat over a period of months while caring for my dying father. Shortly after he died I was in hospital, delirious from a high fever, with infection and blood clots in my legs" or "Doctors tell me that there is no medical truth to my notion that the rape caused this sickness or what happened after it. I believe I am right: it was the rape. They don't know because they have never looked." It can hardly be disputed that Dworkin both claims that she was raped and also claims that that caused her health problems (please note, again that she does not claim it caused her death; how could she, unless she were prophesying?). Is that better? Radgeek 20:27, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

So that is not a fair position for us to take, since few (though their opinion must be respected) believe that she was raped or that her article even established such on its own terms. As you quoted above, she actually says "I couldn't remember", so even *she* is not testifying that any rape occured, whether or not we think that it did. Further, I don't see how "reported rape" or similar is demeaning to her if phrased properly.

The issue isn't whether "reported rape" or similar is demeaning to her; it's that some editors' mania for putting "alleged" and "reported" in front of everything makes hash of the grammar of the sentence in this particular case. I have been more impatient than I should be with you over this issue because it has come up repeatedly and was already discussed by me on the Talk page at the time you made the edit. I apologize for being short with you, but I hope that you can understand my frustration.
As for the rest, (1) it's untrue that Dworkin didn't state that a rape occurs; what she stated is that a rape occurred while she was suffering from the effects of amnesiac drugs, and she inferred this from several physical signs of having been drugged (passing out, the odd taste of the drink, etc.) and having been raped (unexplained wounds, etc.), and (2) you do not know, or at least have not explained how you know, that "few ... believe that she was raped." Have you done surveys? You should avoid claims like this about relative preponderance if you haven't got a documented basis for them. Radgeek 20:27, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

(C2) Now, if she lied about/or imagined/or fantacized/or got confused about/or "memory-recovered" that (as most who have read her article (even including many of her defenders) believe, and which *she herself seemed even to state* (("couldn't remember"))... Well, then to me (and evidently to Seminumerical), that casts doubt on all her other "bled for days"/beaten in prison/worked as prostitute/abused by husband, as well. That is what is so chilling about her rape account. That when you read it, and look at the picture of a woman who was (by then) of such ghastly ugliness, sort-of-alleging it, if you are like most people (maybe not you), then you realize that it is simply beyond belief. *And then you wonder what else not to believe of her claimed background.*

This is at the very best original research on your (or Seminumerical's) part. It is, as a matter of explicit policy, not the purpose of WikiPedia to provide a primary forum for it.
I am also going to ask you to please stop leaning on Dworkin's physical appearance. Besides being deliberately insulting to her on your part, it is also completely irrelevant to the topic. Have you done, or read any research on the physical appearance of women who are raped? Do you have any objective reason at all to cattily suggest that Dworkin probably would not be raped because you find her so distinctly unattractive? This is, frankly, a sleazy tactic and you ought to be ashamed that you indulged in it. Radgeek 20:27, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Just how does she, having made a career of such strident invective, decide that something happened to her, if "couldn't remember" and "lost hours" are enough of a basis for her to allege **rape?** Does she have a whole different system of knowledge that we do? (How is this different from someone who "realizes" that they were probed by space aliens, and isn't it actually much the same story?) So then I also think that some driest, respectful modifiers should be put in about these other misfortunes as well, "she reported", "as she relayed", "she told of", and if we don't put these in I don't think that's being fair, unless we have some corroborating evidence beyond her own writings and what she may have told others about them. Merely ripping out all of the qualifiers that I wrote (twice you did this along with your other numerous excisions) is also not Wiki Etiquette as the above reference also notes. And I kindly suggest that I don't need to have proof that her accounts were wrong, to propose that for a woman whose credibility/epistemology is *so* questioned we have the mildest, respectful modifiers such as "she told of" instead of having her accounts stated as fact.

This has been addressed above. In biographical writing there is a presumption in favor of taking the subject at her own word in the account of her life. If there are documented reasons for doubts about some specific aspect of her autobiographical statements then you should feel free to discuss those doubts from a neutral point of view and to qualify her claims in light of that, as has been done with her statements about being raped in Paris. If not then you are merely using repeated arch qualifiers to suggest that anything she said about herself ought to be doubted, without giving grounds for the doubt. (What grounds would you have? That you are a more reliable authority on what happened to Andrea Dworkin than Andrea Dworkin is?) If you would like to make clear that certain statements are taken from Dworkin's own testimony, a better way for you to do this would be to add explicit citations of Dworkin's own work (such as her memoir, Heartbreak, or the numerous references in her speeches and essays, many of which are collected online at the Andrea Dworkin Online Library). Radgeek 20:27, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

So my perspective: in sum, (A) and (B) above require the same action, and so then which of (A/B), (C1) and (C2) can we kindly resolve now? Thank you, Mare Nostrum 15:23, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

I see that the claim I made a "misrepresentation" and RTFA are still in the history.

Okay, I am not going to pursue this conciliation thing any more, I tried and it's a waste, and I'll go back to boldly but faithfully editing. None of the five articles that Radgeek offers to substantiate that our ugly, obese, and perhaps insane [15] misandrist was raped, begin to do that in any way. The best information is in Dworkin's own account, which does not do so either. And now, thanks to Radgeek's above contribution, we see that her doctors rejected her androphobic hypothesis that the her unlikely "rape" of five years before debiliated her. Thus, the right thing to do about that in the enyclopedia is to delete Dworkin's unsupportable raving that it caused her illnesses, and not to explicate her delusions. It is a good point that a writer's own account should be giving preference absent other evidence, but neither should we cast doubt on famous fabulists like Calamity Jane (or Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky), if we are always to accept the writer's word in the absence of real evidence. Like those people, Dworkin has rebutted the presumption of her truthfulness by showing herself to be non-credible, even among feminists.

The sanctimonious reproving of my pointing out Dworkin's ugliness, is part of the repressive Dworkin tradition and (apart from being condescending) it shows her strong influence on American culture: the First Amendment is revoked in favor of political correctness. Still, her physical repulsiveness is something any jury would rightly take into account in judging the plausibility of her ludicrous rape claim, which would make it only the more preposterous. Even though they would mull that (as but a small detail in a tapestry of incredibility), they might, in their deliberations, refrain from pointing it out orally: they might mince words in that dishonest way, having been cowed by censors like Dworkin. But I won't. Mare Nostrum 18:55, 31 January 2006 (UTC)


# I did not suggest that the stories proved that Dworkin was raped in Paris. As I stated earlier, I am not even remotely interested in debating the topic with you (nor is it the purpose of WikiPedia to get us to agree one way or the other on the subject for the purpose of the article). What I explicitly cited those articles for, deliberately including articles from both supporters and doubters, is to support my contention that what Dworkin said is that she was raped in her hotel room, not "in daylight," a frankly bizarre misreading on your part that you incorrectly edited the entry to reflect. I have no interest in trying to mangle the discussion of the controversy over Dworkin's articles or to rewrite it in a way that presupposes the truth of Dworkin's account. I do have an interest in accurately reporting what Dworkin said about the attack. Your tirade on this point is, thus, based on a simple misunderstanding.
# As I already also stated, I know of no way to remove the comments from the edit history and I wouldn't be particularly interested in doing so if I did know a way. Sorry.
# Dworkin's comments about her own illness are salient to giving an account of her life, whether you think she is right or not. If you simply delete the passage I will consider this plain vandalism and revert it as soon as I notice it.
# This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. There are no censors and nobody with any government authority at all involved in this discussion. What I'm asking you to do is not be a loud-mouthed nitwit. Your opinions about Dworkin's appearance have exactly nothing at all to do with the process of editing this article, and insisting on the point does nothing other than waste your own time with the pettiest sort of cruelty, and mine with reading such trash. On second thought, it does do one more thing: it shows that you have done absolutely nothing to make yourself less than ignorant about sexual assault, and that it is probably a perfect waste of time for me to try to tease out any objective reasons that you might have for insisting on the point. That's useful information for me, I suppose, but perhaps not the information that you were intending to convey.
I appreciate the constructive work (such as the material on the Meese Commission testimony) that you have contributed to this article. But a number of your edits have been unhelpful, and your melodramatic posturing on this Talk page does not change that. Nor is your cause helped when you resolutely misread points explicitly stated in simple words. —Radgeek 01:26, 1 February 2006 (UTC)


"Still, her physical repulsiveness is something any jury would rightly take into account in judging the plausibility of her ludicrous rape claim, which would make it only the more preposterous. "

Rape is an act of violence, not of passion. Therefore the physical appearance of a person does not play into the probability that they will be/have been raped. Brutallittlebroad 05:44, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

dude, the 70s to early 90s are long over. "Rape is an act of violence, not of passion" was a political statement not a scientific or criminological conclusion. So what are ya gonna do? Amongst our ancestors attractive women were preferentially raped. Care to find a contrary study, not written by a lawyer or a liberal arts major? No? what? you can't find one? What about our aboriginal contemporaries? Think raping the unattractive is a sport? Even the drugged up Liberian or Sierra Leonean killers don't seem to be hunting down the fat, the hairy, or the grandmothers (for rape that is, murder and degredation is fine). Take your sly white ass back to the upper middle class neighborhood you grew up in. Seminumerical 03:10, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dworkin's attitude to heterosexual intercourse

The following quotation from her book, "Intercourse", was removed with the comment that it did not mean that she felt being constructed for vaginal penetration was worse than being an Auschwitz inmate. Out of interest, can somebody (radgeek?) please explain what other interpretation could be reasonably put on it? She says there is "no analogue" to having a vagina, not even in the Nazi death camps or Gulag. It might, of course, mean that having a vagina is far nicer than being in Auschwitz, but given the context -- the description of intercourse as "humiliation", her apparent suggestion that men select vaginal entry specifically to debase or dominate women -- and the overall thesis of the book, it seems a reasonable conclusion to reach. Why mention these bywords for horrific torture if not to emphasise the awfulness of having a vagina?

"There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse; for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag."

I don't think that this point requires "interpretation." Dworkin says what she means: there aren't ready analogies between the conditions that she says women experience in patriarchy and the conditions of other oppressed peoples. She suggests that the reason for the difference is that some forms of patriarchal oppression are sexualized. She makes no claims at all about what is better or worse; she merely says that they are, in this respect, not the same. Radgeek 21:41, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
The quoted excerpt does not refer to patriarchy. It says there is “no analogue” to “being made for penetration, entry, occupation”. Just before, we are told that during intercourse “[t]he vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart”, and that “[s]he is occupied -- physically, internally, in her privacy”. All of this is a clear reference to the biological reality of women, and its relation to vaginal intercourse. Why, if she were referring to women’s subordinate position in the patriarchy, would she talk in such explicit language about their genitals?
Since you’re presumably not suggesting that the patriarchy is responsible for the morphology of female genitalia I can only assume you are excavating some esoteric meaning from what you see to be Dworkin’s deeply figurative language. If so, I’d like to see a clearer explanation of this process and resulting view, because it certainly doesn’t qualify as uninterpreted. And no, complaints about “depiction” (the spin you put on this in the “Intercourse” article) won’t do. Regardless of depiction, the vagina is indeed “muscled” and “the muscles have to be pushed apart” during vaginal intercourse; and no amount of sexist imagery has ever had any bearing on that.
You are of course entitled to your own views of what this all means, and I believe the article as it stands reflects them. These views may even accord with what Dworkin said elsewhere. But that does not mean that the obvious interpretation, pertaining to the mechanics of vaginal entry, is invalid, or that it should be removed from the article. Even if it could be shown that Dworkin’s subsequent defence of her views were not back-pedalling, and that “Intercourse” was entirely consistent with everything else she had said, it would not negate the usefulness of showing why her critics have interpreted her books in certain ways. At best it would warrant suitable wording to reflect the divergence of interpretations.
Finally, you are being ridiculous in suggesting her comparison with, among others, Auschwitz and the Gulag, “makes no claims at all about what is better or worse”. The strong implication, as I’ve already said, is that women’s situation is worse. If she were drawing a value-free comparison why was every counterpoint a deeply negative one? To suggest that one can invoke for comparative evaluation the “atrocities [of] the twentieth century”, including the work of Stalin and Hitler, and not imply negativity is pure absurdity.
Stuarta 14:06, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Unless I've missed something, all that can be unambiguously inferred from Dworkin's statement is that the degree of submission inherent to having a vagina is greater than that suffered by prisoners in Auschwitz and the Gulags. This may not be all that far from calling the female condition downright "worse" than being in a death camp, but there is still a difference, and to disregard it would be PoV. 85.64.246.205 01:28, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Of course, her intent while writing it, and other possible interpretations of it, while relevant, do not negate what a disinterested reader might make of it. It would seem very relevant to the discussion of the "intercourse equals rape" question. So I would like, if possible, to see a case for exclusion. As things stand, we have a contention -- that "intercourse equals rape", the fact that this statement does not explicitly appear in the work, and her assertion that this was not her view. The quotation above, and other material from her book recently excised from this article, would seem to be at least as valid contributions to the discussion.

The material "excised" was reverted because you put in long quotes without context or even so much as offering a proper citation in the work (or even a link to the online copy of the 7th chapter). The passages were restored once I took the time to find the paragraphs in the book. It was then moved to the new article Intercourse (book), which is linked from the section on Intercourse in the Dworkin article, because of the length required by long block quotes and discussion of context. (You could have found all of this out by examining the History tab for this entry, incidentally.) I'd like to suggest that detailed discussion of the contents of the book should go under the article on the book; the section in this article about the author should mainly discuss it in terms of the development of her views on pornography and sexuality, and mention the controversy over the book's argument.
I can’t imagine why you put “excised” in quotation marks. All of the quotations were indeed excised from the main article, to be replaced with a further apologia from Dworkin. Only two have been reinstated, and in a different article – the “Intercourse” one. The quotations which you excised, and which continue to be absent, included another relevant one comparing vaginal to anal sex:
“The creation of gender (so-called nature) by law was systematic, sophisticated, supremely intelligent... Fuck the woman in the vagina, not in the ass, because only she can be fucked in the vagina.”
Further context that you apparently deemed irrelevant included her view that “penetration was never meant to be kind” and that sex is a “humiliation ritual”.
I agree, it would have been preferable to have supplied page numbers, although the lack of them was certainly no grounds for a quotation’s removal – many quotations on Wikipedia lack them. Thank you for adding those for the quotation that you added back into the “Intercourse” article. As for the context, that appears to be solely your interpretative framework, including the reiterated assertion that the statement, “All heterosexual intercourse is rape”, does not feature in “Intercourse”. As noted above, this is not the only context that a reader might benefit from.
Stuarta 14:06, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
"Excised" was put in quotation marks because the material was put back in to the Dworkin article once proper references were added. They were then moved to the Intercourse article (you could have found this out by checking the page history). Why? Because this article is about Andrea Dworkin, not about the book Intercourse. Why was that done? Because Intercourse is a culturally important book that deserves its own article and I might point out that there have been specific complaints from other editors on this talk page about the length of the Dworkin article and the amount of time spent dwelling on what amounts to little more than competing argumentative essays. The elliptical quote that you lifted verbatim from Mullarky's review (I had to do some digging to find that that's where you got it from, since you didn't cite your sources) was left out because it was not used to support any point of controversy about Dworkin's work with any cited origin other than your own original research about the "seeming implications" of Dworkin's work. Mullarkey doesn't take it to mean what you think it "seemingly implies" in her review, for example. In case you are interested, here is the actual quote, without ellipsis; it comes from "Chapter 8: Law" in Part 3 of Intercourse, pp. 156-157 in my paperback edition:
"The creation of gender (so-called nature) by law was systematic, sophisticated, supremely intelligent; behavior regulated to produce social conditions of power and powerlessness experienced by the individuals inside the social system as the sexual natures inside them as individuals. There were the great, broad laws; prohibiting sodomy; prescribing fucking in marriage; directing the fuck to the vagina, not the mouth or the rectum of the woman because men have mouths and rectums too; legitimizing the fuck when it produces children; each turn of the screw so to speak heightening gender polarity and increasing male power over women, fucking itself the way of creating and maintaining that power. Fuck the woman in the vagina, not in the ass, because only she can be fucked in the vagina. Fuck to have children because only she can have children. Do not waste sperm in sex acts that are not procreative because the martial aims of gender are not advanced; pleasure does not necessarily enhance power. Every detail of gender specificity was attended to in the Old Testament, including cross dressing: "A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment; for whosoever doeth these things is an abomination unto the Lord thy God" (Deuteronomy 22:5). A woman had to be a virgin, or she could be killed: "But if this thing be true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the damsel; then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die..." (Deuteronomy 22:20-21). The regime of fear was established through threat of death; and the regime of fear created sex roles, called nature. Laws mandating gender-specific dress as God's will, gender-specific virginity, vagina-specific fucking, the legitimacy of the fuck dependent on producing a child, shaped the nature of intercourse as well as the natures of men and women. Opposites were created; a hierarchy was created; intercourse expressed both the opposition and the hierarchy. Intercourse became the "natural" expression of the different "natures" of men and women, each pushed away from having a common human nature by laws that prohibited any recognition of sameness; each pushed into a sexual antagonism created by the dominance and submission that was the only intimacy they shared." (156-157; emphasis added)
The passage is quite explicit that its concern is the conditions produced by a particular sex of laws under the conditions of a particular form of social power. (I've boldfaced a passage that, in particular, might be helpful to you in understanding many things in the book that you seem to misunderstand.) More to the point, however, it is rather obviously not concerned with making any claim about the relative merits of penile-anal and penile-vaginal intercourse (any more than it's specifically concerned with comparing the relative merits of fellatio or masturbation or sex using contraceptives with unprotected penile-vaginal intercourse). The passage is a discussion of Torah, not a sex advice column. Mullarkey knew this because she had read the book, and didn't make the interpretive claim that you want inserted into the article. I suspect that you don't know it because you have not read the book.
If you can connect this passage to some specific controversy about Dworkin published in a source other than your own personal exegesis of Dworkin, then feel free to quote it, with references, in connection with the specific controversy (and, may I suggest, the names of the specific people in the controversy). If you can't at least produce that information in sourcing the claims you make, then maybe you need to think more about whether WikiPedia is the right forum for these claims.
Radgeek 17:08, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
As for what "a disinterested reader" might make of Dworkin's writing, that's a perfectly reasonable topic for discussion, but I would suggest that if that is what you're interested in writing about, you should cite actual disinterested (or interested) readers who have made the interpretations that you offer, rather than using WikiPedia as a forum for your own textual exegesis (cf. WP:NOR). Radgeek 21:41, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Of all your contributions on this topic, this is the most ludicrous. First, you say interpretation isn’t necessary; then you suggest I can cite someone else’s interpretation as long as it isn’t mine. Finally, during what I suppose you believe to be some sort of argumentative coup de grace, you deliver the admonition not to use “WikiPedia as a forum for your own textual exegesis” – this after battling all comers for the right to lard the factual account with partisan apologetics.
This is simply egregious. What I've "larded" the passages in questions with are quotations from Dworkin about the meaning of her own work, identified and cited as such. That's not original research; it's a responsible attempt to give one of the sides in a point in dispute her hearing. If you think that that is the same thing as simply presenting weasel-worded anonymous interpretations of what a passage "seemingly implies," think again.
Along the way we’re treated to this: “you should cite actual disinterested (or interested) readers who have made the interpretations that you offer”.
It demonstrates a) that you don’t know what “disinterested” means and b) that you didn’t read the link I added to Maureen Mullarkey’s “Nation” review of “Intercourse”, which does view the quotations I added in essentially the same light. This review supplied me with the quotations as well as the starting point for my analysis. I’ll discard the fatuous notion that I cite a “disinterested” reader as empty rhetoric. Instead I’ll make the simple, obvious point that if the spectrum of opinions of Dworkin’s work includes the views of Mullarkey, and if her opinion has basis in Dworkin's words (which it does), then it deserves to be represented in this Wikipedia article.
Stuarta 14:06, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
As a matter of the WikiPedia editing process, let me suggest that if you are going to make analytic claims about Dworkin's work and what it "seemingly implies," you may want to name, or at least link to, the source for those claims rather than hiding behind anonymous language like "seemingly implies" or "some critics" or similar (cf. WikiPedia:Avoid weasel words). If there is no source other than your own personal "analysis" of controversial points, then asserting as fact that a passage "seems to imply it" is a violation of WP:NPOV, and asserting that you personally think that it a passage seems to imply it is a violation of WP:NOR.
As a personal note, I'd also suggest that if you expect your "analysis" of Dworkin to be taken seriously, the starting point for it should probably be the book Intercourse, not press reviews of it and elliptical quotations that you have lifted from those reviews. Just out of curiosity, do you so much as own a copy of the book? Have you ever read it any more of it than the Internet copy of chapter 7 and the quotations that you've found in various reviews and discussions? Radgeek 17:08, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Radgeek, you seem well-informed on this topic. I just want to point out, though, that in this comment taken in context with some others, you're asking for contradictory things. Stuarta should not be putting her own analysis in; on that I agree with you. The only alternative is to look at verifiable published sources discussing it, such as press reviews and scholarly works. And the truth of the matter is that Dworkin's work is controversial, and many opinions exist. This article seems to emphasize the positive ones. We need to work on NPOV. moink 17:23, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Moink, thanks for the comment; I'm afraid I don't quite understand you, though. What are the contradictory things you think that I'm asking for? I didn't mean to suggest in this comment that Stuarta should be adding "analysis" based on a reading of the book itself any more than adding "analysis" based on reviews and elliptical quotations lifted from them. I'm sorry if that's how I put it across; it's not what I meant. The "personal note" (and a number of the spats with Stuarta and others over the reading of certain specific passages) are intended as just that, personal and interpretive notes which are mostly off to one side of the topic of how to edit this and related articles. I agree with you that this article would benefit from a NPOV presentation of the claims of some of her critics in press reviews and scholarly works; what I disagree with is the insistent and frequent actions of editors such as Stuarta and Mare Nostrum (to take a couple recent examples) to insert weasel-worded POV editorializing based on their own views, without reference to and often without citation of the critics making the charges in question. Does that help clarify, or does it just muddify more? Radgeek 18:08, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Maybe I misread your comments. Let me clarify what I meant. Elsewhere you seem to suggest that Stuarta and others should not put their own opinions in the article, as this would be original research. I'm with you on that. Here you say that "the starting point for (Stuarta's analysis) should be the book Intercourse, not press reviews of it." I interpreted that as meaning that you disagreed with quotations of press reviews being put in the article. It seems now you're clarifying that to say that's not what you meant, and that this is more of an off-topic discussion. Ok. But back to the article, what it needs is some well-sourced criticism of Dworkin's views. moink 18:17, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for clarifying. I agree with you that the article could use well-sourced discussion of Dworkin's critics, either in the sections on her life and work, or in the section on "Legacy and Controversy," depending on which is more appropriate and leads to a better-reading article.
I don't know how long you've been following this article or the Talk page, but one of the outstanding issues here is that there have been a series of editors (including User:Seminumerical, User:Doovinator, User:Stuarta, and User:Mare Nostrum, who have repeatedly inserted selective, uncited quotes and completely unsourced editorializing in an attempt to express their own views of Dworkin, who expressly stated their desire to use this article as a forum for original research to "debunk" Dworkin's work, and who vandalized this and related pages (see for example Seminumerical's vandalism of Feminism, vandalism from an IP address <<<just to clarify things, I have not repeatedly vandalized anything, I wouldn't even admit to a single act of vandalism, except that when I clicked on Radgeek's link to my vandalism I recognised it as my own drunken input. I had been away looking after an ill relative and had little access to a computer for about six weeks, otherwise I would have made a point of vandalising the site some more. Well what I said about dworkin was not vandalism, rather the truth, but it looked unprofessional. Not what we want to see if we are to compete with the nearly dead Encyclopedia Britannica. I mean Dworkin is an habitual ranter. Anyhow, I only had access to a 56k modem at the time. I'll try to remind everyone that Radgeek is an habitual pussy more often from now on. Seminumerical 06:08, 22 April 2006 (UTC)>>>that shortly thereafter made edits that User:Stuarta claimed as his or her own, Mare Nostrum's quasi-vandalism of the opening paragraph, etc.). They have also engaged in repeated personal attacks against Andrea Dworkin and against me as well. This makes it rather hard to assume good faith as I ordinarily would. It also may help explain why I'm interested in pointing out on this talk page that some of the editors here do not appear to have any significant direct contact with Dworkin's work, have contributed very little constructive, non-combative work to the article (amounting to a handful of external links and a paragraph on the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography), and that this may be important to keep in mind when trying to resolve disputes over recent edits. Radgeek 18:49, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't wish to start a flamefest, but I do find it mildly ironic that, in reponse to adding this section

"Elsewhere she apparently suggests that women are, on account of their penetrable sexual organs, consigned to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims"

the reversion from radgeek said "You also need to read more carefully if you think she suggests that intercourse is worse than Auschwitz." The sentence above does not say that. It says that women are "consigned to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims" because of their "penetrable sexual organs". This derived from the considerations above, and from their apparent link with "being made for intercourse; for penetration, entry, occupation". It doesn't mention intercourse, and it doesn't compare sexual intercourse with a concentration camp -- a nonsensical comparison to make.

Stuarta 10:34, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Fine. I apologize if I misstated your interpretive claim. However, you also need to read more carefully if you think that Dworkin is suggesting that having penetrable sexual organs consigns women to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims. In fact, you need to read more carefully if you think that Dworkin is suggesting that having a vagina consigns women to suffering at all. Dworkin doesn't identify women or female sex organs with sexual penetration; she argues that "the discourse of male truth" identifies women and female sex organs with sexual penetration, and that sexual practice in patriarchal societies enforces that identification. (See also The Root Cause in Our Blood for related themes.) Radgeek 21:41, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
I have addressed this above. I based my interpretation on reading the words Dworkin wrote in “Intercourse”. Whether she wrote something about “the discourse of male truth” (whatever that means) elsewhere is of no relevance to the semantic content of her quoted words, and does not imply that I didn’t read “carefully”. In the content that I added and you removed, I said this:
“she apparently suggests that women are, on account of their penetrable sexual organs, consigned to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims”.
I remain of the view that this is a reasonable interpretation of the paragraph now quoted in the “Intercourse” article, and which I discussed above. I never suggested that she identified “women or female sex organs with sexual penetration” – another of your inventions – and I never made unqualified assertions either way in my original modifications. I said, “she appears to be disturbed by the mechanics of vaginal entry”, that the book “contains the strong suggestion that she disapproves of heterosexual intercourse” and that “she seemingly implies anal heterosexual sex would be preferable to the vaginal norm”. None of this is unequivocal (although certainly the wording could be tightened up slightly) and I fail to see how you could so categorically dismiss such views of her work from being represented in a neutral article.
Stuarta 14:06, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Stuarta, let me suggest that, while I find these claims completely unsupported by the text, and the "implications" to be the creatures of your own imagination, WikiPedia is not ultimately the forum for settling this dispute (as per WP:NPOV). Before, however, you say "Yes, that's why we should make sure these passages go in the article!" let me also suggest that WikiPedia is not the forum for you to present your own original interpretation of Dworkin's book -- as per WP:NOR. For the purposes of editing this article, I do not care whether you think Dworkin is best read as advocating what you claim she advocates, or even whether you find these readings "reasonable." You need to find a different forum for setting out your own detailed reading of Intercourse, because WikiPedia is not a forum for presenting original research. Radgeek 16:22, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More between Mare Nostrum and Radgeek on POV

SO!! STRUGGLING TO INJECT BALANCE INTO THIS LOOPY ARTICLE BUT FRUSTRATED AT EVERY TURN? PERPLEXED WHY CONSENSUS IS SO ELUSIVE IF WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE OBJECTIVE? Need comic relief? Well, then! For some oily Dworkin hagiography, try the Rad Geek People's Daily, e.g., [16], and [17] ("those of you ... know I absolutely adore Andrea Dwworkin") and don't forget the search function, e.g., Why Andrea Dworkin was Right (Volumes 1 through 6!) Also among many others, there's this [18] ("her words changed my life"). Or alternatively, for the "preacher of hate" view (people can be so negative!), try party-pooper Cathy Young in the Globe[19] Mare Nostrum 21:53, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I admire Andrea Dworkin, have read most of her work, think that she was right about many things, and make no bones about it. Similarly, you and a few others who have posted on this Talk page strongly dislike Andrea Dworkin and think that her views on many things are wrong and indeed bizarre or mad. You have made no bones about that either. Now that we have filled out the ad hominem context, what has any of this got to do with the process of editing this article? —Radgeek 20:00, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
NO, NO, NO. I am interested in a neutral account of this extremely controversial person's life. I do not have a whole website writing about how I adore her, the many amazing contributions she made, how I despise her critics, or similar -- and I don't have any Dworkin writing history of any other kind, either.Mare Nostrum 11:53, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Neither do I have any such website (if you want to see one, you're better off going to Nikki Craft's AndreaDworkin.net). I have a website on general topics, which has included some articles concerning Andrea Dworkin and expressing admiration for her as a person and support for some of her views. I do indeed think well of Andrea Dworkin. You think poorly of her and have repeatedly stated this in the above discussion. In any case, what has this got to do with the process of editing this article? Radgeek 04:46, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
This article is becoming bloated and argumentative. It should not read as a forum in which pro and anti-Dworkin forces do battle. IronDuke 23:26, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
I agree. I'd like to suggest that part of this can be avoided by confining any extended discussion of, say, the proper reading of one of Dworkin's books to articles such as Intercourse (book). Also that criticism of Dworkin from random dudes with a web site (which have mostly been inserted through weasel-worded references to "some critics," etc.) be kept to a minimum. IronDuke, what would you suggest as ways to improve the flow of the article and avoid turning it into a debate forum? —Radgeek 00:56, 5 February 2006 (UTC) MARE NOSTRUM rejoins, They are not "random dudes", they are shocked by this person, the word "feminazi" was invented by such people to describe her in part because they don't no what else to call her and smaller sites and references aren't included anyway, which may be unfair to the thousands of appalled smaller-scal commentators who don't devote whole websites to this subect.
It is bloated and argumentative, that is what you get when you have a guy who has his own I-love-Andrea-Dworkin-and-I-hate-her-critics website guy (who knew?! does Wikipedia encourage that, IronDuke?! I used to take this more seriously - ha ha!!),

when you have such a person, doing much of the writing about such an iconoclast. Think positive, it used to be bloated and hagiographic.

And I sure am for cutting it down. Air has to be given to her outrageous bombast (the reader has to understand what so many people are reacting to), but if there are good arguments for putting it in context (e.g., later changed her outlandish views on incest), that's great though it should be very brief. We have to hold her accountable for her invective, she said all these things and there sometimes isn't a good explanation. That's life. If we were writing about JFK, we wouldn't say that many people argued he was a philanderer but if you read his own account he actually said what a good fellow he was, how devoted to Jackie (and then quote him about it, and add other adoring material from his admirers). Probably he did lots of good things, but he *was* a philanderer and we don't need to drone on about what a misconception that is. Maybe Dworkin was a big mouth, who didn't mind her words (or liked to shock people) -- some people are just like that. We have to accept that she said some deeply appalling things, much of it mutually contradictory, and maybe she changed her mind later (views evolved, matured) or had some reason to say them -- but if so, the explanation needs to be really short and not a recitation of all of the pro-Dworkin propaganda on any particular point. We don't need to use Dworkinite hyperbole that something was a "grave" misunderstanding of her work. We do not have to list one by one her legal recommendations before the Meese Commission, but just summarize them respectfully in one line. We don't need to quote her at lengthy on and on about how she "condmened" obscenity laws (that inapt verb was reverted at least five times) at the same time that she called for **new** anti-porn laws, it appears highly self-contradictory anyway and it can best be summed in a very short, respectful description. We don't have to quote irrelevancies like how many minutes she spoke before the Meese Commission (also reverted back in several times), argue that vampires or dracula somehow modify the fact that she said repeated that "romance boils down to rape", don't need to recite how *she* compared her own work to fighting the Ku Klux Klan, or that her partner MacKinnon thought she should have the Nobel Peace Prize. We don't need to quote at length from her books, or hear her account of illness -- she thought she was raped and that such affected her overall health, the doctors disagred but she maintained such. Period. She claimed spousal battering? Then she did. We don't need to know if it was her legs or head that she said were injured, if she was battered, then much of her body surely would surely be injured. And there is far too much descriptive material in here about her "groundbreaking" writings, all that can be greatly shortened and in a respectful and faithful way. The reader can go to Amazon or her site if they seek such information. Mare Nostrum 11:53, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Look, you may think that you are entitled to ornament the article with numerous links to critics of Dworkin, ranging in credibility from published columnist Cathy Young to a hatchet piece written by an obscure Marxist-Leninist splinter sect and subsequently republished on an e-mail listserv, without any mention of the fact that Dworkin explicitly rejected these interpretations of her work or her stated reasons for doing so. I think that that's wildly irresponsible. You may also think that citing from Dworkin's work is unnecessary; I think that citing sources is something that WikiPedia rather desperately needs more of, and furthermore I'd like to point out that I am doing so, in part, to clarify the source for the material is Dworkin's own writing, something that you claimed to be important to ensuring that the article is NPOV. As for "holding her accountable" for your own POV on the contents, effects, and value of what you describe as her "invective," that is explicitly not the purpose of WikiPedia. Radgeek 04:46, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

P.S. When I came on here, the state of this article was that it especially "silly" to say that Dworkin was a misandrist because she lived with self-loathing male (Author, "Refusing to to be a Man") and Dworkin campaigner John Stoltenberg and such was proof she was not sexist. So we've come some way. Now let's shorten.

[edit] Reversions, February 5, 2006

The following edit is shameless POV. From the first paragraph; emphasis mine:

She is best known for her bombastic polemics (e.g., "Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.").

It's also factually absurd. Dworkin reached the national stage as an activist against pornography and Pornography: Men Possessing Women remains very clearly one of her most widely-read books. She was best known as a critic of pornography (which I actually think is rather unfortunate, for reasons that aren't worth digging into here); you might, for example, notice that her anti-pornography work is mentioned in either the first paragraph or the tagline of nearly every press obituary or column on her death ([20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1457325,00.html, ...). The two major printed articles that I can find that front-load a mention of her polemical style or its effects on readers are fellow feminist Katharine Viner's column in The Guardian, and the obit for the London Times, which also mentions her anti-pornography work in the tagline before the story even begins.

I conclude that Dworkin is most remembered for her anti-pornography activism.

SHE MOST CERTAINLY ISN'T. She is "best known," inside and outside the women's movement, as a misandrist, probably the most influential one of all time, and as a prolific author of some of the most startling anti-male invective ever published. Whatever her worshippers may wish for the bigot, this by far is legacy above anything else.Mare Nostrum 09:27, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

The following edits range from pointless wordsmithing to vandalism against documented facts.

  1. The attempt to say that Dworkin condemned criminal obscenity laws without using the word "condemned." Again, what is the point? Dworkin specifically stated "We are against obscenity laws. We don't want them." and further that "Obscenity laws are also woman-hating in their very construction." She spends two pages' worth of testimony explaining her reasons for rejecting them as ineffectual in practice and anti-feminist in principle. If does not amount to a "condemnation," I am not sure what you think does. In your comments above, you claim that she is here suggesting a form of criminal obscenity prosecution, under the heading of the "criminal conspiracy" provisions that she suggested. No, she's explicitly not; she's suggesting "criminal conspiracy" provisions for what she construes as violations of women's civil rights, not for obscenity. This is explicit in her testimony. The difference may not seem important to you, but it was important to her, and the importance that Andrea Dworkin attributes to a distinction is more important than the importance that you attribute to it when glossing the contents of a speech by Andrea Dworkin. Sorry.
  1. The removal of the length of Dworkin's testimony before the Attorney General's Commission. This is sourced (your original complaint seemed to be a lack of verifiability). It contributes three words to the sentence and gives a fuller picture of the testimony. What's your deal?
  1. The obstinate removal of Dworkin's comparison to the SPLC Klanwatch project and the use of civil rights litigation against the KKK. Why? She said this. It's documented. It's relevant to understanding her view on the pornography industry and the right way to deal with it.

Since this exhausts the changes made, other than a correction to the image code (which I'll restore momentarily), I've reverted these edits, which frankly border on deliberate vandalism. There is no way that you could earnestly think that "best known for her bombastic polemics" is an acceptable first-paragraph characterization for an NPOV article on a person's life, and your other changes simply delete documented information without warrant. Please think harder about the way that you are going to approach editing this article if you intend to continue doing so. Radgeek 05:19, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] De-bloating

Hey Radgeek and Mare Nostrum. Sorry I didn’t respond earlier, RL intrudes. This article is continuing to grow, and I don’t think it serves anyone’s purpose, pro or anti-Dworkin, to let this happen. This is why I think it’s happening: too many facts. Radgeek makes a good point about maybe spinning off some of the stuff here into its own article(s). Maybe there could be a decent-sized article on Dworkin’s writings, and then shorten all the stuff on her writings in this article. That would be a start.

Here’s another example of how this article is getting bloated. Someone adds a sentence like, “Some critics have noted that Andrea Dworkin kicked her dog every day after work.” Someone else adds another quote, “Andrea Dworkin actually never kicked her dog. This was a myth.” Then a quote from Dworkin’s seminal book I Kicked a Bunch of Dogs is introduced, followed by a claim that the quote from that book was taken out of context. Thus we have bloat resulting from a quote that never should have been put in there on the first place, because it doesn’t matter whether Dworkin was in the habit of kicking dogs.

So, what I would propose cutting (or moving to daughter articles):

When Dworkin was 10, her family moved from the city to the suburbs of Cherry Hill Township, New Jersey, which she later wrote she "experienced as being kidnapped by aliens and taken to a penal colony" (Life and Death, 3). In sixth grade, at her new school, she was punished by school administration for refusing to sing "Silent Night;" she later wrote "I wasn't a religious zealot; I just didn't like being pushed around, and I knew about and liked the separation of church and state, and I knew I wasn't a Christian and didn't worship Jesus. ... To this day I think about this confrontation with authority as the 'Silent Night' Action, and I recommend it. Adults need to be stood up to by children, period" (Heartbreak, 21-22).

Dworkin studied music as a child (Heartbreak 1-4), and began writing poetry in sixth grade. Throughout high school, she read heavily (with encouragement from her mother and father). She was especially influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Che Guevara, and the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg (Life and Death 23-24, 28; Heartbreak 37-40).

Soon after testifying before the grand jury, Dworkin left Bennington to live in Greece (Heartbreak 80, 83) and pursue her writing. She traveled to from Paris to Athens on the Orient Express (83-85), and went to live and write in Crete (87). While in Crete, she "wrote a series of poems called (Vietnam) Variations; poems and prose poems I collected in a book printed on Crete called Child; a novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on Burning Boyfried" -- a reference to the pacifist Norman Morrison, who had burned himself to death in protest of the Vietnam War -- "and poems and dialogues I later hand-printed using movable type in a book called Morning Hair" (98).

Many feminists, on the other hand, published sympathetic or celebratory memorials online and in print ([26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32]). Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin's longtime friend and collaborator, published a column in the New York Times, celebrating what she described as Dworkin's "incandescent literary and political career", suggested that Dworkin deserved a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and complained that "Lies about her views on sexuality (that she believed intercourse was rape) and her political alliances (that she was in bed with the right) were published and republished without attempts at verification, corrective letters almost always refused. Where the physical appearance of male writers is regarded as irrelevant or cherished as a charming eccentricity, Andrea's was reviled and mocked and turned into pornography. When she sued for libel, courts trivialized the pornographic lies as fantasy and dignified them as satire" [33].

This graf above could stay, but much-tightened.

Some critics, such as Gene Healy [34], Larry Flynt's magazine Hustler, and the "Alliance Marxist-Leninist" [35], allege that endorsed incest. In the closing chapter of Woman Hating (1974), Dworkin wrote that "The parent-child relationship is primarily erotic because all human relationships are primarily erotic," and that "The incest taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them. The incest taboo does the worst work of the culture [...] The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism" (Dworkin 1974, p.189). Dworkin, however, does not explain whether "fulfillment" is supposed to involve actual sexual intimacy, and one page earlier characterized what she mean by "erotic relationships" as relationships whose "substance is nonverbal communication and touch" (188), which she explicitly distinguished from what she referred to as "fucking" (187). Dworkin's work from the early 1980s onward contained frequent condemnations of incest and pedophilia as one of the chief forms of violence against women (Letters from a War Zone 139-142, 149, 176-180, 308, 314-315; Intercourse 171, 194; Life and Death 22-23, 79-80, 86, 123, 143, 173, 188-189), arguing that "Incest is terrifically important in understanding the condition of women. It is a crime committed against someone, a crime from which many victims never recover" (Letters from a War Zone, 139). In the early 1980s she had a public row with her former friend Allen Ginsberg over his support for child pornography and pedophilia, in which Ginsberg said "The right wants to put me in jail," and Dworkin responded "Yes, they're very sentimental; I'd kill you" (Heartbreak 43-47). When Hustler published the claim that Dworkin advocated incest in 1985, Dworkin sued them for defamatory libel (Dworkin v. L.F.P., Inc., 1992 WY 120, 839 P.2d 903; the court dismissed Dworkin's complaint on the grounds that whether the allegations were true or false, a faulty interpretation of a placed into the "marketplace of ideas" did not amount to defamation in the legal sense).

We really don’t need the above, either the assertion that Dworkin was pro-incest or its rebuttal.

Other parts of this article that get a polemical are things like:

She became well-known for passionate, uncompromising speeches that inspired her audience to action… “Uncompromising?” I don’t even know what that means here.

Dworkin rejected the interpretation as a grave misunderstanding of her work [36]. Why not just let it read as “Dworkin rejected this interpretation of her work [37].”

Also, there are many typos…

Hullo, I think those are very good observations by IronDuke. For the sake of transparency, I want to say this: I have enough doubts about the outcome that have have no further plans to contribute to this piece in the interim term, so please don't await action by me. I will kindly leave it at that. Best, Mare Nostrum 14:00, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

IronDuke, thanks for the suggestions. While I agree with you about the pro- vs. anti- dynamic that's causing several sections to swell into competing argumentative essays (sometimes under cover of anonymous "critics" or selected citations from Dworkin's work), I don't agree that the narrative of, for example, her childhood or her time in Crete is "bloat." Maybe we just disagree on the ideal length for biographical articles; it seems to me that on WikiPedia, we can afford to be detailed as long as the article is well-organized. (I am, however, quite open to the suggestion that the article needs, among other things, some better organization. In fact I'm pretty sure that's true.) Here are a couple suggestions: I am sure that there are sections other than Intercourse (and the dispute over its thesis) that can productively be shortened and the longer version put into daughter articles. I'd also like to suggest that one way we could try to accomodate both a desire for a brief explanation of her comings and goings, and a desire for a detailed article, is perhaps to write 1-2 more paragraphs, to be placed at the top after the one-sentence description and above "Her life and work," which could provide an overview treatment that would be fleshed out in the following paragraphs. What do you think? Radgeek 05:49, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
I agree with a lot of what you say. It's late, and I haven't fully digested it, but I would just offer this: while you're idea of an information-rich Wikipedia article is totally legit (and you'd find a lot of support out there on WP for it) my bias is in favor of articles that deliver what people most want to know -- the notability factor, you might call it. So, Dworkin on pornography interests me, Dowrkin as a little girl in the suburbs less so. I guess what I'm saying is, we shouldn't ask people to wade through a gigantic article filled with a lot of smaller facts (however true) to find what they're looking for down at the bottom (not that everyone is, but you get my drift). It's a thumbnail sketch, a highlight reel, not an actual biography. But I could well be wrong on this. It's an intersting point, I think, in any case. I'll try to be more specific later. IronDuke 08:04, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

HOW'S THE PROGRESS BY THE WAY in getting Andrea the Nobel Prize for Literature as the piece says? Anything the Wikipedians can do to push that toward a vote in 2006? Mare Nostrum 13:44, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The "official" interpretation of Dworkin

Since there's been no response to my previous comments, let me put my general point here. As the article stands, it is heavily weighted towards the Radgeek interpretation of Dworkin's work. That isn't my interpretation of her work, and it isn't that of various reviewers, although it may have been the interpretation she promoted in subsequent interviews. It provides no clue as to why she has had the "all sex is rape" claim attributed to her.

As an example, the only hint of why anybody might interpret "Intercourse" as being anti-sex is hived off into the separate "Intercourse" article, and there it is counterbalanced by strong statements of Dworkin's alleged actual stance. Additional quotations on this subject, which still seem very relevant to the issue, were removed in favour of apologetic material. In the main article we just hear of "critics" making a false claim about a statement not in the book, as if that were the sum total of their criticisms.

It's my view that there are numerous statements in her books which support the idea that she was strongly against heterosexual intercourse. They may well have been hyperbolic, and she may in fact have been motivated by a more nuanced analysis of the portrayal of sex, but that doesn't alter what she wrote. (I'm prepared to go into detail on what this was, as I did above, but since it provoked no reply I'm trying a more general tack here.)

Perhaps she expressed herself poorly in those books, or she was inconsistent in her views. Regardless, I believe readers have a right to examine what she wrote without being led by the nose to an exculpatory view. It isn't neutral to wave away the obvious and far from isolated criticisms with some later denial of hers, without even making clear whence they came, and it isn't neutral to put criticisms in the mouth of Cathy Young, etc., but adopt the "official" view, as informed by Dworkin's later denials, for the basic thrust of the "Intercourse" article. She had serious critics, and she handed them ammunition in the form of extreme assertions regarding men and sex. If the article doesn't make that clear then it isn't a fair article, in my view.

Stuarta 14:04, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you that these articles come across as apologetic. I've been wanting to fix them for a while, but I'm not really knowledgeable enough to do so. If you are, please incorporate your knowledge. moink 14:35, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Second that. Doovinator 15:03, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry that you think that the sections on Intercourse (inter alia) are not adequately neutral. Like all WikiPedia articles, I don't doubt that they could stand improvement. However, I will point out, first, that this article is about Andrea Dworkin, not specifically about Intercourse, and that detailed examination of the controversy over Intercourse is better kept to the article Intercourse (book). If you do not think the controversy is adequately explained in the short blurb that discusses the broad sweep of the book and mentions the controversy over its interpretation and refers the reader to that article for more about the controversy, then by all means please make some suggestions about a short summary addition that would help out. However, given that there has already been quite a bit of discussion about avoiding bloat in this article, please try to consider how far the suggested changes advance a coherent overview of the author's life and work, and how far they distract from it in order to dig in to questions of detail about a book that has its own article.
As for what readers have a right to, they have a right to hear Dworkin's replies to her critics as well as those critics claims (made in the critics own names, not in the anonymous forum of what "some critics" say or what passages "seemingly imply" or "strongly suggest"). If you have any concrete recommendations about phrases or introductions that "lead them by the nose" to Dworkin's statements -- as in, engage in POV editorializing -- then by all means point them out. If all that you're complaining about is the fact that Dworkin's replies about her own work are being cited in reply to critical claims made, then I think you have an odd idea of what imposes on the rights of readers.
And as for your view of what Dworkin said in Intercourse -- as opposed to cited appeals to the views of published critics -- why should we be interested in that as far as the article on either Dworkin or Intercourse goes? WikiPedia is not a forum for original research. Sorry. Radgeek 17:22, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply Radgeek.
You haven't responded to the first, most detailed part of my comments. I'd be interested to see your reply.
Stuarta, while this is a topic of some interest to me, my primary goal here is not to convince you of what I take to be the correct reading of Intercourse. Nor should it be; that's not the purpose of this Talk page or this article (or for that matter the article on Intercourse). Nor is my time unlimited. I'm sorry that I haven't had the chance to reply to everything you say, and that my responses here will also no doubt not fully reply to your questions or claims. Fortunately, all that it is necessary to cover here is the process of editing a biographical profile of Andrea Dworkin. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
You're apparently suggesting you didn't excise quotations, despite the fact you admit you removed them from the main article, and that they consequently remain absent from both that article and the "Intercourse" article. Given this basic fact, all the rest, including your question and answer session, is irrelevant to the matter.
What I'm suggesting is that it's inaccurate to characterize this as an "excision" when what I did was remove the quotes until I could verify and find the citations, and then restored the two longest quotes after I'd done so. Here's the history, for those who haven't checked: the quotes were removed when I reverting (at 5:57 GMT) a series of edits you made, when those were provided without citations or references and interspersed with your own attempts at anonymously conveying what Dworkin "strongly suggests" or "seemingly implies." I then restored the two longest quotes to the article at 7:08 GMT after I had done the work of finding the two long quotations in the book. I put in these cited quotations about the experience of intercourse as "occupation" (once I had done your bibliographic work for you) because they are directly relevant to a notable public controversy over the meaning of Intercourse. At 7:32 GMT I moved them to the newly created article on Intercourse along with a lot of other material so that there would be more space for discussion of Intercourse and the controversy surrounding it, un-cramped by the demands of a non-bloated article about the author. It's true that I did not restore the passage that you nicked from Mullarkey's review, which she in turn quoted from Chapter 8 ("The Law") because it was not connected to any controversy over meaning except for your own unsourced (and inaccurate) claim that maybe Dworkin was suggesting that penile-anal sex was preferable to penile-vaginal sex. She wasn't, and as I was unsurprised to find when I located your source for this quote, Mullarkey doesn't think that that's what the passage means. (Or if she does think that, she certainly doesn't say it in her review.) What she thinks it illustrates is the way that Dworkin's analysis mixes together biological facts and social roles, and insists on the role of social conditioning in sexuality to a degree Mullarkey finds dangerous. Again, if you want this quote back in, and there is a sensible way that you can connect it to the surrounding discussion of Dworkin, her reviews by Mullarkey and others, and Dworkin's replies, then you should feel free to put it in the article on Intercourse, with a cited reference. However, I doubt that either it or other long block quotes (and the block quote is long if you are not going to try to hide the most important parts under an ellipsis) has much place in the 2-3 paragraph blurb that Intercourse by necessity is limited to in the article about Andrea Dworkin. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
You suggest that I cannot link the "fuck the woman in the vagina" quotation to "to some specific controversy about Dworkin published in a source other than your own personal exegesis". This you do three paragraphs after stating that your "digging" showed the quotation to be from a highly negative review of "Intercourse" in the Nation, which provoked a number of letters for and against. I therefore can "connect this passage to some specific controversy", and you know this.
This is disingenuous. The fact that you took the quotation from a controversial negative review does not mean that your use of the quotation connects it to a specific public controversy. All that you used it to do was provide a springboard for your own claims about what Dworkin "seemingly implies" about the relative merits and demerits of different kinds of sex. That's what I object to. If the quote were actually part of a discussion of the review, then that would be something different entirely. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
I note that your "egregious" response doesn't address the flip-flopping on interpretation, so I don't know your latest view on this subject.
Look, there are (as I explicitly stated above) two different things being compared here. (1) Quotations from Andrea Dworkin from Intercourse and from later interviews about the meaning of her work. (2) Unsourced attempts by you to say what quotations "strongly suggest" or "seemingly imply." If you have specific examples where I or some other editor of this article have engaged in unsourced attempts to assert controversial claims of interpretation about Dworkin's book, please point them out and we can talk about the best way to fix them. If you have claims about the meaning of Dworkin's work that you can attribute to specific critics, then please feel free to point them out and they can be incorporated into either the Dworkin article or the Intercourse article or both. If all you're objecting to is the explicit citation of Dworkin's glosses of her own work in reply to critics, then it is silly to describe this as "larding" the article with "partisan apologetics," as if Dworkin's own reply to critics about her own work is not relevant to a discussion of what it means, or as if it were equivalent, from the standpoint of WP:NOR and WP:NPOV, to unsourced controversial editorializing about the "strong suggestion" or "seeming implication" of passages quoted. If you are going to claim that this is inconsistent with my views as expressed elsewhere, please substantiate the claim by showing where the inconsistency is. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
So be it. I'll restrict myself to pointing out that you characterise what I wrote as "original work" and "personal exegesis", whereas what you produced is apparently "a responsible attempt to give one of the sides in a point in dispute her hearing". Can you explain this judgement?
Because the "responsible attempt" consists of quoting Dworkin's explicit statements about the meaning of her work, not making unsourced hermeneutical claims from the standpoint of an anonymous editor without providing sources. The difference between the two under WP:NOR ought to be obvious. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
Why is the other side largely confined, with the small exception of some specific citations in the "Intercourse" article, to "critics" alleging that she said something she didn't? Where are the more substantive criticisms?
As I've said several times, I have no objections to naming specific notable critics and citing their specific arguments. The article would benefit from this. However, your past contributions have not done this; they have attempted to provide your reading of Dworkin, couched in weasel words about "seeming implications" and the like, without any references to the sources (such as Mullarkey's review) that you are now saying you'd like to see more of in these articles. I agree that the article would benefit from a better presentation of critics' views (and have made an effort myself to remove pro-Dworkin POV editorializing, to add links to critical reviews of Dworkin's work, to name specific critics and explain the places in Dworkin's work that they draw on for their claims, etc.).
What I am suggesting is that stuff like (unsourced report as if uncontested fact) "For instance, she appears to be disturbed by the mechanics of vaginal entry," (unsourced hermeneutics reported as fact under cover of weasel words) "On account of this, she seemingly implies anal heterosexual sex would be preferable to the vaginal norm," (unsourced hermeneutical claim reported as fact under cover of more weasel words) "Elsewhere she apparently suggests that women are, on account of their penetrable sexual organs, consigned to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims," etc. are not helpful to that aim, and are not going to fly as attempts to gloss critical responses to Dworkin (because they don't attempt to gloss them; they attempt to write a personal argumentative essay on Dworkin's book).
"[A]nalytic claims" are already present in both articles. The difference is they aren't qualified with those hated "weasel words". For instance, the Auschwitz quotation is framed by a preamble talking of "depictions of intercourse", as if this is the unquestionable meaning of the passage. But the quotation goes further than depiction or portrayal (and indeed does not mention them), saying
The "preamble" you're discussing here is the third paragraph of Intercourse (book), which states that Dworkin talks about the depiction of intercourse in literature and pornography. This is uncontestably true; I suggest that you read Chapters 1-6 of Intercourse if you're unsure about it. The article does not, contrary to your suggestion, say that the quotation is merely describing intercourse as depicted in "the discourse of male truth." It states that Dworkin is describing a view of sex that's enforced by the political conditions of patriarchy. I'm sure there is a better way of writing that, and if you have an NPOV way of doing so in mind, please let's hear it. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
"There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied--physically, internally, in her privacy... There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation."
Literary depiction of women, as I pointed out in the section of my comments that you ignored, has nothing to do with female physiology.
You may think that this is true, but Dworkin does not, and her view is more important than yours in understanding what she means. One of the important claims of Intercourse is that the enforcement of a certain view of sex, expressed in literature and pornography, and embodied in the law (see the long block quote I provided for you from Chapter 8 above) has profoundly affected men's and women's understanding and experience of women's physiology. You might know this if you had read the book. That said, the primary issue here isn't how to sort this out between us. It's how to write about Intercourse in an NPOV way in light of some of the intense controversy surrounding it. If you don't think the article as written does a good enough job, let's hear your suggestions for improving it. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
Why, as I've already asked, did she mention the "muscled" nature of the vagina and the physical act of penetration so explicitly if she was just talking about depiction? Neither of these is a function of depiction.
See above. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
After comparing "being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation" to imprisonment in Auschwitz, she goes on to say
"The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people--physically occupied inside, internally invaded--be free; can those with a metaphysically compromised privacy have self-determination; can those without a biologically based physical integrity have self-respect?"
Again, Dracula and Madame Bovary have no bearing on the reality that women are biologically designed to be "physically occupied inside" during sexual intercourse. It is therefore false to suggest that this is all about depiction.
Dracula and Madame Bovary and the rest of the literary works that Dworkin discusses in Intercourse are explicitly discussed as contributing to, and expressing, the cultural and political framework in which penile-vaginal intercourse is experienced as occupation, invasion, entry, penetration, etc. by women. You cannot simply discard the first 6 chapters of the book and then pretend that you have an adequate understanding of the relationship (or lack thereof) between these chapters and the discussion in chapter 7 and expect to be taken seriously as a reliable interpreter of Dworkin's meaning.
Nor does the article on Intercourse suggest that this is all about "depiction." It specifically states that in Dworkin's view the terms of that depiction are enforced by particular political and economic conditions and that this affects men's and women's experiences of sex itself. Again, I'm sure that there is a better and clearer way to say this than it is said in the article; and if you have some ideas I'd love to see them, but do bear in mind that the fact that Dworkin's book does situation her discussion of those experiences after a long discussion of the depiction of intercourse in literature and pornography is simply an uncontroversial fact about the book. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
You suggest that I, among others, was responsible for "insistent and frequent" insertion of "weasel-worded POV editorializing". As far as I remember I made one change. You further suggest that this "editorializing" was criminally based "on their own views". You have, as I've already noted, added explanatory paragraphs to the articles, but we are apparently not to take this as "editorializing". What is it then? Even if I accept that Dworkin's words must be filtered through third party controversialists (I don't), why would your interpretative contributions be exempt?
I am not objecting to quoting Dworkin. I am objecting to your attempts to interleave your own commentary about what the quotations "strongly suggest" or "appear" to express or "seemingly imply" when those interpretations are in fact points of controversy and disputed by the author herself. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
You claim I was among those "who expressly stated their desire to use this article as a forum for original research to "debunk" Dworkin's work.
I didn't claim this. What I said is that you were part of a series of editors whose actions had included this and several other things, without attributing specific actions to specific authors. I assume that people are capable enough of reading the rest of this Talk page to determine who said what when. I'm sorry if my language and grouping was unfair to you. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
I never said anything like this. Nor did I personally attack Dworkin or you, let alone repeatedly. (Since you raise it, I was not responsible for the vandalism from an IP address subsequently associated with me. It presumably derives from the combination of a proxy server and a discussion I had with a friend about the Dworkin page before contributing to it, although I haven't confirmed this.)
If you say so. I hope you do appreciate, however, how the fact that this vandalism occurred only 5 minutes before your first constructive edit from the same IP address (4 minutes after the prior vandalism was reverted) has made the process rather harder than it might otherwise be. (If it is the doing of your friend, I hope you'll explain to him or her that this isn't an appropriate use of WikiPedia.) Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
You suggest my interpretation is "completely unsupported by the text", without, of course, addressing my most detailed points regarding it. Leaving this aside, you have several times alleged that this interpretation is unique to me and hence "original work".
One difficulty with this is that, as you know (because you claim to have gone "digging" in Mullarkey's article, for one), I am far from the only one of her readers to interpret her work as being against vaginal sex. It is therefore not "original work" to include this interpretation. The other is that her words themselves as quoted here strongly imply that she is anti-vaginal sex. Until you succeed in explaining to me how mention of muscled vaginas, etc. pertains to patriarchal depiction, I'll continue to take the most obvious view - the view I share with Maureen Mullarkey and Cathy Young, among others: that she is against penetration of vaginas.
Stuarta 23:52, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm not here primarily to convince you of what I take to be the right way to read Intercourse. Nor do I think that the article should not discuss the published views of specific critics of Dworkin. What I characterized as original research (and continue to regard as such) is your unsourced editorializing. It is disingenuous of you to suggest that you are merely including the interpretation of other readers, since you previously made no attempts to cite those readers or characterize their specific views. That would be a responsible way to help present an NPOV discussion of the controversy. A personal argumentative essay on what you think the upshot of those parts of Intercourse that you have read or found quoted elsewhere is, is not. Radgeek 08:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Wrote that," "said that," "alleged," etc.

Moink, I appreciate your work on some of the awkward wording and trying to move this article closer to NPOV. However, I have to repeat my objections to the repeated qualification of autobiographical claims, with direct citations to Dworkin's writing, in terms of "Dworkin wrote that," "said that," "claimed that," "alleged that," etc. when there is no sustained, published controversy over these autobiographical statements. Whether this is your intent or not, this kind of distancing language generally has the effect of pointedly emphasizing the source, and tends to suggest that the statement is not credible. If there are published doubts about specific elements of Dworkin's autobiographical statements (as there are in the case of, for example, the claims of being raped in Paris in 1999) then of course we need to qualify the statements as Dworkin's claims and discuss the controversy. But without any mention of controversy over Dworkin's account of her injuries from the internal examination at the House of D or of her life as a battered wife in the Netherlands, there's no reason to use this sort of distancing language. If the worry is merely that the source for the statements should be made clear (that this is from Dworkin's autobiographical writing), then that is already done by the explicit citations of her books attached to specific statements.

I'll repeat what I said above (which was seconded by The Literate Engineer) in December to Seminumerical, since it's somewhat buried in the midst of a long and contentious thread.

As with anyone else's autobiographical statements, there is a presumption in favor of taking her at her word unless there is some specific reason not to believe what she tells you. If you have specific, documented reason for raising doubts then feel free to qualify her statements about her own life in light of those reasons; but barring that, it's unclear what grounds you would have except for the tendentious claim that you are a more trustworthy authority on what happened to Andrea Dworkin than Andrea Dworkin is.

For comparison, I'd like to note that other articles draw heavily or exclusively on autobiographical information volunteered by the subject. But we are not told that John Stuart Mill "wrote that" he had read Xenophon in the original Greek by the age of 8, or that Malcolm X "alleged" that an admired teacher told him being a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger" or that Benjamin Franklin "claimed" to have taken various printing jobs after leaving home for Philadelphia, in spite of the fact that the primary source for each of these claims is, or traces back to, a famous autobiography. Where there is no documented standing controversy over particular statements, I don't think that Dworkin deserves to be singled out for special treatment on this point. I hope this helps explain the edits. Radgeek 19:25, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I understand your point, and I'm willing to leave some of the statements standing. However, not all of them are the same category as the biographical information in Malcolm X or Franklin. When someone alleges something that would be considered a criminal act, such as an internal examination so rough as to cause bleeding for days afterwards, and there is no criminal conviction, it is appropriate to state that it is an allegation. moink 19:37, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

OR ISN'T IT BETTER TO JUST KILL THIS PIECE? Radgeek can continue as usual on his Dworkin fansite and then nobody here would question it. Mare Nostrum 20:20, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Mare, I'm sorry that you're frustrated with the editing process on this article, but you are at this point merely trolling and wasting other editors' time. I am sure that you have something better to do. Radgeek 20:46, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

THIS PIECE WILL NEVER APPROACH BEING BALANCED given the tireless, missionary devotion of its main author, a semi-professional Dworkin campaigner, to his prize subject, so let's just delete it. Simply put, it has virtually zero chance of ever being an even-handed encyclopedia article under these circumstances. Okay, its propects for success are not as utterly absurdist as Dworkin's prospects for the [Nobel Prize in Literature] (**literarture**, huh? should we edit the Nobel section of Wiki to say that she is a candidate since we reference it here?) -- but it amounts to the same thing. Cheer up, that's not defeatist, that's just the reality. There are lots of other articles that can be worked on. Oh, don't like me saying this? Too bad, just drop this hopeless article and we'll all move on to non-ridiculous pursuits for a change. Mare Nostrum 21:58, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] To-do list

In the interest of keeping work on this article moving, and to help it continue to improve while arguments over other sections are being hashed out, I'd like to suggest a few gaps in the narrative of Dworkin's life and work that could stand to be filled in, using research from printed works, public records, and the Internet. These are just three things that I thought of off the top of my head that aren't covered. Please feel free to add your own ideas, or to make suggestions about how these can be approached. So, how about:

  • A discussion of Dworkin's legal conflicts with Hustler in the 1980s and early 1990s (these are mentioned only briefly, in the section on "Legacy and Controversy")
  • An NPOV discussion of the relationship between Dworkin in particular and the development of so-called "sex-positive feminism," probably under the "Legacy and Controversy" section; Susie Bright, for one, claimed to be directly and deeply influenced by Dworkin (while also viewing Dworkin as one of her chief adversaries); Nina Hartley and others have claimed a more directly oppositional relationship
  • A mention, probably under "Illness and Death," of the way in which her death was reported and verified through WikiPedia (and elsewhere online) before it was reported in the mainstream media. (moink was involved with editing this page at the time and so should have some immediate experience; cf. the archives of this Talk page and The Guardian's weblog (2005-04-12)). Of course, if this is done, it should be done consistently with the guidelines at WP:SELF.

Anything else? —Radgeek 20:43, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree strongly that the first two points need to be covered. That will really help with the POV issue, by balancing out the article as a whole. This is better than my little fiddling with language. I don't think the third point (her death and Wikipedia) is relevant. In my opinion, that just comes across as the editors navel-gazing. moink 21:10, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Find a better Andrea Dworkin Quotes webpage. The advertisement to quotation ratio of the current External Link is so high, it is uncomfortable to look at. Just looking at the current link "above the fold" shows non-quote material takes up 75% of the page.

[edit] Dworkin's critics

Thanks for your reply, Radgeek. It’s nice to see a slightly less aggressive tone. Rather than go through line by line, I want to set out my view of how the article should change in one coherent whole. That doesn’t mean I don’t disagree with much of what you just wrote; it just means I want to move to something more productive than point scoring.

(For the record, yes I do possess “Intercourse”, and yes I have read it. As it happens, I didn’t have access to it when I made the initial changes, hence I relied on Mullarkey’s review. I don’t want to go against what I just said above, but I find it irritating that you emphasise repeatedly that your “digging” revealed that I’d “nicked” quotations from that review: I told you before you mentioned “digging” where I got them.)

My contention is that the articles as they stand present a sanitised and arguably distorted view of Dworkin’s work. One area in which this is the case is her attitude to heterosexual intercourse. Someone reading the article would not have a clear picture of why Dworkin has been the focus of criticism on this subject, or why she has been characterised as being anti-sex and anti-men.

Much of the problem is that critical views are generally not present at all in the article, but I also believe that what is present is on occasion misleadingly one-sided. An example of this that I’ve already given is the paragraph preceding the long quotation in the “Intercourse”. You say it isn’t a preamble, and perhaps it isn’t intended to be, but nonetheless it ends “Dworkin describes the view of intercourse enforced [by literary depiction] by saying:” The positioning, language and punctuation do, in my view, make this paragraph act as a framing device for the quotation.

The problem with promoting this understanding to the exclusion of others is that other people have interpreted the passage, and “Intercourse” as a whole, differently. As we already know, Mullarkey immediately follows her citing of the “vagina itself is muscled” quotation with the comment that “Heterosexuality is on trial in a kangaroo court, and the judge talks dirty.” She clearly does take Dworkin’s “brutal and lewd” description of vaginal intercourse to be part of an attack on intercourse itself, not its portrayal by DeLillo et al. (see below about portrayal versus reality). This view of the quotation was echoed by Moira Gatens, who took it to mean that “sex can only ever be ‘violation’ for women” (Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, Moira Gatens, 1995, page 78). We also know Cathy Young detected in Dworkin’s work “demonization of men and male sexuality”.

Helene Myers’s view (Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience, Helene Myers, 2001, page 11) is probably worth quoting at greater length, given that you rejected mention of penetrable organs consigning their owners to suffering as “original work”. With specific reference to the same quote – a key quote for critics – she said:

“The penetrability of the female body as it is hypostasised in heterosexual intercourse seems destined to ensure female vulnerability and male predation. Indeed, for Dworkin, heterosexual sex is war; the penis, metonym for the man, is the invader, and the vagina, metonym for the woman, constitutes occupied territory.

…

“For Dworkin, intercourse is a Gothic crime of transgression; heterosexual activity and rape become indistinguishable from one another, and women who willingly have sex are ‘collaborators’ in their own occupation. Read as a symptom of specific anxiety about female vulnerability, female subjectivity, female independence, and heterosexuality as institution, ‘Intercourse’ is fascinating. However, as a theory of female victimization, it makes all women into Gothic heroines, virgins awaiting, fearing, and, perhaps, desiring their defilement.”

Elsewhere (ibid., page 41) she says, “In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin argues that female subordination and vulnerability are inherent in the sexual act”.

Ann Snitow read “Intercourse” to mean that “in sex women are immolated as a matter of course, in the nature of things” (Pages from a Gender Diary: Basic Divisions in Feminism, Ann Snitow, Dissent, spring 1989, page 222). Patricia Collins understood her to mean “’men oppress women’ because they are men” (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Collins, 1990, page 173). This latter view coincided with a belief that Dworkin was a biological determinist or essentialist, which is itself contentious (see below).

Jane Juffer (At Home With Pornography: Women, Sexuality, and Everyday Life, Jane Juffer, 1998, page 10) said Dworkin and MacKinnon “are firmly committed to an ahistorical politics of victimizer and victimized, in which men and women are ceaselessly confined to play out the roles to which pornography, seemingly, has the sole power to confine them.” (I would point out here that Dworkin’s definition of “pornography” is so ductile that this by no means implies pictures of naked women. For instance, she uses the term “social pornography” in the context of “Satan in Goray” to mean the sexual subordination of Rechele.)

It’s possible to go on. In her book “Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics” cultural critic Laura Kipnis states that for Dworkin “all heterosexuality is violence” (Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics, Laura Kipnis, 1993, note 21, page 300). She also draws attention to Dworkin’s views of seminal pollution and its relation to male desire to violate: “[h]er point seems to be that men prefer that semen be a violation of the woman by the man, as the only way they can get sexual pleasure is through violation” (ibid., note 26). Marjorie Garber (Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber, 1997, page 217) avers that Dworkin “regards heterosexual intercourse as an instrument for the enslavement of women”. Stanley Aronowitz has this to say on the Dworkin/MacKinnon view:

“According to antiporn feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, for example, masculinity and its cultural forms—pornography, sexual intercourse, let alone more subtle symbolic discourses such as science—are violence against women, a sin that can be restrained only by law and the police power that enforces it. For them, with few exceptions, reason lies outside the purview of gender relations. Men are inescapably aggressive, whether because of socialization or testosterone. Dworkin holds that all sexual intercourse is rape, and that sexuality, which men trumpet as a universal desire, is merely another symptom of male domination. As a result, all men are to be held responsible for the oppression of all women.” (Constructing Masculinity, Berger, Watson, Wallis eds., 1996, page 314)

I would point out that here, as with everywhere else I’ve seen the “sex is rape” allegation, it is not contended that the phrase itself appears in her work; rather it is an interpretation of her work as a whole.

Others with a similar take include Kriss Ravetto - “Dworkin implies that men are carnal violent beings who look at every form of interaction as an act of murder, while women are asexual lesbian beings.” (The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics, Kriss Ravetto, 2001, page 258, note 12), Malise Ruthven - “For feminist ultras such as Andrea Dworkin, all penetrative sex is deemed to be rape.” (Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning, Malise Ruthven, 2004, page 32) and Aida Hurtado - “Interestingly, Andrea Dworkin… conceptualizes sexual intercourse as violation.” (The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism, Aida Hurtado, 1997, page 64).

I don’t believe we can reasonably insert anywhere near this amount of material. Rather, some accurate summary of the critical position should be included. This was what I was trying to do, with direct reference to her words. You’ve objected that any criticism must be linked to some controversy regarding her, which is not a position I accept (at least as far as I understand it), because we can’t insert a literature review.

It’s my view that, as things stand, there is a certain reading of Dworkin’s work implicit in the articles – not in her words, but in yours and other people’s. This is “unsourced editorialising” just as much as what I added. For instance, at the top of the “Intercourse” article, we read that “Intercourse” argued “sexual subordination was central to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse in a male supremacist society”. The key qualifiers “experiences of” and “in a male supremacist society” are frequently not present in Dworkin’s own discussion of sex, and it isn’t clear (to me, or, apparently, many other readers) whether they can be inferred. Yet we’re told that “Dworkin argued that the depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture consistently emphasized heterosexual intercourse as the only or the most genuine form of ‘real’ sex”.

Firstly, I don’t agree that by any means all or most of the works discussed in “Intercourse” are “mainstream” – “Satan in Goray” and James Baldwin’s essays are not “mainstream” by most definitions, and nor for that matter is Tolstoy’s largely unread “Kreutzer Sonata”. This is important, because if the significance of the works examined in “Intercourse” is that they “emphasize” certain sexual norms then it can only be through widespread influence – i.e. from being “mainstream” – that they actually influence behaviour. Since they aren’t, I conclude that this argument is mistaken.

Maybe you have misinterpreted her; maybe her argument was flawed. But actually I don’t think you have much evidence to suggest this was her argument in the first place, because she leaves open the question of whether she’s talking about the reality of sex or its literary depiction. What we’re presented with in “Intercourse” is a detailed rundown of all the most unpleasant sexual scenes in works that set out to portray dysfunctional relationships. Tolstoy is deliberately blurred with the narrator of “Kreutzer Sonata” (on the basis of this work and her biographical reading, Dworkin concludes that Tolstoy exhibits a “goose-stepping hatred of cunt”), much as Dworkin herself is blurred with “Andrea” in her novel “Mercy”. Typically we begin with some talk of this or that depiction in whichever work she’s examining, but then slip quietly into bald assertion, the strong implication being that we’ve moved from the fictional to the real world.

As Roz Kaveney wrote of “Mercy”:

“By disavowing specifically autobiographical intent here, Dworkin does not so much remove the implied authenticity of the personal, but add to it a claim of even more generalized authenticity: this is the biography either or at once of a fictional character, of Dworkin herself, or of Everywoman remade, by literary technique, in Dworkin’s own image. One could choose to regard this as a postmodernist deconstruction of a particular feminist literary technique, but, given the more specific denunciation of postmodernism in the text, it seems more likely that this is an old-fashioned matter of having one’s cake and eating it. It might also, by the not especially trusting naïve reader, be taken as an abuse of the reader’s sisterly trust.”

Because so much of Dworkin’s case is unstated people inevitably fill in parts. Another good example is the debate over biological determinism. Currently we have no mention of it. We should in my view. But it won’t be good enough to say “Dworkin denied she was a determinist”. The reason why so many people (yes, I’ll supply the sources if necessary) viewed her as such was because little of what she said about sex made any sense unless this was assumed.

Finally, I don’t think the controversy over Dworkin’s anti-pornography work is represented nearly well enough. There were more credible critics than Hustler! There was a huge debate within feminism about censorship, and the possible positive role of sex in feminism, but I see none of that expressed – instead we have a lengthy discourse on incest with Larry Flynt the principal opponent. Since I don’t want to go on forever I’ll stop there, after raising this, but it does need to be addressed.

(On an unrelated, factual note, I believe the account of the Ginsberg/Dworkin dispute on incest/paedophilia perhaps does Ginsberg a disservice as it stands. By his own account, he mentioned sex with 16 year olds and she said he should be shot for it.)

Stuarta 15:07, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

P.S. I notice now the "sex-positive" intra-feminist debate has already been raised, so I'm glad we agree this needs dealing with.

Stuarta 19:40, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Stuarta, thank you for providing the explicit citations of the critical views that you have in mind. I'm familiar with the views that you're citing, and I agree that some of this material is well worth incorporating into the article on Intercourse, and a very careful gloss of it would be a good addition to the section on Intercourse in this article. What I disagree with is the way that you've heretofore gone about trying to add it (not just because I think that critics need to be named and the source of the criticism cited in order to be fair to Dworkin, but also because this is an important part of being fair to the critics). I also agree that the Controversy section needs more on the debate between Dworkin and self-identified "sex-positive feminists", self-identified "free speech feminists," and also the debate between Dworkin and fellow anti-pornography feminists over legislative activism (cf. Anti-pornography movement, antipornography civil rights ordinance, and the chapter on "The Pornography Wars" in Brownmiller's In Our Time for some of the relevant material on the latter).
I also think that the passage on the allegations of supporting incest is unfortunate (this was originally inserted by put in by Mare Nostrum with no sources named inline, and a link to an obscure Marxist-Leninist sect's newspaper as the only citation; I tried to refer the debate to more well-known sources and added material from Woman Hating and later works). Frankly I do not consider the debate to be a matter of controversy or interest, at least so far as I know, in any credible sources on Dworkin, and I completely agree the Controversy section would be better served by having more information on arguments among credible interlocutors. My energies have just been focused elsewhere for the time being.
Sourced claims that she was a biological essentialist would be a good addition to the Controversy section, since this was something she has been repeatedly criticized for within some wings of Women's Studies, Queer Studies, and elsewhere, and many of the critics have notable positions within the academy. However, you need to be careful about how to present these. They should make sense in the context of reading the article but they should not depend on converting large sections of it into an argumentative essay about her meaning in Intercourse or elsewhere. I realize that this is difficult to do, but it's also important as per WP:NPOV and WP:NOR. The section should also include a mention of Dworkin's 1975 "The Root Cause" (speech 9 in Our Blood) and 1977 "Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea" (Letters from a War Zone 110-116). In the prefatory note to the latter in Letters, Dworkin specifically complained that:

One of the slurs constantly used against me by women writing in behalf of pornography under the flag of feminism in misogynist media is that I endorse a primitive biological determinism. Woman Hating (1974) clearly repudiates any biological determinism; so does Our Blood (1976), especially "The Root Cause." So does this piece, published twice, in 1978 in Heresies and in 1979 in Broadsheet. The event described in this piece, which occurred in 1977 [a conflict at a panel on lesbian feminism between Dworkin and an essentialist sub-group of lesbian separatists--R.G.], was fairly notorious, and so my position on biological determinism--I am against it--is generally known in the Women's Movement. One problem is that this essay, like others in this book, has no cultural presence: no one has to know about it or take it into account to appear less than ignorant; no one will be held accountable for ignoring it. Usually critics and political adversaries have to reckon with the published work of male writers whom they wish to malign. No such rules protect girls.

– Andrea Dworkin, 'Letters from a War Zone, 110

That's an unfair characterization of who the writers who allege this are (they include pro-pornography feminists but are not limited to them). But Dworkin's stated views about this criticism of her are relevant and ought to be included.
In re: Ginsberg, Dworkin claims in Heartbreak that Ginsberg pointed out friends of their godson at a bar mitzvah, who were 12 and 13 years old, and "said they were old enough to fuck." If Ginsberg claimed that something different happened then sourced references to his claims would be a good addition (although if there is any lengthy mention of The Fight, it should get its own paragraph at least, rather than being tacked on as an addendum to the Hustler/Healy/incest discussion).
I hope this helps. There will probably be some more comments shortly, after I've gotten back from work. Radgeek 21:20, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
We agree, then, on more critical points of view being represented, and a discussion of essentialism.
What I believe we disagree on still -- and what I was hoping you would address -- is the depiction-focused take on "Intercourse" promoted in the article. I haven't seen anything in the text of the book, or Dworkin's introductions, that explains that she is talking about the depiction or portrayal of sex in literature; whereas I have seen much that points in the other direction.
While she certainly implies that literary portrayal is connected with sex (by discussing literature at such length), there's no suggestion I'm aware of that literary portrayal *influences* attitudes to sex. If this was her case then her choice of examples, as I've already said, would seem to be very poor, and the term "mainstream" is not justified as a description of them. It seems at least equally possible, unless you can show me something contradictory in what she said, that she viewed the causal relation the other way round.
Regardless of this general question, the "vagina itself is muscled" quotation, which as I've pointed out has more than once been interpreted by critics as attacking the sex act itself, does not come in the context of a literary analysis. It appears at the beginning of a chapter, introducing a selection of paratactical, oracular pronouncements regarding the nature of intercourse.
In the following paragraph she says the "discourse of male truth" (which I regard as ill-defined, particularly given her apparent dislike of postmodernism) has caused penetration to be "taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use". She immediately goes on to say that "use and abuse are not distinct phenomena" and "[i]ntercourse in reality is a use and abuse simultaneously". One interpretation of this is that penetration *is* at least partly an "abuse", but the "discourse of male truth" has rendered it a "normal use". Indeed, I don't know how else you could link the two claims -- maybe you have a different view?
When on the next page (145) she says "[b]y definition, as the God who does not exist made her, she is intended to have a lesser privacy, a lesser integrity of the body, a lesser sense of self, since her body can be physically occupied and in the occupation taken over" I am at a loss to understand what she means, although I can see why people took this type of remark to mean she was an essentialist.
Firstly, just previously she admitted that "a man has an anus that can be entered", so presumably a man can also be "occupied and in the occupation taken over" as well, so what's the unique problem for women?
Secondly, I don't know what she means by "the God who does not exist". Does she actually mean the "discourse of male truth", or does she just mean biological reality? If it's the latter then she's seemingly an essentialist -- but she denied that. If it's the former then she's either saying men should not have penetrative sex with women (thus avoiding the "occupation" and "violation" and so on) or that the "male discourse of truth" has in some way made vaginal intercourse into an "occupation" or "violation", and if it were abolished then vaginal intercourse might become acceptable.
The difficulty I have with this last idea (apart from its epistemological implications) is that it seems to directly contradict the quotation that started this off, because that says, without qualification or reference to this "male discourse of truth" that "[t]here is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered". So my conclusion is that she really is saying penetrative vaginal intercourse is a violation.
At the very least, I don't believe one can, without being misleading, introduce the "muscled vagina" quote with talk of depiction. The context is just too ambiguous.
I'll dig out the source on Ginsberg.
I think there is value in having mention of the Hustler dispute. It illustrates Dworkin's practical attitude towards freedom of speech, for a start. I'm not sure if it needs so much coverage, though, and as things stands the absence of other sources of criticism makes it appear Hustler was her primary critic.
Stuarta 22:18, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Jurist? That is pushing it.

Andrea Dworkin is not a trained lawyer. The "Jurist" catagory is really pushing it. AWM -- 68.122.118.161 10:35, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

She does not make the grade. I am removing the cat. -- 68.122.118.161 10:40, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Good catch. Radgeek 22:12, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Oh, by the way, it is not a "good catch." Just removing some insanity -- Andrea was no more a jurist than is Paris the capital of New Zealand. --Mare Nostrum 19:34, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Grammar

The quote in the first section about birth control and abortion needs to be checked; the grammar is wrong and I can't copy-edit a quotation. --Slashme 07:17, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Also, there is something wrong with "a faulty interpretation of a placed into the "marketplace of ideas" did not amount to defamation in the legal sense" - something's missing here. --Slashme 09:11, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

These have been fixed. The bit from Heartbreak about her mother's support for birth control and abortion was missing a "were;" the bit from the end about faulty interpretations was missing a "work." Radgeek 16:23, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Timeline

I'm a little bit confused. The article text states in two places that the Paris drug-rape happened in 1999, but the "Numbered Short Articles" section suggests that "The day I was drugged and raped" was published in 1996. What gives? -ikkyu2 (talk) 16:27, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

The date listed in the "Numbered Short Articles" section is surely incorrect. The article was published in The New Statesman on June 5, 2000 [38]. I don't know where whoever authored the "Numbered Short Articles" section got the year 1996. In fact, I don't know where whoever authored the section got the "numbers" attached to each article. ASIN is an internal product identification from Amazon.com, and I'm having trouble identifying where if anywhere Amazon.com lists the articles listed in this section. Anyone know what's going on with this section? Radgeek 05:18, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] POV tag removed

given the improvements I've removed the tag. NPOV tags should be used very sparingly. They are not a good look for an encyclopedia, particularly for an article getting media attention. pls disucss specifics if you want to replace tag Mccready 16:32, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

You've done ** what **?? The "improvements" may be numerous but they are largely insubstantial, do not address the main issues in this hagiography to a preacher of hate, and the tag certainly needs to be there, if this article needs to be here at all which I doubt -- it is largely written by an indefatigueable semi-professional Dworkin campaigner with his own I-love-Andrea website. Your little snips and suggestions are completely ineffectual against the never-ending propaganda onslaught. (I see that the low smear of associating Larry Flynt with Dworkin's unbelieveable remarks promoting incest is still there -- its's like saying, "Pol Pot never embraced her for her contributions to society.") By the way, it flatly violates Wikipedia's standards to have this Dworkin promoter mis-using the system to advertise her. What ** you ** are doing by removing the tag is rewarding this serial, bullying, never-ending revert abuse. The abuser waits you out, and you tire, and ** remove the tag! ** Why on earth do you knowingly let it go on? Under these dread circumstances, it raises Wikipedia's credibility, and does not lower it, to note the very serious concern -- all the more so if there is a risk (heaven forbid) that it will be quoted by the media. Mare Nostrum 20:33, 8 March 2006 (UTC)


[edit] image request

Can we have a photograph or something of Dworkin? --ScienceApologist 19:25, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

They probably don't want to put one up, the sight of her is a terrible and awesome thing. --24.131.209.132 20:59, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

I put one up, do we have a disturbing picture warning? 129.10.245.23 21:15, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Here's the pic to use: [http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3909302 Mare Nostrum 20:55, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I couldn't access the above-linked picture because logging in requires an email address, not just a user id. If the community desires a fierce image of Dworkin, I am sure there is a better candidate somewhere on the web than the current image, which to me does not respectfully present her. There are crops of the pics below and more to be found by scrolling through Google Image's pages. I don't know about the legality of using Google-found images on Wikipedia, but they've been reproduced other places. Here are some suggestions (all found using Google Image search):

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/blog/DWORKIN_ANDREA.jpg
http://usera.imagecave.com/jmkinnard/feminism/Dworkininher20s.jpg
http://www.rodneyanonymous.com/archives/fatpig.jpg
http://toutesegaux.free.fr/IMG/jpg/DWORKIN_ANDREA_4.jpg

[edit] She is best known for...

This is complete bunk. If Andrea or her worshippers could impose what she would be known for, this is what they would say, yes. anti-porn campaigner. But she isn't known for it at all. NOT AT ALL!!! Who even remembers anti-porn campaigning?! That is why you don't have a cite for it, much less a credible one, because it isn't true. Dworkin is well known, however, best known as virulent misandrist, perhaps the fiercist man-hating polemicist ever to shame Western society. That is her legacy. That is what she is known for. Being a bigot. If she were attacking any other group than men she would be imprisoned in any number of jurisdictions for hate crimes. Mare Nostrum 20:33, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Mare Nostrum, you have provided no evidence other than your own unverified assertions [oh, pshaw! Mare Nostrum 20:55, 9 March 2006 (UTC)] -- which is to say, no evidence at all that matters for the purposes of editing the WikiPedia article, that Andrea Dworkin is not best remembered as an anti-pornography campaigner. I will repeat what I stated above a month ago in reply to your attempts to delete this from the introductory paragraph and replace it with your own POV ranting. You may notice several explicit citations in defense of my claim. Your recent response did not address any of these; you merely re-asserted that you do, indeed, think that she is not best remembered as an anti-pornography campaigner.
The following edit is shameless POV. From the first paragraph; emphasis mine:
She is best known for her bombastic polemics (e.g., "Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.").

But you are not denying that she said this most appalling example of hate-speech, right? Is this what you were trying to get at when you included delirium in the piece about her being up for the Nobel Prize for Literature? Where are the ** editors ** on that anyway? It's too funny to be upset about! NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE!!!! WHAAHHHHH!!!!!Mare Nostrum 20:55, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Oh, by the way, better hope the Nobel committee doesn't catch Maureen Mullarkey's review if the consider Andrea's oeuvre:[39] "Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon are not interested in clarifying issues...they prefer obfuscation and shock tactics. Intercourse and Feminism Unmodified should be read solely for clues to the crudity of the authors' assault on the First Amendment. This is lock-step, völkisch theorizing spun from the tribal myth of male depravity. With the dictatorial arrogance of traditional censors, the High Command disdains information and truthful discussion. (At an April 4 conference at New York University, titled Sexual Liberals and the Assault on Feminism, Dworkin trashed "the free market of ideas" because it does not guarantee that "good" ideas will win.)...Both books are ritual performances, hokey rallying points for the real agenda: the polarization of women along lines of sexual preference. Pure feminists (lesbians and nice asexuals) on one side of the sex code, collaborators on the other...Both books travesty debate with a pornography of their own: the reduction of men to their erections and the depiction of heterosexuality as vicious and degrading." Gee, I never heard of a book like that winning in Stockholm!

As though Mullarkey were somehow able to read our unfortunate Wikipedia draft, she cautioned, "Beware the party hacks who chirp encomiums to her "elegant" and "lyrical" prose. Dworkin lives in "Amerika," where "violation is a synonym for intercourse," and "incestuous rape is becoming a central paradigm for intercourse in our time."

It's also factually absurd. Dworkin reached the national stage [nah, sorry, that was then and this is now Mare Nostrum 20:55, 9 March 2006 (UTC)] as an activist against pornography and Pornography: Men Possessing Women remains very clearly one of her most widely-read books.

She is not famous for her "widely read" (?!!) books, sorry again. A number are out of print. The first thing her defenders wail about (playing the odds against this) is, "Have you read her work?!" Unfortunately, at least a few have (see below), and it isn't a pretty sight! Yow! Mare Nostrum 20:55, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

She was best known as a critic of pornography (which I actually think is rather unfortunate, for reasons that aren't worth digging into here); you might, for example, notice that her anti-pornography work is mentioned in either the first paragraph or the tagline of nearly every press obituary or column on her death ([40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], [46], ...).

What this indicates is that the press release at the time of her death made this false claim, that's all. Mare Nostrum 20:55, 9 March 2006 (UTC) It may also be true that among a coterie of man-haters of the day, this is the image of herself that the morbidly obese minanthrope promoted. Camille Paglia, though, thought Dworkin was more trying to promote herself as an oracle of truth: "Dworkin pretends to be a daring truth-teller," wrote the feminist Camille Paglia, "but never mentions her most obvious problem, food."[47]

The two major printed articles that I can find that front-load a mention of her polemical style or its effects on readers are fellow feminist Katharine Viner's column in The Guardian, and the obit for the London Times, which also mentions her anti-pornography work in the tagline before the story even begins.

She is well known far beyond the pages of the Guardian and London Times. She is known everywhere, in the Boston Globe for example, as a "preacher of hate." [48] This is a woman with a big, big reputation, it goes way beyond the man-hating invective that constitute her published works.

I conclude that Dworkin is most remembered for her anti-pornography activism.

Shucks, we never doubted what ** you ** concluded about it, goodness me! Your Dworkin fansite explains all your worship of her along with how you despise anyone that criticizes her, we know. Mare Nostrum 19:59, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

You need to provide better evidence than you have so far if you want to claim that Dworkin is not best remembered as an anti-pornography campaigner.

How about a compromise? You can say, "She is most recognized among fellow misandrists for her anti-pornography campaigning." Or, we can just keep the neutrality disputed label, or best of all, dump this irredeemable article as I wrote earlier. Mare Nostrum 19:59, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry if you're frustrated with the process of editing this article,

Not at all, don't worry about that, I haven't wasted time getting endlessly reverted by you lately. Just don't care to have the process hijacked by a Dworkin propapandist and not go on the record about it. Mare Nostrum 19:59, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

but I'd also like to note that your tone and attitude are in obvious violation of both WP:CIVIL and WP:AGF.

80.255.59.139 19:47, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Don't make me laugh. A careerist Dworkin propaganda publisher can't write an article on Wikipedia about the bigot -- too close to the subject. You violate Wiki rules every time you edit and serially revert on here.
Well, this ought to even it out a little bit, these people don't much remember her for anti-porn work [49] ("Hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right." - Dworkin, quoted by Carey Roberts in observing that hatred of men and bigotry have serious negative consequences.)[50] (“Intercourse with men ... means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect.” - Dworkin), [51](recounting being raised to feel inferior as a male thanks to Dworkin's ilk and delighting in her passing -- Dean, Dean's World), [52] (Misogyny "parallels the despicable way feminists have used victimhood to justify man-hate. One need only to look at the hate-filled feminist head case Andrea Dworkin, reputedly the victim of sexual abuse, to see where this leads." - writer Glenn J. Sacks), [53]("In the late ’sixties and ’seventies, such misanthropic feminists were given full license by academia and the media to preach their man-hating message throughout society...Among the two most vociferous champions of feminist misanthropy were Germaine Greer and her American counterpart, the lately deceased Andrea Dworkin" - David Conway, Civitas)

[54] ("An odd thing about this pathetic mixed-up creature is that if you read her Autobiography carefully, it becomes clear that her man-hating style was actually misdirected rage at her mother." - writer David A. Roberts, beginning lengthy exegesis of Dworkin's acute misandry, without a mention of anti-porn), [55] ("Unfortunately for Dworkin, once you sit down and read her work in depth she comes across as far more bizarre than even the occasionally out-of-context quotes from her writing makes her appear." - writer Brian Carnell, full article does not mention porn), [56] ("I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig." - Dworkin, featured in, A Misandry Sampler (including eight anti-male slurs by Dworkin, more than by any other bigot listed), assembled by G. Shrock), [57] ("Fortunately, one reviewer at least made Dworkin's perspectives clear: "'Ms. Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men.'" - Warren Farrell, Ph.D, criticizing New York Times giving excessive coverage to "man-haters like Marilyn French and Andrea Dworkin"; anti-porn activity not recalled), [58]("It’s hilarious the way they try to blow her up. She was one of the most crazed example of male haters have pushed the radical feminist agenda which tries to claim all men are evil." - James D. Hudnall) [59] ("And no one needs to read a volume of Mary Daly or Andrea Dworkin’s apocalyptic prose to get a nasty dose of Woman Good, Man Bad. The misandrist message often reaches us in more mundane forms." - Robert L. Campbell)[60] (It's because of people like Andrea Dworkin that the legitimate cause of equal rights for women became a crusade against men, heterosexuality, and the entire concept of personal responsibility. I have read her work. In spite of her claims, she was a man-hater..."- Anne Haight) [61] "The lovely Ms. Dworkin is best known for her militant antipathy to men" - Van Helsing), [62]("Dworkin might not have actually said "all men are rapists" but she did have the slogan Dead Men Don't Rape above her desk." - Havana Marking, arguing in the Guardian that Dworkin's real legacy is due to her most women today would rather be bitten by a rabid dog than be considered feminists), [63]("Dworkin…has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera. She publicly boasts of her bizarre multiple rapes, assaults, beatings, breakdowns and tacky trauma, as if her inability to cope with life were the patriarchy's fault rather than her own. Dworkin's shrill, kvetching, solipsistic prose has a sloppy, squalling infantilism." -- Camille Paglia) [64] The title of Viner’s article is “She never hated men”. Does anyone here believe that is accurate? [...]The idea of a woman-only state is of interest. How would they reproduce? -- JW Holliday)[65] (lengthy Sunday Times article never mentions anti-porn activity), [66] (another lenghty essay noting her countless problems and "disputatious rage" but not recalling any porn activism), and here's a word from Wendy McElroy, horrified by the hate:[67] "Men have been so maligned by our society that they are not taken seriously when they protest. The process began in the mid-70s. In her 1976 book Our Blood, gender feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote, 'Under patriarchy [white male culture], every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.' This is what the politically aware mother was supposed to see when she looked down into the face of her newly born son." McElroy might not even know (or care) what the Dworkin psychophants say she was, it is clear from all of the above -- she is a misandrist, a minsanthrope, a lunatic, a bigot, a promoter of violence toward's men, and that is what she is known for. Not third rate polemics posing as policy.

Mare Nostrum 19:59, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
There are a lot of things here that will have to wait until I have more time to respond. However, I would like to note that the lengthy Sunday Times article you just added to your list does mention Dworkin's anti-pornography activism. In fact it mentions it in the first paragraph. Here, look:
Right hails Dworkin sex campaign
Sarah Baxter, New York
THE feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, who died last week aged 58, is being hailed by conservatives and supporters of family values in America for speaking out against casual sex and pornography.
The Havana Marking article from the Guardian also front-loads her work on pornography in paragraph 2 ("But there was a much more important moment when Jenni Murray asked yesterday what Dworkin had actually achieved in her life. It was acknowledged that while pornography was on the increase, at least we could discuss it now"), and plainly states in paragraph 4 that "Dworkin achieved fame for her stance against pornography."
You're not helping your case. Radgeek 09:09, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Please reconsider your approach or find a better way to spend your time.

—Radgeek 21:03, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Yes, this is vintage Dworkin and your handy answer to every ticklish problem: tell the other guy he has no right to speak and to shut his trap. I remember one kindred soul calling Dworkin one of the greatest enemies of the U.S. First Amendment, gee, I guess that *was* an anti-porn reference... Mare Nostrum 19:59, 9 March 2006 (UTC) (UTC)
This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. I am not the cops and you have not even been asked to "shut up," let alone threatened with any kind of harm for not doing so. What I have askedyou to do is to reconsider your tone and approach, which is (among other things) trolling, contemptuous and openly abusive towards me. WP:CIVIL and WP:AGF suggest (rightly, I think) that this is not the best way to go about editing. I'm asking you to keep this in mind. The accusations of censoriousness on my part are your own invention. Radgeek 09:09, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
Even so, Cathy Young would have none of it,
"Dworkin's admirers laud, and wildly exaggerate, her role in the battle against domestic violence and rape; if she deserves credit" for anything, it's helping infect feminist activism on these important issues with antimale bigotry and paranoia. Her biggest contribution" to the women's movement was to redirect a lot of its energy into a futile, divisive crusade against pornography." [68] Yeah, the truth hurts. Especially for those who were never in pursuit of the truth to begin with. Mare Nostrum 20:55, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Revisionist dicussion

Mare Nostrum, you have repeatedly used the WikiPedia edit functionality to revise and expand, in place, signed and dated comments that you had previously posted in different form. These are not minor copyedits but substantial revisions of what you had said, after it has already been read and responded to in later comments, with no indication that you are changing the record of what you said. I understand that you have more information that you want to add to the discussion, but the way you're adding it is confusing for later discussion and creates a false sense of what it is that respondents are responding to at a given time.

Please make any additions, self-corrections, etc. beyond simple copyedits (signing a post you left unsigned, etc.) in a separate note further down the page.

Please also try to use indenting to keep the threads of discussion straight. You can do this easily by adding colons at the beginning of each paragraph when you add a response; each colon indents your comments one further level. (E.g.: "Top level," ":Response," "::Response to the response," ":::Third response," etc.)

Thanks. —Radgeek 17:24, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "MacDworkin", "Feminazi"...

Ever heard those terms? You won't in this article. MacDworkin pulls about about 200 hits on Google alone, it's a widely recognized term in critiquing misandry. And guess where it comes from? The slang invective "Feminazi" generally refers to a particularly virulent form of misandry, and the consensus is that one of Dworkin's life achievements was to serve as the inspiration for this pejorative. That's right, the term refers to *her* in particular. Want to learn more? You won't do so by reading here. Then there's "gender feminist," a polite euphemism that means anti-male bigot. Feminist academics freely categorize Dworkin as a "gender feminist," and again, she seemingly is the modern archetype for the term. (See, she *is* known much more broadly than for some long forgotten, failed anti-porn efforts!) And that's another thing you won't be informed of by reading our slanted little piece. Mare Nostrum 21:50, 10 March 2006 (UTC)


Sorry but NPOV doesn't mean that we must include evrything anyone said about a given topic.

This is not an article about Dworkin's retractors, however many or correct they might or might not be, but about her, in an encyclopedic sense. Anything that is not part of her biography or bibliography falls outside of the scope of the article. And this article must conform to NPOV,

Besides, "feminazi" is hardly a neutral description, anyone would agree.

If you want, for example, create a page on her critics, and put it as a "see also". You can also go to the Feminazi page and try to include her in a list of Feminazis. (no doubt that it will get edited out, as it is still not NPOV, but it would at least be relevant!)

Be a wikipedian! --Cerejota 05:12, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] So where is our unfortunate article headed?

As before, this is what is going to happen now.

1. The principal author has his own site in which he tells us how much he celebrates Dworkin and reviles her critics -- he is a very tenacious editor (sometime pugnacious -- liberally uses the word "sleazy" to discuss moves he doesn't agree with). Anyway, he also sporadically makes limited efforts to be balanced and that has to be acknowledged, but it isn't nearly enough and he is a revert fiend. His epistemology is wacked -- the way he knows things is because the androphobe or her fellow man-haters said them. He leaves ludicrous things in his prose about the misandrist getting the Nobel Prize for Literature (repeat, *Literature*!), and when she embraces incest (and even incest with children), he manages to somehow blame that on on Larry Flynt. One small tenacity example: he reverted numerous times to how she "condemned" criminal prosecutions for pornography, even though it was shown in black and white that she herself proposed *new* criminal laws against it in the very reference he was misquoting. So, could we at least stretch to the truth toward his POV angle but just say that she "criticized" or "disfavored" criminal sanctins instead of the absurdist "condemned"? Nope, truth be damned, it had to be that she "condemned" them, even though what she was supposedly "condemning" was her own proposal. Pretty tiring. *SheI never said "condemn" or anything similar BTW; our author insisted on the hyperbolic mischaracterization.

2. Stuarta tried to get the author to remove the Flynt smear -- again, no dice.

3. The main author is not going to leave this editing process even though he is too close to subject and can't participate under Wiki rules. He will parse through what he agrees with and disagrees with, and he thinks it through, he will realize as usual that he is right and that those who disagree are wrong (or their actions "sleazy").

4. He'll agree to small changes that don't substantially affect the content, but no more, and otherwise defiantly and repeatedly revert as necessary.

5. Some good-hearted person will mistakenly thank him for his "flexiblity" in making petty changes while digging in his heels/recalcitrantly reverting as to all meaningful ones.

6. More incisive editors will tire of the fruitless effort to control the bad situation in the face of such intransigence.

7. With others too exhausted to improve the article against the obstreperousness, after a short interval some good-hearted person will again come along and remove the POV tag.

8. The resulting article will be propagandistic and approved with the Wiki seal.

N.B. Don't even dream, please, of comparing me with the author. I don't have a Dworkin hate site (and have never written about her formally or informally except here); he does have a Dworkin love site. He is on the record as to how highly he regards her and how little he thinks of her critics. P.S. Also kindly don't suggest that all I need to is edit the article, I have tried and it doesn't do any good as in No. 4 and 6 above. Mare Nostrum 21:50, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Hey, don't feel you're alone in the wilderness, Mare Nostrum. The depth of my disgust for The Prostitute is exceeded only by the incalculable harm she accomplished in her blessedly short life, but I have no desire to write anything at all about the Fat Pig. I will, however, maintain the NPOV tag hung over her gravestone until the end of time or hell freezes over, whichever comes first. Doovinator 04:27, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

In other words, you are admitting to vandalizing? Keeping an POV tag just for the hell of it is a form of vandalism. You cheapen the usefulness and relevancy of an important community tool by doing so.

Doovinator: I am officially, as a fellow wikipedian, asking you to stop vandalizing this page in this manner. If you have relevant edits, by all means do them, but simply putting a POV tag is not good form. --Cerejota 04:54, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Disruptive Talk Page editing

User:Mare Nostrum, or an IP address making edits that Mare Nostrum later claimed as his or her own, has twice broken the link to Archive 1 above in unrelated edits (cf. [69], [70]) and, in the latter edit, also deleted my comments under the heading of #Revisionist discussion. I have restored the deleted text and fixed the link. This is disruptive use of the Talk page and I do not understand why User:Mare Nostrum is doing it.

If these are mistakes on your part, Mare Nostrum, you need to realize that you're acting in a way that is disruptive, whether you intend to or not. Please don't delete text posted by other users, and please leave the archive link intact.

Radgeek 14:50, 11 March 2006 (UTC)


Radgeek is such a pussy. I am ashamed to share the planet with someone whose mind is so easily programmed by words and so incapable of reality testing. Seminumerical 07:43, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reversion of edits by LukeLockwood/207.112.92.102

I have reverted a series of edits recently made by User:LukeLockwood and a user at IP address 207.112.92.102 (the IP address merely made typographical corrections to edits made by LukeLockwood). Here's a list of the edits that were reverted, and why.

  1. Revision as of 15:25, 20 April 2006: Luke added the unsourced claim that "She also argued that ordinary sexual intercourse was de facto rape of the woman, and that ultimately a healthy heterosexual relationship was not possible." Dworkin's views on heterosexual intercourse are controversial, and she denied believing that "ordinary sexual intercourse was de facto rape of the woman" when she was asked directly (she repeatedly characterized this presentation of her views as a "slander"). This controversy is discussed in some detail in the article, especially in the section on the book Intercourse. Whatever you make of her published views, it is certainly a violation of WP:NPOV to state as fact that she believed this in the opening paragraph of the article. She also explicitly stated that healthy sexual or romantic relationships between men and women were possible; cf., for example, Woman Hating, p. 184: "Unambiguous conventional heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity. ... That is not to say that "men" and "women" should not fuck. Any sexual coming together that is genuinely pansexual and role-free, even if between men and women as we generally think of them (i.e., the biological images we have of them), is authentic and androgynous" (boldface mine). Cf. also the interview with Michael Moorcock: "Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don't think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality."
  2. Revision as of 15:28, 20 April 2006: Luke inserted the following paragraph at the end of the section on Dworkin's later life: "She did record in her biography that she felt that all the publishing houses were against her, due to being a feminist. However it does have to be admitted that the things she wrote about tended to be very narrow in focus and as a result would not have a wide appeal." This passage does contain some valuable information (Dworkin's conviction that American publishing houses were hostile to her writing and that her difficulties in finding a publisher had to do with her political views). However, the alternative explanation inserted constitutes original research (or more accurately, bare speculation), if it is not qualified by some actual source that suggests it as an explanation. Further, "it does have to be admitted..." is intrusive POV editorializing. No, it doesn't have to be.
  3. Revision as of 15:30, 20 April 2006: Luke inserted the phrase "extremist" into the opening paragraph, so that Dworkin would be described as "an American radical feminist and extremist writer." This is POV. "Radical feminist" already provides a neutral description of both the content and the tone of her writing. "Extremist" is both superfluous and POV.
  4. Revision as of 15:33, 20 April 2006: Luke revised the paragraph on Dworkin's testimony concerning the Women's House of D to read: "She was sent to the New York Women's House of Detention, where she was given an internal examination by two prison doctors that she alleges was rough causing her to bleed for days afterwards. ... The grand jury declined to make an indictment in the case due to lack of evidence(80), but Dworkin's testimony contributed to public outrage over the mistreatment of inmates." The statement that the prison was closed seven years later was deleted without explanation. Arch use of phrases like "alleges" has been discussed at length above and if you want to revisit this you should begin at the Talk page. The positive claim that there was a "lack of evidence" is POV; that's what the grand jury decided, but Dworkin and many others would beg to differ. (Dworkin says on the pages immediately proceeding p. 80 of Heartbreak, the source cited, that they dismissed her because she didn't meet the cultural expectations of a "good girl.") Further, even if this edit were warranted, the way Luke has implemented it is a grammatical trainwreck. If an internal examination caused her to bleed for days, then it was rough, not just "allegedly" rough. What I take it he means to say is that she alleged that their internal examination caused her to bleed for days because it was (allegedly) rough, not that it did cause her to bleed for days and that she merely alleged that it was rough.
  5. Revision as of 15:35, 20 April 2006: Luke revised the section header "Return to New York and contact with the feminist movement" to read "Return to New York and contact with the extreme feminist movement." This is POV. If you want to use the neutral and meaningful descriptor "radical feminist movement," that would accurately describe the part of the feminist movement she was influenced by in Amsterdam and joined up with in New York. "Extreme feminist movement" means next to nothing, and violates NPOV.
  6. Revision as of 15:40, 20 April 2006: Luke made several changes to the paragraph describing Dworkin's reputation as a speaker. A long analytic discussion is added: "An examination of the content of these speeches leads one to conclude that they were about sex, and the power imbalances in sexual intercourse, and that sexual violence and pornography were inextricably linked. The topics talked about were always based on this and never really diverged, so therefore she became single-issue. She made a lot of passionate claims without proper evidence, and tended to over-generalise: "all pornography leads to rape", to the point of paranoia. She strongly felt that all men were potential rapists, and was never able to convince herself otherwise. However she always refused to go for counselling." The "examination of the content of these speeches" is extremely tendentious original research, unconvincingly hiding under the weasel-worded descriptions of what "An examination ... leads one to conclude." The topics of Dworkin's speeches did not always actually have much to do with pornography (just to pick some titles at random, there's "Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia," "Remembering the Witches" and "Renouncing Sexual 'Equality'" in Our Blood). The assertion tha "she made a lot of passionate claims without proper evidence, and tended to over-generalise ... to the point of paranoia" is a POV synthetic conclusion that you're not entitled to assert in the editorial voice. It's also given without any sources in either Dworkin's work or writings about Dworkin, even though a specific phrase ("all pornography leads to rape") is presented as if it were a direct quotation (from where?). The dimestore psychoanalysis of Dworkin's views is ad hominem, unsupported, and POV. After this analytic passage, Luke also edited the claim that her speeches "inspired her audience to action" to state (ungrammatically) that "She inspired her female audiences into action, such as her speech ..." But not all of the speeches listed as examples of her public speaking had female audiences. One of them, "I Want a Twenty Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape," was given before an audience of about 500 men at a men's pro-feminist conference.
  7. Revision as of 15:43, 20 April 2006: Luke inserted into the paragraph about Dworkin and Stoltenberg's 1998 marriage that "Their relationship was never sexual however, and it appeared that Dworkin could have a caring relationship with men as long as no sex was involved. Stoltenberg had quite severe issues relating to his own gender, and possibly suffered with gender dysphoria. His books are incredibly introspective and polarised." Besides more hamhanded psychiatric diagnosis in absentia, this passage is presented without sources and appears to be pure speculation about Dworkin and Stoltenberg's private life from beginning to end. In all the interviews I have read they refused on principle to discuss such details of their life together. Dworkin wrote elsewhere that she did not have intercourse, but that tells you nothing about whether their relationship was "sexual" or not, since there are more forms of sex than intercourse. As a whole this passage is simply rubbish.
  8. Revision as of 15:45, 20 April 2006: Luke wrote the following into the opening paragraph in the section "Critique of pornography": "However Dworkin never spoke about pornography of men designed for women, or the sexual aggressiveness of women e.g. ann summers; hen parties. In her mind she had split all sexual desire and lust onto the part of men, and all passivity and weakness onto the role of women." This is not true. Speculation about how Dworkin divvied up the world "in her mind" is just that. In any case her public writings do explicitly discuss sexual aggressiveness by women; cf. for example "Renouncing Sexual 'Equality'" in Our Blood.
  9. Revision as of 15:51, 20 April 2006: Luke adds an arch "allegedly" to the description of Dworkin's autobiographical statements in the New York Times Book Review. See above. If you want to make it clear that the source for the claims about her life history are her own autobiographical statements, then the best way to do this is to rewrite the paragraph using attributed verbatim quotes, or to use sentence constructions that sidestep the issue (e.g., "Dworkin stated that her experiences of being violently inspected by prison doctors, battered by her first husband and numerous other men were the origin of her fierce opposition to prostitution and pornography").
  10. Revision as of 15:53, 20 April 2006: Luke changes "Dworkin published controversial articles ... stating that one or more men had raped her in her hotel room in Paris the previous year" to "... alleging that one or more men had raped her in her hotel room in Paris the previous year." "Stating" is exactly equivalent in meaning to "alleging" in this sentence. There is no need and no warrant for this wordsmithing, unless you intend to use the phrase to archly suggest that her claims are not true. A closing sentence is added to the final paragraph about her failing health, asserting without sources that "Her failing health was principally due to her being vastly overweight, she always refused to lose weight, possibly because she wanted to remain as unattractive to men as possible." The last clause is speculation and crude antifeminist caricature. The claim that her failing health was due to her weight is speculation and no source is provided (she was, among other things, suffering from the effects of repeated surgeries and numerous pain medications; her health after her years of abuse and homelessness in the Netherlands was never robust). The claim that "she always refused to lose weight" is false. During the last couple years of her life Dworkin dieted and went as far as to have bariatric surgery to reduce her weight, on doctor's advice, because her weight exacerbated her crippling osteoarthritis. At the end of her life she actually was quite thin: cf. Ariel Levy's article and the photo at the head of the page.
  11. Revision as of 15:55, 20 April 2006: Luke adds the statement that "Knee replacements are common in those who are overweight" after a mention of Dworkin's knee replacement surgery. No source is provided for this claim; in any case, it's hard to know what purpose this trivia serves. After the quotation of Dworkin's own belief that wounds from her rape in Paris were related to the crippling leg and joint pain she later suffered, Luke adds "Osteoarthritis cannot be cause by rape or childabuse however, as it is a genetic condition or one derived from joint friction and injury." This is unsourced, and in any case involves the patent absurdity of suggesting that sexual or physical abuse couldn't be a cause of joint injury. (Dworkin reported being beaten severely all over her legs by her former husband in the Netherlands; that might just be a possible cause of joint injury). In any case, Dworkin's statements do not need to be "corrected" by subsequent editorializing. She herself states that the doctors doubt what she thinks and mentions other explanations that have been offered. The link to osteoarthritis provides a place for readers to go if they want a more in-depth discussion of the etiology and possible causes of osteoarthritis. For what it's worth, the ultimate causes of degenerative osteoarthritis are not at all well known, and controversial, so the apodictic tone of this statement would be inappropriate even if the statement were needed to serve some informational purpose.
  12. The remaining two revisions are typographical corrections by an anonymous IP of sections that were added by LukeLockwood.

Both the subject of this article and the article itself are controversial, and the editing process has been a hard one involving many disagreements over precisely the issues that Luke's edits broaches. If you have new information to add, non-combative edits to make, etc. please don't hesitate to do so. But if you are treading on ground where it's likely that you're revisiting some old debates, please consult the Talk page and take the issue up there before you decide to head once more into the breach. Radgeek 07:23, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

You don't need evidence that being overweight causes osteoarthritis - it is common knowledge and common sense. Secondly, you're hardly neutral yourself for describing my comments as ANTI-FEMINIST as this is not a neutral term - you could accuse me of it being unsourced, which would be more professional. Secondly, if you know anything about John Stoltenberg I think it is pretty damn OBVIOUS that he has got psychiatric issues as no normal man would behave like that. LukeLockwood

Radgeek, while I agree with you that, in some places in Wikipedia, the word "allege" is overused, but I think it is appropriate in several of the places Luke used it. In cases where a crime is claimed, "allege" is quite appropriate.

Also: "The grand jury declined to make an indictment in the case due to lack of evidence(80)" This phrase is not really POV. It appears to be common practice in Wikipedia to treat legal decisions as reliable sources, unless a specific controversy about the case is notable. Note also that decision such as this does not claim her allegation is factually false, it merely claims that proving it true would be impossible.

[edit] Disruptive Talk page editing, part II

A user at IP address 62.6.139.11, who later claimed in his comments to be User:LukeLockwood, recently erased my extensive comments explaining my reversion of a series of edits by LukeLockwood. Besides being conversationally unfair and puzzling to readers (since it presents the response to my claims without making the claims themselves available to read), it is also a violation of WikiPedia etiquette, a disruptive use of the Talk page, and an abuse of the Wiki mechanism. Please do not erase or otherwise modify the content of other people's comments on this Talk page. That's not an acceptable way to conduct this conversation. Radgeek 16:06, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

User:LukeLockwood again vandalized this Talk page by altering and deleting information written by me (cf. [71] and [72]). The first edit removed his username (mangling some sentences in the process) from the section discussing my reversion of the edits he made (along with the corrections of typographical errors on his edits by an anonymous IP). The second edit again mangled sentences and deleted uses of his username. I don't know why these edits were made, but they are not in any case a proper use of the Talk page. Please stop disrupting this Talk page with edits to the content of other people's writing. Radgeek 02:52, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Dear Radgeek,

I have e-mailed you telling you why I have deleted my username. I do not wish my full name and details to be on the Internet, as I have now been advised by the police to try and remove as much identifiable content about me on the Internet, due to a pending court case. I have now e-mailed customer services to tell them about this and they have replied and said they are going to help me out. Incidentally LukeLockwood does not exist anymore, it is now LukeL.

LukeL

[edit] Politically-Correct Hate Speech

Something should be said about the fact that much of what Andrea Dworkin said and wrote meets the criteria of hate speech. -- LKS 5/13/06

[edit] The ongoing debate

I'm hesitant to return to editing this page. However, I note that somebody has taken to critiquing comments I made several months ago. I don't wish to enter into yet another debate regarding the particular points that they raised. All I wish to point out is why I stopped contributing.

Following claims regarding "original research" and so on, I went to the trouble of looking through the literature again and cataloguing various writers' interpretations of Dworkin. This was, it was claimed, what was lacking in previous contributions regarding Dworkin's alleged dislike of vaginal intercourse. There never was a substantive response to any of that, or any attempt to include that information in the entry itself. I also cited "Intercourse" in detail to show where my interpretations came from. Again, there was no response.

While radgeek continued to combat the evils of vandalism, I saw no serious effort to include less congenial interpretations of Dworkin's pronouncements. I therefore concluded that it was futile to continue my efforts. I have no doubt that, had I actually inserted any of this material into the article, it would have been reverted on grounds of NPOV or original research. As such, the attitude to such negative interpretations stands in contrast to various other pieces of exculpatory editorialising, which are naturally deemed neutral and not original research, and apparently don't require the voluminous citations that I provided. Even if they had made it in, they would have been of the "he said/she said" form (see the "Controversy" section of the "Intercourse article), unlike, e.g., radgeek's narratory framing of the controversial "vagina is a muscle" quote, which in radgeek world is unimpeachably detached truth-telling.

radgeek never showed how his unsourced interpretation was straightforward and reasonable, whereas all others were biased and/or original research, in spite of Dworkin's deeply ambiguous writing style. When the "original research" canard was shown to be false he simply fell silent.

The quibbling from IP 85.64.246.205 is wearyingly familiar. I have gone into great detail about that particular point. Either you take on this argument properly, or there is no point in saying anything at all.

Against my better judgment, let me answer the specific point: I did not refer to the "female condition"; I referred, as Dworkin did, to possession of a vagina. You appear to be using this false disjunction to exaggerate an at best small, and certainly arguable, difference between degrees of suffering versus degrees of overall badness. This sort of nitpicking is quite irrelevant while the Dworkin and "Intercourse" articles remain manifestly biased. In any case, I would point you to what I actually added to the article all those months ago (and which was removed by radgeek):

"Elsewhere she apparently suggests that women are, on account of their penetrable sexual organs, consigned to suffering worse than that of concentration camp victims."

This (which was already quoted above, if you'd cared to read it) is almost precisely what you are now defending (you mention submission, but she does not, if we're to move to your level of pedantry, actually say anything about a "degree of submission inherent in having a vagina"). The broader inferences to be drawn from this statement and others were dubbed, when I added them, "original research". As copiously explained above and previously, they were not; they were no less valid than radgeek's. The continuing lack of response to these points is eloquent.

Stuarta 14:17, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Stuarta, your specific claim about Dworkin's views on having a vagina was responded to above more than once. This was done both in reply to your direct comments on the quotation, and also on the general theme of Dworkin's views about how women and men come to experience what are in fact political conditions as if they were part of their own inner nature. Having other things to do in this article, let alone in my life in general, I have left some of your replies to my replies without further replying to them, because I think the point is clear and that resolving the interpretive dispute is not really the purpose of this Talk page.
Since you're bringing it up again, however, let's look back to what you said, and then what I said in one of these exchanges. Here's Stuarta on 2 February 2006:
The following quotation from her book, "Intercourse", was removed with the comment that it did not mean that she felt being constructed for vaginal penetration was worse than being an Auschwitz inmate. Out of interest, can somebody (radgeek?) please explain what other interpretation could be reasonably put on it? She says there is "no analogue" to having a vagina, not even in the Nazi death camps or Gulag. It might, of course, mean that having a vagina is far nicer than being in Auschwitz, but given the context -- the description of intercourse as "humiliation", her apparent suggestion that men select vaginal entry specifically to debase or dominate women -- and the overall thesis of the book, it seems a reasonable conclusion to reach. Why mention these bywords for horrific torture if not to emphasise the awfulness of having a vagina?
"There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse; for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag."
The quotation, for reference, is taken from Chapter 7 of Intercourse, "Occupation/Collaboration," p. 123. On the same day, I replied:
I don't think that this point requires "interpretation." Dworkin says what she means: there aren't ready analogies between the conditions that she says women experience in patriarchy and the conditions of other oppressed peoples. She suggests that the reason for the difference is that some forms of patriarchal oppression are sexualized. She makes no claims at all about what is better or worse; she merely says that they are, in this respect, not the same.
Five days later you came back to answer:
The quoted excerpt does not refer to patriarchy. It says there is “no analogue” to “being made for penetration, entry, occupation”. Just before, we are told that during intercourse “[t]he vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart”, and that “[s]he is occupied -- physically, internally, in her privacy”. All of this is a clear reference to the biological reality of women, and its relation to vaginal intercourse. Why, if she were referring to women’s subordinate position in the patriarchy, would she talk in such explicit language about their genitals?
But, first, you misrepresent Dworkin here by selective quotation. Dworkin does not say that there is "no analogue" to "being made for penetration, entry, occupation" in the passage you quote. She says: "There is no analogue ... to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation" (emphasis added). Having an experience of being so-and-so is not the same thing as being so-and-so; you might have an experience of being so-and-so without actually being that way. In Chapter 8, "Law" she makes a clear argument that "The creation of gender (so-called nature) by law was systematic, sophisticated, supremely intelligent; behavior regulated to produce social conditions of power and powerlessness experienced by the individuals inside the social system as the sexual natures inside them as individuals" (156). She makes a similar point in her speech, "The Root Cause," when she argues that "while the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. ... In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely real; but the model itself is not true. We are living imprisoned inside a pernicious delusion, a delusion on which all reality as we know it is predicated" (Our Blood 110). Dworkin devotes a great deal of space in Intercourse and elsewhere to discussing how the social reality of male dominance shapes the meaning and effect of intercourse for women. She is explicit in the very paragraph you cite that this is connected with the inferior status of women -- a social condition which she takes to be political and not natural or intrinsic, as she explains throughout her work. Thus: "Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence" (123, emphasis added). Further down in the chapter, you'll find that she says: "Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible. The context in which the act takes place, whatever the meaning of the act in and of itself, is one in which men have social, economic, political, and physical power over women. Some men do not have all those kinds of power over women; but all men have some kinds of power over all women; and most men have controlling power over what they call their women--the women they fuck. The power is predetermined by gender, by being male" (125-126). And: "The uses of women, now, in intercourse--not the abuses to the extent that they can be separated out--are absolutely permeated by the reality of male power over women. ... How to separate the act of intercourse from the social reality of male power is not clear, especially because it is male power that constructs both the meaning and the current practice of intercourse as such." (pp. 127-128). Here is how she closes the chapter, after all these considerations and more: "If intercourse can be an expression of sexual equality, it will have to survive--on its own merits, as it were, having a potential for human expression not yet recognized or realized--the destruction of male power over women; and rape and prostitution will have to be seen as institutions that most impede any experience of intercourse as freedom--chosen by full human beings with full human freedom. Rape and prostitution negate self-determination and choice for women; and anyone who wants intercourse to be freedom and to mean freedom had better find a way to get rid of them. Maybe life is tragic and the God who does not exist made women inferior so that men could fuck us; or maybe we can only know this much for certain--that when intercourse exists and is experienced under conditions of force, fear, or inequality, it destroys in women the will to political freedom; it destroys the love of freedom itself. We become female: occupied; collaborators against each other, especially against those among us who resist male domination--the lone, crazy resisters, the organized resistence. The pleasure of submission does not and cannot change the fact, the cost, the indignity, of inferiority" (143).
This should make it clear to you, first, that she is explicitly mentioning women's status under patriarchy, as critical to the discussion, in the paragraph in question. She also makes clearer elsewhere in Intercourse (and throughout her work) what the source of "this experience of being made for intercourse" is: not some set of anatomical facts about women's genitalia, but rather a particular set of social conditions that shape how men and women experience their sexual natures and intercourse in particular. Nowhere does she rule out the possibility that intercourse can be an expression of sexual equality--and her explicit statements elsewhere indicate that she does indeed think that it can. What she wants to do here is only to raise the question clearly, and to make clear that there are real social and political demands imposed by any effort to make intercourse compatible with freedom.
Now then, secondly. You object to my claim that in this passage Dworkin makes no claim at all that "this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation" is worse than the conditions of Jews in Auschwitz, of prisoners in the gulag, of colonized peoples, etc.:
Finally, you are being ridiculous in suggesting her comparison with, among others, Auschwitz and the Gulag, “makes no claims at all about what is better or worse”. The strong implication, as I’ve already said, is that women’s situation is worse. If she were drawing a value-free comparison why was every counterpoint a deeply negative one?
But I deny that there is any such "strong implication." The claim made in the passage you quote is only that the experience is different, that "there is no analogue," that "there is nothing exactly the same," that "There is nothing that happens to any other civilly inferior people that is the same in its meaning and in its effect." There are plenty of reasons that you'd want to make this comparison other than trying to imply, somehow, that women's situation is even worse than that of death camp inmates (or the less dramatic "counterpoints," e.g. the condition of people in colonized cultures, or the submission of children to adults). For example, she may want to make it clear that the issue cannot be understood on the model of other forms of oppression. She may want to make it clear that the meaning and effects of intercourse for women in our society go deeper than (which is not to say that they are worse than), are closer to one's own self-conception than, are harder to question than, or have any number of other differences from, the meaning and effects of other forms of oppression with which we are familiar. (All of these are points that she lays some stress on later in the chapter.) Maybe she wants to suggest that women's situation is worse than that of other subordinated peoples', even worse than that of Jews in the Holocaust. Maybe she doesn't. The passage you're citing simply does not assert anything one way or the other on this question, and you cannot pull one out of it without moving beyond summary to having the article make an analytical claim over a disputed point. Which you are not entitled to do under WP:NPOV and WP:NOR.
As a further note, you have never refuted my claims that you were engaging in original research in the edits of yours that I reverted. Long after I challenged unsourced claims that clearly violate WP:NOR you came back to this Talk page and you posted a great deal of material that you had culled from third party sources of varying credibility, which, if added to the article, would not have violated WP:NOR (and which I stated might make good additions to the article if done properly). But coming up with new edits that would not violate WP:NOR is not the same thing as having proven that your old edits did not violate WP:NOR. They did, since they repeatedly made analytical claims over disputed points without providing sources, repeatedly attempted to anonymously editorialize about what passages "seemingly imply," "strongly suggest," etc. over and above what the text actually says, etc. Here's what I said about this some time ago, without reply from you: "I'm not here primarily to convince you of what I take to be the right way to read Intercourse. Nor do I think that the article should not discuss the published views of specific critics of Dworkin. What I characterized as original research (and continue to regard as such) is your unsourced editorializing. It is disingenuous of you to suggest that you are merely including the interpretation of other readers, since you previously made no attempts to cite those readers or characterize their specific views. That would be a responsible way to help present an NPOV discussion of the controversy. A personal argumentative essay on what you think the upshot of those parts of Intercourse that you have read or found quoted elsewhere is, is not."
I hope this helps illuminate the issues for those who may be reading this exchange. Radgeek 17:28, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Thank for responding. It was evidently a mistake to raise the vagina issue again, as you've wasted a lot of time going into great detail about that while skating over the far bigger problems. While your Clintonesque semantics have added nothing new to this subject — much less "illuminated" anything — I wish to return to the central issue, in the hope that you will actually address it.
Having complained that the original interpretations I drew were "original research", you now dismiss my extensively referenced catalogue of writers' attitudes to Dworkin as being "culled from third party sources of varying credibility".
Firstly, if you have a direct criticism of their credibility then please, raise it. If you don't, then it would help this process greatly if you'd refrain from baseless insinuation.
Secondly, the idea that citing writers is "culling" from "third parties" is ludicrous. Your demand for sources was precisely a request for recourse to third parties, as you well know. It is therefore hard to understand what you say as anything other than a contemptible rhetorical ploy.
I don't wish you to slip away from the confronting the main problem, however, so I'll once again restate it. Nothing you say about unsourced assertions, or what I said previously about the vagina quote, has any bearing on the well-sourced catalogue of critical writers and their attitudes that you have ignored. To reiterate: I am only speaking now about those contributions, not because you have in some way negated previous posts, but because these most clearly illustrate your partisan attitude to the article.
Why, if you actually wish to produce a neutral article about Dworkin, did you ignore *sourced* criticisms from numerous writers?
The excuse that you were too busy hardly convinces given your other contributions in the months since I did that work, not least your tediously documented investigation into the depradations of Luke Lockwood. You have demonstrated a clear lack of interest in including critical material, whatever generalities you may have emitted on that subject.
The other problem, which I raised again, and which you again ignored, is your inability to show why your editorialising (see above, ad nauseam) is somehow distinct from mine. You have argued at length that my interpretation was wrong. I have argued that it was right. The distinction you attempt to draw, and which you have never justified, is that somehow *your* editorialising, based on your viewpoint, is neutral and reasonable, and mine is "original research" and biased.
You imply that your framing of the vagina passage is "summary", whereas mine was an "analytical claim over a disputed point". But your allegation that the reference was to "literary depiction" and the "discourse of male truth", rather than to biological reality, is also an "analytical claim over a disputed point". I dispute your interpretation of Dworkin's attitude to sex, as have numerous others, as I documented. While I pointed to Mullarkey and a host of other writers as having a similar interpretation of Dworkin's work, you provided no sources at all. Why, given all this, and given your previous apparent criteria for judging contributions, would I take the long-winded exposition above, or its alleged outcome — the introductory passage currently in the "Intercourse" article — as anything but "original research"?
Your framing of the vagina quote is arguable and not sourced. Mine was too, inasfar as what I said was not precisely the same as what Mullarkey said about the quote. So why should we take yours on trust and dismiss mine out of hand?
Please note: none of your obfuscatory word wrangling above has *anything* to do with this question. All that matter are the criteria that you use to judge when editorialising is justified and when it isn't. Until you state them I'm not going to accept that you have a monopoly on neutrality.
Stuarta 19:30, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Stuarta,
1. You misunderstand me if you think I'm trying to ignore or to dismiss the work that you did in finding third-party discussions of Dworkin's views. I'm sorry if my wording suggested a dismissive attitude toward them--that wasn't intended. Quite the opposite: I've repeatedly said that the third-party discussions you've mentioned (particularly those from notable figures such as Laura Kipnis) are, if properly condensed, valuable material for incorporating into the article. I am not criticizing you for introducing this material; all I am pointing out is that your later efforts to do so don't retroactively refute the charges of original research in the older, unsourced editorializing you engaged in on the main page.
2. Let's separate two issues here, because you seem to be confusing them.
First, there is the issue of what standards we should employ when we discuss Dworkin's work in the main article. This is governed by WikiPedia policy, in particular WP:NPOV (including the section on undue weight), WP:NOR, and WP:AWW.
Second, there is the issue of what standards we should employ when we discuss Dworkin's work on this Talk page. Although the Talk page should be focused primarily on determining what should or should not be incorporated into the main article, there's no reason why (for example) original research from primary sources cannot be incorporated into these discussions, either as a side note, or as part of an explanation for why attempts at editorial summaries need revision, clipping, or what have you. It's not inappropriate to try to hash out what Dworkin actually means here, as long as the hashing out doesn't derail the primary purpose of the discussion (improving the article).
My complaints about violations of WP:NOR in your editorializing on the main page involve the first set of standards. Controversial synthetic claims about Dworkin's meaning, implication, etc. should not be made from the editorial voice. The edits of yours that I reversed, I reversed because they seemed to me to clearly overstep this line. If you think that my own attempts at summarizing her on the main page for either Andrea Dworkin or Intercourse (book) have overstepped this boundary, then I wouldn't be surprised: good writing for WikiPedia, especially about controversial figures or theories, is hard to do, and I'm a finite being like everyone else here. Specific suggestions for improvement or edits would be welcome; the main thing to keep in mind is that while viewpoints should be fairly represented, the main pages should not turn into a set of dueling argumentative essays on Dworkin's Real Meaning.
However, the standards for discussing what Dworkin meant on this Talk page, as per the second set of standards, can include a lot of material that cannot properly be incorporated into the main page. This is why your complaints that I haven't provided "sources" for my discussions of Dworkin's meaning on this page are inappropriate. I certainly have provided sources: specifically I've repeatedly cited from Dworkin's own work, and for the purposes for which I was citing it on this page, that is a source far more interesting than the assertions of Stanley Aronowitz, Laura Kipnis, Maureen Mullarkey, etc. about what Dworkin meant. If my discussion of these quotations were being incorporated into the main page, it would be objectionable as original research. But since I had quite a different purpose (i.e., offering you and others some reasons for my reading of Dworkin, and offering some reasons why specifically I rejected your claims about what certain passages could be safely said to "imply," "strongly suggest," etc.), the best source is the one that I actually offered, at some length.
You may find these discussions to be implausible, or even sophistical, attempts to controvert the obvious meaning. I, of course, disagree: you are the one insisting on reading more into Dworkin's statement about "no analogue," etc. more than she actually says, and the points I have been stressing about Dworkin's view on the social construction of sexuality are points that Dworkin considered extremely important and returned to, again and again, throughout nearly all of her work from Woman Hating onward. The best way to settle this issue, here, insofar as it needs to be settled, is to appeal to a careful reading of Dworkin's work. But, as far as what should go on the main page, the only important upshot is that you cannot offer editorial assertions that these passages say, "imply," "suggest," etc., if there is some dispute about it with some credible reasons from Dworkin's text to think that she may not have meant what you suggest she meant.
Since you've suggested that this affects my discussion not only on this Talk page, but also spills over into my attempts to summarize Dworkin's argument in Intercourse, maybe you could explain what specific sentences, clauses, or phrases of the following you find objectionable:
Extensively discussing works such as The Kreutzer Sonata, Madame Bovary, and Dracula (and citing from religious texts, legal commentary, and pornography), Dworkin argued that the depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture consistently emphasized heterosexual intercourse as the only or the most genuine form of "real" sex; that they portrayed intercourse in violent or invasive terms; that they portrayed the violence or invasiveness as central to its eroticism; and that they often united it with male contempt for, revulsion towards, or even murder of, the "carnal" woman. She argued that this kind of depiction enforced a male-centric and coercive view of sexuality, and that, when the cultural attitudes combine with the material conditions of women's lives in a sexist society, the experience of heterosexual intercourse itself becomes a central part of men's subordination of women, experienced as a form of "occupation" (cf. Chapter 7, "Occupation/Collaboration") that is nevertheless expected to be pleasurable for women and to define their very status as women. Dworkin describes the view of intercourse enforced by saying ...
Radgeek 02:21, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for your reply.
I'm happy to tell you that any confusion was yours alone. I am not exercised about the “standards we should employ when we discuss Dworkin's work on this Talk page”, and did not mention them. Instead I'll keep to the subject that I did mention: the standards we employ for the main article (and the “Intercourse” article). These are not a “spill over” from a fuss over the Talk page, but all that I'm interested in.
You say that you “wouldn't be surprised” if I feel your “summarizing” attempts have “overstepped the boundary”. You certainly shouldn't be surprised, as I have repeatedly stated this is my position; but if what you mean is that you may actually have “overstepped the boundary”, then perhaps we are making progress (I doubt it, however).
You say that you provided sources for your “summarizing” because you cited Dworkin's work. This, of course, does not distinguish your summarizing from mine: it too cited Dworkin's work. It is not, therefore, a determinative factor. I was referring, rather, to what you earlier termed “third party sources”. I was apparently obliged to provide these because without them what I wrote was dubbed “personal exegesis”. Evidently this obligation doesn't extend to you, because you cite no third party sources to bolster your own “personal exegesis”, which currently stands in the “Intercourse” article. This point does not hinge on the fairness or otherwise of either piece of “summarizing”: it is simply a double standard.
In the light of this it is extraordinary, quite apart from its irrelevance to what I actually raised, that you continue to assert that my “later efforts” do not “retroactively refute the charges of original research in the older, unsourced editorializing you engaged in on the main page”. The sources that I subsequently supplied, alongside the Mullarkey source that I originally supplied, make plain that the attitude to sex mooted in my editorialising is indeed commonly attributed to Dworkin by various writers. It would therefore be perfectly reasonable to assert (not that I ever did – it is your hobbyhorse, not mine) that the charges of “original research” have been refuted by following contributions. Allow me to quote the “original research” Wikipedia policy page, of which you are so fond:
“Citing sources and avoiding original research are inextricably linked: the only way to demonstrate that you are not doing original research is to cite reliable sources which provide information that is directly related to the topic of the article, and to adhere to what those sources say.”
I demonstrated that I was not doing original research by citing reliable sources directly related to the topic of the article. Thus the charge was refuted. By contrast, the charge against your editorialising remains outstanding, on your own terms, because you have provided no sources aside from Dworkin herself. The gamut of writers with a differing interpretation from yours demonstrates that the interpretation you have inserted into the “Intercourse” article can by no means be assuredly inferred from the book itself. But even if it could, you are in the absurd position of simultaneously dismissing my interpretation for its initial paucity of non-Dworkin sources, while simultaneously maintaining that your own interpretation requires none.
In spite of your implication to the contrary, I have, of course, already made clear specific problems with your editorialising about “Intercourse”. I do not believe one can be at all sure that Dworkin was, as you say in the article, referring to a “male-centric and coercive view of sexuality” “enforced” by “cultural attitudes” or “depiction”. Her meaning is at best ambiguous. I am not going to rehash the specific arguments about this with reference to her text. If you wish to read them, they're still above, in the 21st February post that you never replied to.
You conclude that the 'upshot is that you cannot offer editorial assertions that these passages say, "imply," "suggest," etc., if there is some dispute about it with some credible reasons from Dworkin's text to think that she may not have meant what you suggest she meant.' But I have offered credible reasons from her work, and from other people's work, that suggest she may not have meant what you say she meant. Therefore *you* are, by your own admission, not in a position to offer your “editorial assertions”. Moreover, you did not even hedge your editorialising in the way I did, and are thus more vulnerable than I am to the allegations of making contentious assertions. You baldly aver, for instance, that:
'Dworkin argued that the depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture consistently emphasized heterosexual intercourse as the only or the most genuine form of "real" sex'
I don't agree that she did. She made, as I noted above, a collection of “paratactical, oracular pronouncements regarding the nature of intercourse”, interspersed with literary criticism, that might be interpreted to mean what you say, but which might also be interpreted to mean she viewed vaginal intercourse as inherently violative. Your editorialising remains unsupported by “third party sources” (unlike mine) and less equivocal than mine. Yet unfathomably you continue to assert that it is implicitly somehow more neutral than mine.
There remains the separate issue of your lack of enthusiasm for including sourced critical material not in the editorial voice. While I again hear noises about how this would be welcome, I again note that, in between your various contributions over the past four months or so, you never found the time. Why would that be, if you seek a balanced article? As I have said, I hesitated to do this job myself because I felt you would almost certainly object to whatever form of words I chose – a feeling not dispelled by your continuing role as partisan gatekeeper to the article.
Stuarta 13:48, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why no picture?

There are pictures of most other famous people on here. Why not of her?

Because nobody has uploaded a GFDL-licensed picture and added it to the article. Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make whatever changes you feel are needed. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. You don't even need to log in! (Although there are some reasons why you might like to…) The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome.. If you have a picture that is not copyrighted, go right ahead and add it. moink 03:04, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
My experience is that the NNDB photo is often public domain. You can use it if nothing else. -- 75.26.4.46 05:04, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

LET ANDREA BE REVEALED!!!--Mare Nostrum 19:25, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Hey, I like that current photo!! Thanks, to whoever supplied it!! Sort of puts the uninitiated into the picture as to just what an oafish oddity we're dealing with here!! 82.146.162.228 09:02, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV Removal

Agree or disgaree with Dworkin, this article by far satisfies the NPOV requirement, is heavily sourced, and the critics of the NPOV can only come up with their own POV as a reply. If you think Dworkin lied on her autobiography, you are entitled to that, but thats POV. A NPOV is the one that says what we *know*: that she described being raped. -- Cerejota|Cerejota 04:42, 29 June 2006 (UTC)


NO, SHE ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY, ABSOLUTELY DID **NOT.**

And this one of the real Big Lies of the Dworkin-loving fanatics. Read her own account of it -- the fat, hate-filled, repulsive, misandrist cow had no recollection of any rape whatsoever, and it is right there plainly in her own ludicrous account of it in the Guardian. Oh, yes: She pieced it together. She decided she must have been raped (pity the poor perpetrator, eh?). She made it up. She bullshitted us. She raved. She free-associated. She channeled back to the non-event. "Realized" what must have happened. Like one might "realize" that one must have been been kidnapped by aliens or otherwise how could one possibly have fallen asleep with the TV still on. She accused.

And she made an idiot of herself. And exposed herself as one flamboyant nut case. But she never claimed to recall any such event. And I know you hate that, and I know you'll find a way not to admit it, and you'll dearly want to mock those of us who point it out. But that's the fact, Jack. And it's on the written record. In her own delirious words. Mare Nostrum

If you notice, the article doesnt say she said the truth, nor that she lied. It takes a NEUTRAL stance. What part of neutral you need to understand? --Cerejota 04:42, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Liked those sanctimonious 13 reversions from the fansite operator, speaking of POV. Mare Nostrum

Oh by the way,*this* is NPOV? That Newsweek wouldn't publish another of her nutball accounts, "to protect the identity of the batterer"? Is that an actual Newsweek quote? I mean, did the Public Affairs department of Newsweek authorize that language? Or is our regrettable article actually something out of the Dworkin zealotry looney bin?

And this **UNBELIEVABLE** insanity about her and the Nobel Prize for Literature, I see that's still in there!!! I can't even fathom that it didn't get taken out (or did the reverters again triumph?)!!! Oh my goodness! And listen, this stuff about her losing her crackpot defamation lawsuit because of some marketplace-of-ideas jazz is another callous, direct attempt to disinform us: it is provided only to confuse us into believing that she lost the suit on a technicality. She actually lost it because she claimed that Hustler falsely accused her of calling for incest with children. But she did call for incest with children, in print. Whatever the hell she meant by that, Hustler was right and she was wrong, plain and simple. The court was pretty stunned that she would bring a suit despite those clear facts, but she did for some reason, and naturally she lost. This isn't really a POV issue by the way: including the false explanation in the article is a calculated misrepresentation to the reader. Deliberately meant to confuse and misinform. Don't let anybody tell you different. --Mare Nostrum 19:06, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Could we hold off on the name-calling?

Folks, let us agree on something: Andrea Dworking was abrasive. But now she is dead so let us just all pretend like she has been dead for 100 years, calm down and summarize who she was. We do not have to like who she was, we just have to get her biography right. For perspective: if she said some stupid things in her life, then perhaps they are, in the end, not-so-notable. If she wrote and published something controversial, OK, that is fair game. Let us try to figure out what she left behind that is worth remembering. It is not as if she ever had much real political power: she was an activist. And another thing: if she was not the prettiest, slimmest sexist woman in history, well... her appearance probably had more to do with how the world treated her and how she might have lashed back at it, but that is all non-notable pettiness that probably the majority of the people in the world have to deal with. Let us just figure out what is worth remembering about her. I am not looking to rehabilitate her or apologize for her, I am just asking that we take a scholarly approach, which tends to avoid trivial issues like simple physical appearance. OK? -- 75.24.213.40 00:49, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, it is not PC to say this, but many or most of us think that her acute physical repugnancy is very relevant in considering her most absurd claim to have been raped at a fierecly ugly 50 years of age or whatever (whereas obviously many 50 year old women are beautiful, kind, balanced, yet still strong, in the modern day). Shoot, many or most of us also think PC is truly stupid BTW. So, no, I kindly will not be silenced by your note here. As to figuring out what is worth remembering about her, "let us agree" that the main things she is famous for are two:

(a) being a bombastic polemicist bigot, and (b) hitching the unfortunate name of feminism to extreme, virulent misandry. That should be the lead of the article, i.e., as has been said of her legacy, most women today would rather be bit by a rabid dog than call themselves feminists. She certainly isn't famous for impacting the pornography world in any way, one of the world's healthiest industries that has grown truly exponentially since she became active. Although, yes, Attorney General Meese's office at the time found her to be a convenient willing dupe for its censorship polices, until an appalled Supreme Court smacked them down.

In reality, "us" figuring this out is much in doubt -- the history of this article has been a sad parade of endless, daily, recalcitrant reverting and vituperation when any of her "achievements" (such as narrowly missing the Noble Prize for Literature) were questioned. So there is no "us" unfortunately, this article has been all about bullying by the zealots against the thoughtful. And that is one of the weaknesses of Wikipedia that has been laid bare here, there is no effective sanction for this kind of serial abuse, however apparent and prolonged. Men of good will tire and move on. Then some good-hearted sort like yourself comes along pretending to be neutal while bemoaning how "the world treated her." Poor "preacher of hate" that she was, as Cathy Young put it. But how about the way **she** treated the world, while you're being so generous with your thoughts? What about **us?** If she said the same things about blacks or Jews or Hispanics, would you be so conciliatory and sentimental? Or do you have a double standard, when you speak of "pettiness"?

As to what was important, really, about her? It could be done in three paragraphs, maybe two. All this bloated blarney about her ground-breaking authorship and all is lunacy. And, hey, where's that picture? If her appearance is truly of such little concern as you assure us, let's plaster it up there! Oh, and, Freudian slip there when you called her "sexist" there, huh?! Better watch that next time! - Mare Nostrum 82.146.162.228 18:29, 3 July 2006 (UTC)


Mare Nostrum, this is wikipedia. In other words it is an encyclopedic compendium. It attempts to collect all human knowledge. This includes all things, wether you like them or you don't. From the perspective of the wiki you are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to diminish the quality of the factual information on a given topic simply because of your dislike of the topic.

If you want to wax poetic about your obvious dislike of Andrea Dworkin, fine. No problem. Go ahead an do it. Just not on Wikipedia.

I will ask you again:

1) Stop the vandalising of the page by including the POV tag. It is not warranted under the rules, as the article satisfies all of Wikipedia Rules. This also go out to to those who are putting it up as a form of wiki vandalism. The POV tag is meant a guide towards substantial discussions on the topics, not as a way for vadals to show their dislike of a topic.

2) Stop using this page as a way to vent your own personal point of views on Dworkin. In particular the use of weasel words is discouraged.

3) Stop disrespecting fellow wikipedians.

Thank you. --Cerejota 00:58, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Hey, thanks, and if I had a quarter for every time a disinforming friend of Andrea on here instructed me to shut up I'd be doing okay. (Then they say, "Oh, I never asked you stop contributing", Li'l Bo Beep style.) I won't shut up, we have already treated this process with gentility and it absolutely doesn't work in the face of revereting bullying (how **many** of us have been abused on here!!!) which Wiki regrettably allows, a majority of the people above don't agree with you anyway, and damn sure don't again waste your breath trying to give me orders. It doesn't meet NPOV because it is full of POV. Respect begins with the reader --respect them and us with an honest attempt at the truth. Rather than, for example, coyly making up false statements like you did claiming that Andrea's raving Guardian article indicated she had a clear recollection of being raped. If you have an opinion that up is down, fine, but kindly treat your fellow Wikipedians with enough decorum not to spread known falsehoods. --Mare Nostrum 05:45, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

No one is asking you to shut up, just to follow the wikipedia rules. Or care to elaborate on why you are so special these rules don't apply to you?

I also ask you, again, to refrain from name-calling and weasel words. Perhaps you don't know that under conflict resolution rules, my attempts are considered good faith attempts to prevent continued vadalism on an encyclopedic entry? And that if these good faith attempts fail, it will mean that escalation might be in order?

Again: if you feel this article is somehow lacking in terms of what is expected of an encyclopedic article and Wikipedia's rules, feel free to contribute any of those positive elements. I will be the first to defend a positive contribution, even if it goes against the grain of the tone set by the original author.

--Cerejota 09:43, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I recently reinstated the POV tag because I believe this article is not neutral. I have explained above why this is, but let me summarise yet again.

Firstly, it includes little information about her serious critics, instead devoting more space to Hustler magazine. When it does mention critics their views are immediately counterposed with assertions from Dworkin (e.g. about the "all sex is rape" claim), as if these somehow implicitly negate the semantic content of her books.

Secondly, Radgeek has adopted an exculpatory narratory framework, and uses this to pass off his own ruminations as unimpeachable fact, while simultaneously disparaging (and deleting) contrary interpretations as "original research". He holds to this "original research" line even though he is the one who has provided no third party sources to justify his stance.

He has over the past few months repeatedly failed to reply to serious arguments and the presentation of evidence, in spite of his supposed demand for these. He has found the time, since I last responded to him, to make various contributions to this article, Wikipedia in general, and his Dworkin fansite. Yet he has, mysteriously, found no time to add any critical material to this article, or to even respond on the talk page.

There is no better illustration of his bias than the sequence of events following my insertion of material about "Intercourse":

1) I add some quotes and minimal explanatory material that show why people have interpreted her as suggesting penetrative heterosexual intercourse is inherently violative.

2) Radgeek deletes the quotes and associated material, saying this latter is original research. He then reinstates some of the quotes, with a passage suggesting that they mean something entirely different.

3) I provide a long list of citations of authors who have indeed interpreted her as having the above view of sex, as well as detailed arguments about why this is at the least a reasonable interpretation of "Intercourse".

4) Radgeek never replies to the detailed arguments about "Intercourse", and never introduces any of the critical material I have provided. Instead in the following months he devotes his energies to battling talk page vandals and improving the footnote style.

5) The debate restarts. I respond to his ongoing attempts to wriggle out of applying the same evidential standards to himself as he does to others. He never replies, but continues to tinker with the page instead.

In summary, the page as it stands is largely the result of a Dworkin partisan, and is unsurprisingly biased. Previous attempts to correct this have met with reversions and hypocritical bluster.

Stuarta 12:12, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Stuarta,
Given the volume of material above between you and I on the interpretation of Intercourse and of the specific passages you have cited, it is frankly absurd for you to claim that I have "never replied" to the detalied arguments that you have introduced. I have not insisted on getting the last word on every point that you have tried to make, not because I think you are right, but because I think that a great deal of this argument is irrelevant to the writing of the article; because my time and my energy, even for topics that I care a great deal about, is not infinite; and because whenever I do attempt to reply in detail I am abused by you for "Clintonian word-wrangling," etc., and no matter how much effort I devote to replying to you and drawing your attention to selective quotations, parts of the book that you have neglected, etc., I am repeatedly met with the charge that I have "never replied" to whatever shining insight you think that you have presented, in spite of having written several pages of material and spent quite a bit of time reading and transcribing sections of the book. You may think that you have every right to make charges that I'm being sophistical, that I'm imposing double-standards, that my replies are not responsive to whatever point you're trying to urge, etc. because (you think) those charges are true. But you can hardly expect me to agree with you, and you can hardly be surprised if I find this more trouble than it's worth for more than a few exchanges at a time.
I have repeatedly encouraged you and others to incorporate material like that which you quoted on this Talk page into the article. I have not done it myself because this article is not my sole responsibility, because I do have to work for a living, and because I have other things to do, both here and elsewhere. You may think that it's not worth taking the trouble of adding yourself because you feel that your efforts will be unfairly reverted or otherwise amount to wasted labor. If so, I'm sorry you feel that way, but that does not make it incumbent on me to devote time solely to fixing up all the things I'd like to see fixed with this article--let alone to fixing it to your specifications.
I am also not sure what possible objection you could have to the fact that Dworkin's replies to her critics are allowed space in the article. How is presenting an author's interpretive statements about her own work, and replies to criticism of it, a violation of WP:NPOV?
As a side note, I do not run a "Dworkin fansite." I run several websites, one of which (Rad Geek People's Daily) is a general-interest weblog where I've posted some articles favorable to Andrea Dworkin. That is no more an "Dworkin fansite" than Instapundit (which has, after all, posted some articles favorable to Christopher Hitchens) is a "Hitchens fansite." This claim, endlessly repeated by Mare Nostrum and now by you, is sheer misrepresentation, and I'd prefer if you stopped it.
Radgeek 21:49, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
Apparently the “volume of material above” renders “frankly absurd” the suggestion that you have evaded my “detailed arguments” on “Intercourse”. This is so even though the contribution I made on 21st February, which contained the the fullest presentation of the reasons why I do not believe Dworkin could have been referring purely to depiction, provoked no response.
Curiously, however, even though what I said on 21st February had supposedly been preempted by the great “volume of material” preceding it, you felt the need to produce a new barrage of Carollian hair-splitting on 9th June about precisely the same subject. I suppose this reiteration was generous, given your enormously busy schedule, but it would have been more worthwhile to have addressed the argument as it actually stood, rather than less complete remarks from the beginning of February.
I shan't pursue the wider implications of your idea that discussion beyond a certain volume implicitly renders answered any points – they are too absurd for reasoned consideration; and besides, I do have work to do.
Anyway, you have some other excuses. You didn't insist “on getting the last word on every point”. How kind. I suppose this polite reticence is why you never explained, despite being asked repeatedly, just what criteria apply when distinguishing between your neutral “summary” and my “personal exegesis”, or why your editorialising requires no third party sources and mine does. Apparently this matter, along with what Dworkin actually meant in “Intercourse” (see above), is “irrelevant to the writing of the article”.
Apparently I can “hardly expect” agreement on whether your double standards are acceptable. It was foolish of me, clearly, to expect any consistent application of editorial standards, or even an attempt at a defence of your stance thereon. Point taken.
As it is a side-issue, I'll also quickly pass over the alleged Dworkin “fansite”. You're right – I apologise – it isn't a site purely devoted to worship of Andrea Dworkin. I confess I was thrown by Google's report of 78 mentions of Andrea Dworkin, apparently all positive, and the six-parter titled “Andrea Dworkin Was Right”.
I am more interested, in any case, in the standards that you apply to editorialising on this site. Given that you are unwilling to defend your application of double standards I am left wondering what the odds are of making any substantial change that will not provoke a revert war. I'm willing, given your inclination only to add positive material, to try. I just hope that your related inclination to excise negative material will be restrained.
As for Dworkin's replies, they certainly belong in the article. But I do not believe her critics are presently given a fair hearing alongside her categorical responses. It is possible, as I have pointed out before, that Dworkin was self-contradictory. Since I and many others take “Intercourse” to equate sex with rape, and yet she disavowed this position, it is hard to reach any conclusion other than that she wanted to have it both ways. This possibility is at present excluded by the article.
Stuarta 17:01, 6 July 2006 (UTC)


Stuarta:
I have read all your justifications for a POV tag and all they amount to is weasel words and your own POV, and ad hominem attacks at Radgeek. Yet you seem to ignore what constitutes NPOV under wikipedia rules.
This article as it stands today (see my sig for time) is NPOV compliant. It is so because NPOV is not a capricious definition you create to suit your wants and needs but because it has some verifiable standards set out in the relevant NPOV page. This article as it stands today meets all and fail none of the criteria:
In other words, NPOV IS NOT THE SAME AS EQUAL TIME. Get it? NOT THE SAME. NOT EQUAL. There is NO RULE, AGREEMENT or ANYTHING in the entire Wikipedia about equal time within a single article. What is ENCOURAGED is to make an article much more complete by adding all the relevant information possible, PRESENTED in a NPOV. If an article fails to have equal time, but this is due to lack of research, it is still NPOV.
(Don't like it? Take it up in the talk pages about wikipedia administration. But dont try to weasel it in by the backdoor.)
Wikipedia IN GENERAL gives equal time. Thats the beauty of wikipedia. You post on Andrea Dworkin, and then add stuff against Andrea Dworkin and let the readers decide. You and others who continue to vandalize this page by stating that the article, IN GENERAL violates NPOV, when this is OBVIOUSLY not the case, do not understand this simple idea.
Be a wikipedian, and add relevant critcism to Andrea Dworkin. Otherwise stop the weasel words, which is all the arguements I have heard here about POV since I joined the fray amount to.

--Cerejota 21:02, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't see a lot of value in devoting much attention to this outburst. You once again removed the POV tag on 4th July, and I didn't reinstate it because I think changes to correct the POV problem are more important than signalling it. You got your way, in other words, so what are you stamping your foot about? (It's probably worth also adding that I reinstated the POV tag precisely once, and did not initially add it, even though I believe it to be warranted.)
What your RANDOMLY CAPITALISED splurge appears to neglect is the biased narratory voice about which I have written repeatedly above. Even if your argument regarding equal time held, it would not eliminate this problem. Indeed, you concede that information should be "PRESENTED in a NPOV". This is exactly what I have argued is not the case -- an argument that you have not felt moved to address.
But then, you have not addressed a single substantive point: everything above is just a stream of generalised accusations. I can't respond to them until you provide examples of these weasel words and ad hominem attacks (I regard your charge of my "own POV" as implicitly empty). Until you do, I shall ignore your complaints.
Incidentally, I don't quite see where your obsession with "equal time" comes from. Perhaps you can enlighten me without hitting that caps key? On the NPOV page to which you directed me (three times) I read that "NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints, in proportion to the prominence of each". A significant viewpoint is that Dworkin was anti-sex. This is not fairly represented. The article is therefore POV, surely?
Stuarta 10:54, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes I am biased because this surely is one of the ugliest talk pages in all of wikipedia.
One of my pet peeves in wikipedia, call it a convert's zeal, are both weasel words and wrong interpretations of NPOV. Concrete examples on your part of both abound, but I will give two each:
Stuarta:"Anyway, you have some other excuses. You didn't insist “on getting the last word on every point”. How kind. I suppose this polite reticence is why you never explained, despite being asked repeatedly, just what criteria apply when distinguishing between your neutral “summary” and my “personal exegesis”, or why your editorialising requires no third party sources and mine does. Apparently this matter, along with what Dworkin actually meant in “Intercourse” (see above), is “irrelevant to the writing of the article”."
Classic example of Ad Hominem. A beautiful, imho, example of parlamentary sarcasm that would make Disraeli weep in pride. Alas, well-worded form makes not for incisive substance.
You do not appear to understand what argumentum ad hominem is. I did not attack Radgeek personally in these words you quote: I attacked what he had said, and pointed out what he had not said. As you admit below, "the discussion of ideas presented by individuals" is not ad hominem. My point was, and remains, that he had not addressed the key issues.
Stuarta"Radgeek never replies to the detailed arguments about "Intercourse", and never introduces any of the critical material I have provided. Instead in the following months he devotes his energies to battling talk page vandals and improving the footnote style."
This is wikipedia. You can edit the page yourselve if you want material added. Preferiably after engaging in discussion. This actually has a bit of strawman in it too. You weaseling out from actually subjecting your crticical material to standards of the community by not publishing it in the main page. Go ahead and do it if you feel its relevant. I certainly think that it might compromise NPOV by being disproportionate in comparising to the NPOV information and to the the POV material from supporters, but maybe am wrong.
You appear to be selectively ignoring what has already been written. It is my plan to make changes to the page. This entire debate was sparked by my making changes to the main page. Radgeek then deleted those changes, as you know, because I made this clear in text that you partially quote above. I have not, therefore, "weasel[ed] out from actually subjecting [my] crticical material to standards of the community", because I have published it.
As I have also stated, I held back from making changes because of Radgeek's responses. After a further exchange with Radgeek I made it clear I did intend to try again with the critical material, in the hope that it wouldn't be immediately reverted as previously. So why are you further bloating this talk page with at best obsolete accusations?
Of course, references to what a person argued, and the discussion of ideas presented by individuals are not Ad Hominem. You do that too, like I am doing to you now. But you also engage in some kind of contest with Radgeek that does nothing to elevate the substantial quality of the encyclopedic article on Andrea Dworkin, and does a lot to further clutter this talk page with irrelevant stuff, included my exasperated and general calls to refocus on the consensus goal of the article on Andrea Dworkin (develop an encyclopedia article meeting certain standards) and of its talk page (to help develop the article to those standards by engaging the community of wikipedians). Your comments and those most others in this talk page sometimes prove useful and follow those general guidelines, but most of the time they don't, and sometimes have been egregious examples of vandalism.
I agree, the debate has become too much like a contest. But I do not believe your starting a new contest is helpful. As I have pointed out, both your complaints about the POV tag removal and your complaints about my not adding critical material are not relevant because they no longer apply. Your general complaint that "most of the time" my comments are not "useful" is more applicable to your contributions, in my view. I have had a detailed discussion on the meaning of "Intercourse", and provided a lot of references thereon. You have so far provided nothing.
(My basic point is that this article is as complete as any in wikipedia, and that by continually questioning its POV simply based on a lack of percieved completeness (without any apparent effort to complete it!), people are vandalising it.)
But my complaint is not restricted to completeness! I have repeatedly stated that I object to the biased narratory tone. It is manifestly false to describe my critical stance as "simply based on a lack of percieved completeness". As it is, the NPOV page mandates fair coverage of major points of view, and the article currently lacks this. Since there do exist pages with fair coverage of major points of view, it is quite evidently false to maintain, as you do, that this page is "as complete as any in wikipedia" or as "NPOV as any in Wikipedia".
I will not address your further ad hominems, appeals to motive, and other such fallacies as their are irrelevant to the article and editing it. I have engaged in the above two clarifications only to show that I have indeed read your writings, and that my exasperation is grounded on them, not what you want the perception of them, post-facto, to be. I will no longer do this, and will indeed consider this the last words that I will engage with you that are not directly related to the article and its editing.
I'm encouraged that these are to be your last words, because I regard your contributions, unlike Radgeek's, to be uniformly unhelpful. Just when I had settled on editing the page to reflect my criticisms of it, you start wasting my time with these nebulous imprecations. Instead of doing the editing, I'm instead pushed to defend myself.
Talk pages are neither about us, not about what we believe about a given article, but rather about how we can make that article better.
Right. So please go away, unless you wish to discuss how to make the article better.
You raise points that are addressed, and refuse to either accept them or edit the main article to reflect the changes you feel are necessary, except the weasel cop-out of putting a simple POV tag (which you know say you will refrain from doing). I call you on that as a wikipedian: If you dont like something, edit it by adding or substracting, not by engaging in vacous unproductive debates in the talk pages. I know you know how to do this. Saves us all time to edit other articles, and saves you time from trying micro-edit an article for which you have nothing concrete to add or edit. Perhaps I need to point you to Talk Page Guidelines?
Again with the unsubstantiated generalisations. Which points were addressed? Not the ones regarding missing critical material or editorial double standards. As I have noted, I re-added the POV tag exactly once. It can hardly, then, be fair to characterise my response to points, addressed or not, as "the weasel cop-out of putting a simple POV tag".
The hypocrisy of accusing me of "vacous unproductive debates in the talk pages" is quite extraordinary, given what you have just written. There is no specific mention of Dworkin's work in any of your shapeless gripes, and your only contribution to the article has been to remove the POV tag. To repeat myself, your main points (the POV tag, my lack of recent editing) have explicitly already been addressed. I therefore cannot fathom what motivates you to continue. I have previously added material, and presented more for addition. Unlike you, I certainly have something "concrete" to add, as simply scrolling up would show. Perhaps I need to point you to anywhere but here, so that we can get on without being distracted by your playground insults?
As to a substantive point: "On the NPOV page to which you directed me (three times) I read that "NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints, in proportion to the prominence of each". A significant viewpoint is that Dworkin was anti-sex. This is not fairly represented. The article is therefore POV, surely?"
That is another example of weasel words. Wikipedia hates armchair editors: if you feel an article fails to meet a standard, you have a right to edit or talk about it, but also a responsibility to make sure that talk and editing is done in good faith, doesn't eliminate relevant information and is NPOV. This indeed has been the case: Radgeek's heavy POV article has been shaped into a NPOV precisely due to community input (including yours!!!). Yet there is a point when an article reaches a certain level of quality when tags become innecesary. I offer this article has reached that point, and all I hear is ad hominems and weasel words. I will continue to remove any tags that question the NPOV of this article, and will revert all malicious or irrelevant edits, unless a fair, good faith effort is done to discuss it and seek consensus. I will stop doing so when I am convinced this page is no longer a target of vandals and bias peddlers.
A stirring peroration, but you appear to extend the term "weasel words" to anything that you don't like, thus rendering it meaningless. By quoting the NPOV page, to which you repeatedly directed me, I am engaging in "weasel words"? You claim that the article is not POV, and therefore does not warrant the POV tag. I point out that it does not conform to the standards on the NPOV page, and therefore is POV (and could reasonably tagged POV, although I don't plan to do so). And these are "weasel words" because... I haven't immediately edited the page to eliminate the POV? This non sequitur pirouetting might warrant some sort of comedy award, but plainly no serious response is possible.
Just so I dont get accused of not being substantial: I take an NPOV with you assertion that "A significant viewpoint is that Dworkin was anti-sex". This seems to be the case, and indeed the page as it stands address this.
I see. So this is your one attempt at showing any concrete evidence for your hazy accusations. I do not agree, and unlike you I have provided documentation of why. All that is currently addressed in the article is the false accusation that Dworkin's work contains words along the lines of "all sex is rape". Nowhere is addressed the widespread critical opinion that her written work -- in particular "Intercourse" -- carries the strong implication, inasfar as its ambiguity allows interpretation at all, that this is so. I have quoted numerous writers on this subject, and I have made clear from internal evidence why I believe it is so. You have rebutted none of this, yet feel free to baldly aver that "the page as it stands [addresses] this". Why on earth would I take this ex cathedra pronouncement as anything but uninformed dogma?
Yet your POV is that it is not "fairly" represented. But why? Only your POV? And those of biased vandals? Yes, unfortunately the burden of proof falls with the editor. Convince us that the view point of Dworkin as anti-sex is not represented in proportion to the topic at hand. Mind you, this article is about Andrea Dworkin, not Radical Feminism, not Gender Studies, not Anti-Feminism, nor any other such related article. It is about Andrea Dworkin in a biographical and encyclopedic way. In that sense, what you call my "obsession" with equal time becomes relevant: in spite of your and other's weasel words and ad hominems, the placing of the POV tag, when not pure vandalism, has been a result of what has been argued as to what amounts to a lack of equal time. I am not obsessed with equal time: those who place POV are! They equate NPOV with equal time, which it isn't neccesarily. If NO time where given to critics, if the article had the rather POV editorials it had, etc, then the POV tag would be justified.
I have written at length about why I believe the critical view is under-represented. I am not going to repeat myself purely on account of your limited ability or unwillingness to comprehend written English.
As for "equal time", I have already pointed out that the NPOV page of which you are so fond says that "all significant viewpoints" should be "fairly represent[ed]" according to their "prominence". It is my contention that this is not so. You apparently dispute this contention, but regardless of the truth of that, you suggest that I am advocating "equal time" for all viewpoints. I am not, and you could have resolved this misapprehension, along with so many others, by the simple expedient of reading what I wrote. I'm not even slightly interested in these other vandals, apparently "obsessed with equal time". It isn't a concept that I raised, and is not one I'm advocating. I cannot make myself clearer than this.
I sm sorry, but if we were to tag every page in Wikipedia in which the opposing view point is addressed, but someone without proof argues it isn't, then all of wikipedia would be marked with a POV tag!!! This is a apagogical argument and would break down the usefulness of the POV tag, and probably of all Wikipedia, if accepted as logical.
The operative, unjustified qualifier here is "without proof". You cannot wave away by repeated assertion what I have argued. It is not persuasive to turn up, ignore everything that has been discussed, and simply state your opinion as if it is unquestionable.
You must surely understand that while we all have our POV, the attempt to seek, in good faith, to achieve NPOV must not mean that articles must be perfectly balanced and fine-tuned before all warning tags are removed?
--Cerejota 09:47, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
There is a non-issue because, as you knew before you wrote this, I was not advocating the reinstatement of the POV tag. I would rather edit the article. You could help me in this by restraining your predilection for inane mouthing of "weasel words" and "ad hominem" at anybody with whom you disagree. So poor is your evidence that I cannot even see what are supposed to be the "two each" examples of ad hominem and weasel words. All I could see was one absurd attempt to paint reasoned argument as ad hominem, and an even more ludicrous implication that failing to edit the article was "weasel wording". If you do respond -- and I hope you don't, because I have better things to do -- then please label them more clearly.
I have contributed to this article, and to the debate. You have done nothing beyond lowering the level of discourse.
Stuarta 13:15, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] inline references

I am trying to inlien most of the references. My approach is that if they link points to a book and has a label title, then I let it me. Otherwise, I am adding some simple label to the reference so that the numbered references are true footnotes and there are no unlabeled external links, just to avoid those auto-numbered links. The next step is to use the proper "Cite" templates, mostly Template:Cite_web . -- 75.24.213.40 01:14, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Another style point of these footnotes: they should almost always go at the end of the sentence. The sentence is the unit of meaure and each sentence should make a clear, factual assertion (and not just somebody else's opinion). Some of these footnotes are still documenting things like an adjective and a noun. It is very annoying. If it takes more than one sentence to express the idea, then break the sentence up. The justification is that when you go to fact-check this article, you want to verify an entire sentence, no just a sentance fragment. -- 75.25.181.242 03:27, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] These online chapters

I see that Nikki Craft has some chapters of Dworkin's books online. I am trying to avoid these internal links. It is a small matter of style. What do you all think? Should we leave the links in the text or somehow consolidate them in the footnotes? Also: six or seven footnote in a row are excessive. Those two cases of many footnotes (labled as "View"s and "Mem"s) really should just be a list of external links within its own subsection. It is a usability issue. -- 75.26.4.46 04:00, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm inclined to prefer inline links rather than footnotes for links to online sources, for the simple reason that an inline link takes only one click, rather than two, to follow, and I can't see how consolidating them into endnotes improves the look or the readability of the text. If anything, it worsens it, since it adds the extra noise of the numbered superscript. I'm not firmly committed either way, however, and I'd be interested to know what others think. Radgeek 21:52, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Let's aim high: Feature Articles use footnotes (inline refs using the <ref> tag) almost exclusively. That way, the focus is all on the brilliant prose and not on the supporting documentation referred to. Sure, the citation needs to be there, but we should keep "other" documents out of the way. -- 75.25.181.242 02:34, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
I have inlined even more and I still find all the titles of the "other" documents to be intrusive. We are supposed to talk about Dworkin in our own voice - not just string together the titles of her works. We will get there eventually. -- 75.25.181.242 02:54, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The legacy section

I am getting less comfortable with this "legacy" section. Having the subject's allies and critics line up and spout off is not really information. Was Dworkin insane like Cathy Young says? Is Young qualified (she does not have an M.D. or anything like that) to make that claim or is Young just trying to indicate that she disagrees with Dworkin? Well, this is the Dworkin page. If we want to put that info back on the Young's page, that would be fine. The links to the obits and eulogies at the bottom of the page are fine. My question is: what did anyone do about Dworkin's legacy after she was dead and buried? Talk is cheap. The whole legacy section is just a bunch of other people either grieving or gloating about her death, but that is all just transient opining. What else is there? I think that the facts of Dworkin's legacy can be summarized much more briefly. -- 75.25.181.242 03:13, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

The opinions of Dworkin's allies and critics is information about how her life's work is viewed at this time. Since that is a topic of considerable controversy, WP:NPOV requires that many different views get a hearing.
Given that Dworkin has been dead for just over a year, I'm not sure what more you expect than this. A lot of the "facts of Dworkin's legacy" are not yet attainable, because we do not have the historical perspective with which to see them.
Radgeek 06:10, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
I disagree. Her supporters and critics are still fighting the battles she fought and are biased and subject to resorting to manipulation to yet prevail. Wikipedia is supposed to develop its own understanding of the subject, speak in its own authoritative voice (with supporting citations, of course) and describe Dworkin's philosophy and thesis and convey that to the reader. These other people are footnotes, at best, and only when they provide fact. If she had wielded any real political or professional power, well, that might be more complex, but all she ever did was talk, protest, write and, to a limited degree, litigate. My view is that she can be summarized in terms of her intellectual legacy and all of that other stuff is not-so-notable. For instance: it is of little concern to be if, late in life, she was raped or not. Even if such a rape did happen, she never asserted that it was some sort of political act in an attempt to stifle her message. It is a rather minor point from a historical point of view. OK, we might not want to drive the point home while she is alive, but she is not alive. I mean, we can take years worring about the feelings of her surviving personal friends, or we can wrap her up now, in terms of her lasting legacy to mankind, and have a stable, NPOV article. I am not trying to be cruel, but I am looking for an article of lasting value and and incidental facts about her that are not part of a larger context are, from a historical perspective, just isolated fragments that should be treatly briefly. I really want something thaItalic textBold textt will be relevant 100 years from now. It is a hard, cold view (time and history are sort of like that), but I thought that this is what NPOV was about. On the eulogy stuff: If MacKinnon wants to praise her and Flint wants to vilify her, so what? That is just talk: it is not objectivitely about Dworkin's life unless they tell us some fact that we did not previously know. It is Dworkin's own words and facts that should establish her importance. In my opinion, Wikipedia should not rely upon individual eulogies to establish the importance of the subject. If some eulogy established new facts, then fit the facts back into the timeline of the narrative, which should march forward in as monotonic a fashion as much as possible. -- 64.175.41.114 02:08, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This boring article, conceived by Andrea's worshippers, is over eight times recommended length.

Recommended length is 32 KB, this one is well over 260 KB. Could the following blather be shortened, for example, what she did or did not *read in high school*??? "Dworkin began writing poetry and fiction in the sixth grade. Throughout high school, she read heavily (with encouragement from her mother and father). She was particularly influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Che Guevara, and the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg."

That was with encouragement from them both, huh? From the mother *and* the father? How very informative indeed! Anyhow, this can't be shortened easily now, because *somebody* has gotten this loopy, meandering, dizzy, hagiography designated as "semi-protected." That means it is "an official policy" and "a standard." And what does that mean? It is done, "to prevent sockpuppets of banned users [here,read as, "critics of Andrea"] from editing it." Sound faschistic? You decide.

But be careful, lest you should become a "banned user" in case you don't hold the right views. Because the piece is "a standard" right down to the lunacy of Andrea being arguably eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature. (A *standard*??? I can't even believe this as I write it, but that's the quote on the site: a standard. Great God in heaven!)

Somehow I feel myself subject to becoming a future "banned user." I haven't tried to edit the embarassing article in a long time, but I fear that even my comments will cause me to be banned if I don't get with the Wiki program of joyously celebrating Andrea as one of America's greatest, um, what was she again? Not bigot, I am told. And not misandrist, nor misanthrope, and not androphobe, not preacher of hate, not eccentric, not polemicist, not crackpot, not man-hater, not psycho, not sociopath, not stooge of Ed Meese, not misfit, and certainly not hideously ugly, but what was she again? Loving mother? No? I guess she can't be devoted wife since she denounced her gay "husband" in the Guardian as sometimes supporting her and sometimes not. (That sort of disagreement belongs more at home than on the front page of the weekend magazine, eh?) What, then? We seemed to rule out the previously offered, "jurist", since she is no more a lawyer than is a gerbil one. Successful reformer, maybe? Naw. De facto destroyer of the women's movement? Symbol of everything wrong with American feminism? Shrike?

Shucks, I don't know. Maybe you can get banned for even thinking the wrong thing, so I had better take it easy. The article is a little long though. Like almost nine times too long. "Official policy" or not. Oh, and it is not widely accepted by editors either, like the tagline wrongly refers, most of us are appalled and bewildered by it. But it is "widely" accepted by a favored few on here, I guess you'd say. Like people who are comfortable with Andrea saying that a surgeon performing a caesarian section on a woman struggling to bear a healthy child is society's "new rapist," because he invades the woman's body. Or her colorful quotes like, "every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman." On that subject, critics might ask what Andrea knew about family life, though, apart from the fact that she wanted to mate with her father and her tomes excused incest? But I digress, and perhaps I can be banned for that, too. User:Mare Nostrum.


This is a good point. It only takes one sentence to spell out: "Andrea Dworkin was a man-hating, feminazi dyke"


I've been reading this talk page for a while, and it occurs to me that maybe people with extreme opinions on either side of an issue should recuse themselves from editing further.Thedoorhinge 14:00, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] People with extreme opinions should recuse themselves?

Alas, it is far too late for that, Thedoorhinge.

The dogmatic tract was written almost in toto by the extreme partisan protectors of their Saint Andrea’s holy memory. Smirkingly manipulating Wiki policy, reverting endlessly, and always lecturing even-handed commentators that the latter's contributions were morally or substantively insufficient, the fanatics relentlessly bullied their twisted fantasy into becoming the official truth. And in their zealotry to safeguard their idol’s bio against all who sought balance, they somehow even subverted the most basic Wiki rule of all, the right to edit. Yes, now the guardians of Andrea’s sacred legacy have found allies inside Wiki who agree that only *they* can edit the party-approved version, as opposed to anyone interested in objective truth. Wiki doesn't even care that the disinformation comes from her apostates' own Andrea fansites!

Is there such an odious disgrace anywhere else in Wikidom, or is this the very worst?

Make no mistake -- this doctrinaire hagiography is the intellectual ally of Pol Pot. And a leading lesson to all as to how Wiki’s supposed policy for fairness is nothing more than the punchline in a cynical joke, when it comes to determined propagandists. Mare Nostrum 16:56, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

So, take the high road, and you be the one to start the 'recusing'. Thedoorhinge 21:31, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

1. No, Thedoorhinge. As I kindly noted before, I will not shut up. Ever. You can tell me to again, and the answer will always be, "No." Or you can switch to a higher road and stop instructing others to shut up. 2. As it happens, I have not wasted time editing the shabby, propagandistic hagiography for many months so don't worry. 3. But I am certainly not the propagandist as you seem to be implying; I am just pointing out the sad situation. But I realize that even so that really bothers some people who don't like seeing beloved propaganda criticized. Mare Nostrum 09:15, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Can't we all just get along? Be nice to each other.


Dylan Slade 17:38, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] On a totally different (technical) note...

In the Fiction section, the paragraph beginning "Dworkin, however, wrote 'My fiction is not autobiography...'" is bolded for some reason. When I tried to remove this, I couldn't figure out why it was bolded (couldn't find ' ' ' or HTML coding). Someone who understands the technical underpinnings to Wikipedia should look at this, as I am stumped. Natalie 01:49, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Somebody fixed it. How, I don't know, but they did. Natalie 04:53, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Bias Warning Added

Why did no one think to add this tag yet? Template:NPOV may or may not be appropriate (there is even considerable debate on that...), but surely no one can dispute Template:Bias Warning applies in spades, here.

I would also ask that before anyone kneejerks and deletes the tag (as was done with the Template:NPOV at one point), they read and contrast the official stated purposes of the two on their descriptor pages. This tag fits to a T, people. Let's rise above... Bullzeye 09:10, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I finally find a template that seems to suit both sides of the field while still indicating the considerable Sturm und Drang present in this article, and suddenly the entire existence of the template is unsuitable...I apologize, but this raises my hackles a smidge. Eloquence, I recognize you are a high-level fellow at Wikipedia, and are certainly a very busy man, but the template (according to the dictates it is established under) fits the definition of the article's current circumstances to the very letter.

Whether it's very existence (in ANY article) is appropriate is another issue, one that you have raised and is currently being discussed and debated. Unless I'm missing something, it hasn't been definitively ruled upon yet (else it would no longer exist). For that reason, I feel it's unexplained removal does the article a disservice. Surely there MUST be something we can put up there? Bullzeye 10:01, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Anything that casts doubt on Wikipedia's twisted adoration of Saint Andrea, Bullzeye, must go. That's how this one works. Mare Nostrum 12:10, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Credibility and account of her own life

I came up with an analogy that I believe is relevant to the article's presentation of Andrea Dworkin's life. Although I totally agree that wikipedia should take the person at face value on the events of their own life, in this case I believe there are enough documented criticisms of her truthfulness (Paglia, et all) that there should be at least some mention of her reliability at the start of the article. This has been a recurring theme of the talk on Andrea Dworkin and many editors seem to share the view that there should be some critical views on her account of her own life.

For me the analogy is:

Idi Amin claimed to be the Last King of Scotland. He, no doubt, personally believed this to be true. If asked to give an account of his life he would definitely describe how he became the last king of scotland, however, many other sources do not accept this claim. The problem with THIS ARTICLE is that it presents the above information like this:

  "Idi Amin was the last king of scotland. He became the last king of scotland in year X when seized control of the government of Uganda."

when the information should be presented like this:

  "Idi Amin seized control of Uganda in year X, after which he claimed that he was now the last king of scotland."

The key difference being the separation of objectively verifiable facts and unfalsifiable claims. This separation SHOULD be represented in the Dworkin article, but as it stands the article presents both facts and allegations side by side. I agree with an earlier editor that it is clumsy to add "alleged" or "claimed" to every sentence so I propose that we add a short paragraph just before or after her biography that mentions the fact that many do not find her life history reliable and that the majority of it is self-reported. In this section we would present the view of notable sources that criticize her reliability (i.e. the feminists that criticized her rape accusation) as well as consolidate the criticisms scattered throughout the article. let's discuss before I go ahead and make these changes.

Kaiser187 17:37, 9 February 2007 (UTC)