So there has been Christmas and Wales and New Year and some parties including togas and running practically naked in the snow and punch with fully seven types of alcohols (a.k.a. 7-Alcy Punch). Standard nights involve bellowing, beer and Zone Horror. I wish the last sentence could have been alliterative but it just wasn't.
Sometimes I think that I really like being in the countryside because when I am there I always read loads and eat loads (I had a 9 course dinner) and have a great time not worrying about the matrices of urban social dependency.
Last night we went out for Secret Santa Dinner and afterwards in the pub there was a group of drunken louts and one said 'Say happy birthday to my friend, it's his birthday' and the little 'WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO CLAIM SPURIOUS AUTHORITY OVER ME/PRESUME THAT I WILL RESPOND TO YOU IN THE WAY THAT YOU WANT' switch triggered, and I predictably refused, and so predictably the situation escalated with various drunken men coming over to make nice before reiterating the demand. It could have been nastier, there was some muttering about feminist dykes (I assumed they were talking about some very intelligent modern geography), but the main problem was in the drawn out length of the whole non-event. Obviously it would have been easier to just say it, so everybody could move on with their lives. But I just can't help analysing these things in terms of social power structures and fuck me if I'm going to concede to a presupposed gendered power dichotomy in the way required. That probably makes me a massive dick.
I have also realised that Andrea Dworkin is in fact AMAZING and massively misrepresented. Her book 'Woman Hating' is pretty much spot on. Simplistically, she links the regulated enforcement of gender roles to traditional fairytale mythology, and advocates replacing this understanding of gender with one informed by androgyne mythologies. And she has some hard-hitting (Daddy would say 'knockabout') stuff about foot-binding and witch burning. And also advocates the destruction of the family, incest and bestiality.
I basically love you Andrea.
Sunday, 3 January 2010
Yes I Make Post Hi (Knights at Danielle's)
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Hi Ray.
ReplyDeleteGood for you for refusing to sing happy birthday!
I too find Andrea Dworkin's work to be amazing and grossly misrepresented. She wasn't advocating incest and bestiality, however, and spoke out about this later in her life, about those sections of Woman Hating. She was not for any sexual exploitation, including of children by adults, of children by children, or of animals by adults. So I just wanted to clarify that point, but you probably already knew that.
Destruction of the family, destruction of incest, and destruction of bestiality, would be closer to her politics, but she was writing back then at a time when incest wasn't discussed and when bestiality was not "a genre" of pornography as it is now. So she was not for those things as we now understand them. She would not likely have found anything good, for example, in John Phillips raping and incesting his daughter MacKenzie.
I think you'd adore Letters From a War Zone, Ray. And Scapegoat. And Intercourse: chapter called Communion (among other sections): amazing!!!!! Let's discuss! The part of a chapter on Joan of Arc... [Julian gasps for breath].
Oh, and nice to meet you. I'm Julian. I have a blog called "A Radical Profeminist". Stop on by any time. And I'll try and do the same.
Oh, and I thought you might like to read these things I wrote a few years ago about Andrea:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.andreadworkin.net/memorial/toandreawithlove.html
and
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/levy/
Cheers!
OMG I LITERALLY LOLD SO MUCH AT THE FEMINIST DYKE PUN. THE WEST ROOM HATES ME RIGHT NOW.
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