On the incoherence of "erotica" - Andrea Dworkin

>Interviewer: In “Pornography is a Civil Rights Issue”, your 1986 testimony before the Attorney-General’s Commission on Pornography, you discuss a definition of erotica articulated by Gloria Steinem. Do you believe that erotica exists and if so can it serve any kind of useful purpose for women?>Andrea Dworkin: I don’t know if it can exist in this world we live in. I don’t think that much of it does exist. I think that the question itself is part of the male agenda around pornography and that’s what troubles me so much about the question. There are deep political issues involved in discussing what it means to look at something and have a sexual response to it, especially for women. That question is always used to obscure what the political issues are, as if everything has to do with the product and nothing has to do with what drives a person to need the product. In that sense I would characterise it as a male question because the male question always is, is there gonna be something left for me? Part of male sexual response is this voyeurism, this objectification, as opposed to the way that women have practised sexuality, which has had more to do with being with someone who is actually alive, three-dimensional or, if you want to be mystical about it, four-dimensional, in that they also exist in time as well as in space.>When I was working on Pornography, this “feminist” definition of erotica did not exist. In all the discourse about pornography, erotica simply means pornography for intellectuals. That’s all it means. There is no difference in terms of the place of rape in the pornography, in terms of any kind of violence ranging from flagellation to mutilation. It’s strictly a class difference.>Then feminists come along and say, “But we need erotica. We have to be able to say that we like sex. We have to be able to sign our loyalty oath to sexual activity. We have to be able to have these artefacts of sexuality.” And I see that having to do a lot with male identification. In other words, we can be like men.>It seems to me that the great misunderstanding is that those of us in the anti-pornography movement have said we are pure, we have nothing to do with that stuff. We have never said that. None of us has ever said that. We’ve all said that we are fighting pornography because we know what it is. We are fighting for sexual equality because we’ve experienced inequality. We live in this world. We don’t live twelve feet above it. None of us that I have ever heard or seen in my life have made claims of purity, let alone avowals of puritanism. These mischaracterisations have been really just propaganda tools. I see myself as living in this world. I know what sadomasochism is. I know what all those feelings are. I know what all the practices are. I don’t think that I am different or better or above it. What I think is that it has to change and that we do not celebrate our powerlessness and call it freedom.I've harshly criticized Dworkin for many things, including her zionism and her complicity in transphobia. But in an era of "socialist" tolerance for pornography, some of her writings need to be salvaged and read critically. via /r/communism https://ift.tt/2uJZFur