By Alexandra Brodsky • @azbrodsky • 2 weeks ago

Blast from the Past: Debunking the “all sex is rape” quote (again)

Image via Hark! A Vagrant

Remember that whole thing about how all hetero sex is rape? Right, me too. Misogynists love playing straw feminist, and one of their most successful campaigns has been falsely attributing the quote that “all sex is rape” to Catharine MacKinnon and/or Andrea Dworkin. The lie is a deeply untrue and unfair reading of those scholars’ works, and is still used today as an unsophisticated response feminist arguments. “I don’t care about anything you say because feminists think all sex is rape!” Just this week, a professor at my school rejected sexual autonomy standards in the New York Times in part because, in his telling, “extreme” feminists like MacKinnon think heterosexual rape and sex are nearly indistinguishable. The Times has, it is worth noting, made — and corrected — this mistake before.

These writers turn feminist thinkers into props, a special academic form of objectification. They also ignore the texts these writers have produced and the extensively documented etymology of this lie. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the vicious myth started with Rush Limbaugh, nor should we be surprised that anti-feminists would rather grapple with fake criticism than the actual ideas of actual scholars. But we should expect more of our trusted publications.

Alexandra Brodsky

New Haven, CT

Alexandra Brodsky is an editor at Feministing.com, student at Yale Law School, and founding co-director of Know Your IX, a national legal education campaign against campus gender-based violence. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, and NPR. Through Know Your IX, she has organized with students across the country to build campuses free from discrimination and violence, developed federal policy on Title IX enforcement, and has testified at the Senate. At Yale Law, Alexandra focuses on antidiscrimination law and is a member of the Veterans Legal Services Clinic. Alexandra is committed to developing and strengthening responses to gender-based violence outside the criminal justice system through writing, organizing, and the law. Keep an eye out for The Feminist Utopia Project, co-edited by Alexandra and forthcoming from the Feminist Press (2015).

Alexandra Brodsky is an editor at Feministing.com, student at Yale Law School, and founding co-director of Know Your IX.

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TefExpat

Is this Damage Control Friday?
erica

Really Andrea Dworkin is some ‘great feminist’? Wow. I expected more from your web site. Gross.
- dragon847
  
  Weird how no one actually said this.
chiosso

ahhhhhh, thanks for this! someone in a heinous fb argument I’m currently in JUST used an image full of quotes like this to “prove” why feminism is NO GOOD. gross.
Chris

Expecting any extremist to even be capable of respecting the other side is highly unlikely. I thought academic publications would discard extremist blathering. I guess I was wrong.
Mr. S

There are some radicals who do subscribe to this notion, though:
http://witchwind.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/piv-is-always-rape-ok/

Granted, these women are not scholars and are certainly on the fringe, but they do exist and can be vocal. They give easy fodder to anti-feminists looking to poison the well… I’m always interested to see how extremists on one side of a debate inevitably help their opponents more than their perceived allies.
- ellid
  
  I saw a blog post by a group like this a couple of years ago. Could not believe what I was seeing, and no, they were not joking.
Brittany Jackson

Can you offer the direct quote/idea/concept form those scholars (Catharine MacKinnon and/or Andrea Dworkin) that these publishers are misquoting? I’ve seen a few over-zealous feminists claim that POV sex is rape. I think that level-headed feminists need to distance themselves from radicals who think that hetrosexual love is wrong. Instead of pretending that those feminists don’t exist, we need to disown them and tell those people making the ‘straw-man’ argument that it’s not important to listen to insanity when there are actual problems to discuss. It would also be nice to get a support group going for the feminists that think hetero-love is rape (and other antisocial beliefs) because that kind of hatred is just sad and I’m sure that something truly horrid happened to them to make them think that way.
- Victoria
  
  I’m less familiar with Dworkin, but in several of her essays MacKinnon talks about power dynamics and sexual coercion, the central idea being that there is a full spectrum of manipulative behaviors that we accept without question and we try to separate that from rape and act like the two are unrelated when they are not. She talks about how the law is written from a male perspective in which only the most heinous violation is rape, and yet there are a lot of women look back on situations where they really had no choice but to have sex (because they know he’ll be violent otherwise, because she’s financially dependent upon him and there will be repercussions if she says no, because he’s her boss and he’s made clear that this is part of the job and if she doesn’t do it she’s fired) and they felt extremely violated that don’t fit the script which is made by men. She also says that in a society that gives men disproportionate power we have to be very careful about consent because that power relationship is always present. It’s not saying that women can never consent to hetero sex, but that in sex/relationships that follow the traditional patriarchal/compulsory heterosexual script that power dynamic is at least somewhat at play. It doesn’t mean that consent cannot happen, but it does mean that men need to be aware of the fact that they could be taken the power privilege gives them into the bedroom. Honestly, I do think some part of the misunderstanding is the fact that she is writing for a specific academic audience. However that does not make up for the fact that her writing has deliberately been misconstrued.
  - madmeuf
    
    great summary
- Longwalker
  
  Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
  -Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood (1976)
  
  I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together.
  -Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood (1976)
  
  Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of contempt for women’s bodies.
  -Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (1987)
  
  Violation is a synonym for intercourse.
  -Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (1987)
  
  That being said, she really did make some brilliant contributions to feminism. Her insight on coersive social structures, and the pervasive rape and exploitation of sex workers is still relevant today. She may be a racist hateful TERF who set feminism back a quarter century, but there are gems in her writing that should not be discarded. One must seperate the wheat from the chaff.
  - Blue Orion
    
    She is someone that one has to read in the context of her time period. Most of her stuff is irrelevant and even hateful (like you pointed out, she was a TERF) today, but she was one of the few people at the time to take apart the pornography of the time and how it fit into solely a male’s model of sexuality.
Peter Sattler

Those who cite Dworkin would probably turn to passages like this, from INTERCOURSE: “Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more. . . . Can intercourse exist without the woman herself turning herself into a thing, which she must do because men cannot fuck equals and men must fuck? . . . To become the object, she takes herself and transforms herself into a thing: all freedoms are diminished and she is caged, even in the cage docile, sometimes physically maimed, movement is limited: she physically becomes the thing he wants to fuck. . . . Whatever intercourse is, it is not freedom; and if it cannot exist without objectification, it never will be. Instead occupied women will be collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority; calling intercourse freedom.”
Fraga123

Andrea Dworkin was a brave Rebel who paved the way for today’s Wymyn Warriors.