welcome to the fest

The Church of Porn in Sinfest was inspired by Andrea Dworkin's analysis of pornography. Excerpt from her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women:

"In Pornography, men express the tenets of their unchanging faith, what they must believe is true of women and of themselves to sustain themselves as they are, to ward off recognition that a commitment to masculinity is a double-edged commitment to both suicide and genocide. In life, the objects are fighting back, rebelling, demanding that every breath be reckoned with as the breath of a living person, not a viper trapped under a rock, but an authentic, willful, living being. In pornography, the object is slut, sticking daggers up her vagina and smiling. A bible piling up its code for centuries, a secret corpus gone public, a private corpus gone political, pornography is the male's sacred stronghold, a monastic retreat for manhood on the verge of its own destruction. As one goes through the pictures of the tortured and maimed, reads the stories of gang rape and bondage, what emerges most clearly is a portrait of men who need to believe in their own absolute, unchangeable, omnipresent, eternal, limitless power over others. Every image reveals not the so-called object in it but the man who needs it: to keep his prick big when every bomb dwarfs it; to keep his sense of masculine self intact when the world of his own creation has made that masculine self a useless and rather silly anachronism; to keep women the enemy even though men will destroy him and he by being faithful to them will be responsible for that destruction; to sustain his belief in the righteousness of his real abuses of women when, in fact, they would be insupportable and unbearable if he dared to experience them as what they are--the bullying brutalities of a coward too afraid of other men to betray or abandon them. Pornography is the holy corpus of men who would rather die than change."

Hm. Well cool - always neat to see what inspires your work. Thank you for sharing.

Dworkin is an inspiration, I won't deny that. She also held some good views with regards to the trans community, as evidenced by her own words

We are, clearly, a multi-sexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.....every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.

An awesome take on Dworkin's writing! Thank you for sharing!

hey tat, top notch artistic interpretation ^^

Z6IIAB wrote:

May wrote:Dworkin is an inspiration, I won't deny that. She also held some good views with regards to the trans community, as evidenced by her own words

.....every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.

It's not on the original paper by Judith Grant, and I'm sure Andrea Dworkin didn't wrote that. You filthy liar, lol.

While I don't approve of people coming here just to stir up the pot, I do want to set the record straight that Andrea Dworkin did write that.

https://books.google.ca/books?redir_esc ... +functions

As a side note, if you are wondering why people don't reply back to you after you reply to their controversial opinions or troll posts, it's because they're already banned by the time you first reply to them. The forum could really use a feature to know when a ban happens or who is and isn't banned.

A couple of things about the Dworkin quote...

First, "Women Hating", where that quote was written, was published in 1974. Long, long before the current Trans Ideology emerged. I don't know how she would feel or respond to the Identity Politics that we're facing today. It's certainly woman hating on an entirely different level.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly... does this quote matter? I am not a fan of letting perfect be the enemy of good. Any number of people I support or respect have opinions I don't agree with. I have yet to find an author or speaker I can agree with 100%.

That doesn't change the fact that Dworkin's perspective and radical feminist writings are incredible. So valuable. Sometimes prophetic...

I'm no Dworkin scholar, people more knowledgeable than me can decide how this fits in with the rest of her work. I really just wanted to clear up the misconception that the quote was made up.

October wrote:A couple of things about the Dworkin quote...

First, "Women Hating", where that quote was written, was published in 1974. Long, long before the current Trans Ideology emerged. I don't know how she would feel or respond to the Identity Politics that we're facing today. It's certainly woman hating on an entirely different level.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly... does this quote matter? I am not a fan of letting perfect be the enemy of good. Any number of people I support or respect have opinions I don't agree with. I have yet to find an author or speaker I can agree with 100%.

That doesn't change the fact that Dworkin's perspective and radical feminist writings are incredible. So valuable. Sometimes prophetic...

this^

Walkie wrote:

Z6IIAB wrote:

May wrote:Dworkin is an inspiration, I won't deny that. She also held some good views with regards to the trans community, as evidenced by her own words

It's not on the original paper by Judith Grant, and I'm sure Andrea Dworkin didn't wrote that. You filthy liar, lol.

While I don't approve of people coming here just to stir up the pot, I do want to set the record straight that Andrea Dworkin did write that.

https://books.google.ca/books?redir_esc ... +functions

As a side note, if you are wondering why people don't reply back to you after you reply to their controversial opinions or troll posts, it's because they're already banned by the time you first reply to them. The forum could really use a feature to know when a ban happens or who is and isn't banned.

I wasn't wondering and tbf I forgot because I have more to my life going on than this lol
Yeah, despite that, they did glue two things together that didnt really belong together lol. Ofc they were a troll and were banned, \o.

There are two very different groups of men that call themselves women - gay men who doctors/institutions/governments have been "transitioning" into "straight women" for almost a century, and straight men who fetishise "femininity". Dworkin was talking about the former. They are generally not a threat to women - at least to the extent that any gay man is a threat to women (gay men and transsexual men can be misogynists, of course), and that's why radical feminists have not spoken out very strongly against them.

Janice Raymond (The Transsexual Empire) and Bernice Hausman (Changing Sex) are two women who did see transsexualism for what is was: misogyny, essentialising of sexist stereotypes and homophobia. Their works are not against the gay men who were transitioned by their doctors, but against the medical empire which did so. Their works are compassionate towards those men as victims of patriarchal medicalisation, but do not shy away from pointing out the harms that this redefinition of womanhood and the idea that women can be constructed by men does to actual women. (Although Hausman, I think, attributes more responsibility to those men themselves and sees them more as agents of transsexualism rather than mere victims.)

So the works written before the 80s generally only conceptualised transsexualism as something unique to gay men. The current "transgender" movement was created by straight men who are sexually turned on by patriarchal ideas of femininity as submissiveness, or performance (makeup and nail polish, etc), inferiority, etc, when applied to themselves. They transition due to a sexual fetish or paraphilia (transvestic fetishism which becomes autogynephilia) that takes over their lives. Conflating these two groups (gay men who think they're women and straight men who think they're women - for entirely different reasons) leads to confusion. Dworkin was probably unaware of the latter group when she wrote supportive comments of the former group. Sheila Jeffreys' Gender Hurts is an excellent radical feminist critique of the latter group of "transgender" men.

radicalradish wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 30, 2019 10:57 pm

[...] So the works written before the 80s generally only conceptualised transsexualism as something unique to gay men. The current "transgender" movement was created by straight men who are sexually turned on by patriarchal ideas of femininity as submissiveness, or performance (makeup and nail polish, etc), inferiority, etc, when applied to themselves. [...]

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