The men, of course, are tired. It has been an exhausting period of extermination and devastation, on a scale genuinely new, with new methods, new possibilities. Even when faced with the probable extinction of themselves at their own hand, men refuse to look at the whole, take all the causes and all the effects into account, perceive the intricate connections between the world they make and themselves. They are alienated, they say, from this world of pain and torment; they make romance out of this alienation so as to avoid taking responsibility for what they do and what they are. Male dissociation from life is not new or particularly modern, but the scale and intensity of this disaffection are new. And in the midst of this Brave New World, how comforting and familiar it is to exercise passionate cruelty on women. The old-fashioned values still obtain.

The world may end tomorrow, but tonight there is rape— a kiss, a fuck, a pat on the ass, a fist in the face. In the intimate world of men and women, there is no mid-twentieth century distinct from any other century. There are only the old values, women there for the taking, the means of taking determined by the male. It is ancient and it is modern; it is feudal, capitalist, socialist; it is caveman and astronaut, agricultural and industrial, urban and rural. For men, the right to abuse women is elemental, the first principle, with no beginning unless one is willing to trace origins back to God and with no end plausibly in sight. For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when.

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. Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated, every vile prison or dungeon brought into the bedroom and celebrated, police torture and thug mentality brought into the bedroom and celebrated— men reveal themselves and all that matters to them in these depictions of real history, plasticized and rarefied, represented as the common erotic stuff of male desire. And the pictures and stories lead right back to history— to peoples enslaved, maimed, murdered—because they show that, for men, the history of atrocity they pretend to mourn is coherent and utterly intentional if one views it as rooted in male sexual obsession. Pornography reveals that slavery, bondage, murder, and maiming have been acts suffused with pleasure for those who committed them or who vicariously experienced the power expressed in them. Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. T he private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.

from Dwokin's "Pornography - men posessing wormen"

levoydpage posted:

I'm still confused as to why a vasectomy isn't more popular. iirc they are reversible even. Idk, its hormone free... Why are reproduction issues solely a female responsibility?

your entire scrotum is sore and fragile for about a month after and the reversal doesn't work much of the time. so not too far off taking the pill really

chickeon posted:

Is there anyone misogynists hate more than Dworkin? their own mothers maybe? so good

Solanas probably.

Skylark posted:

Agreed but with a little note in red pen to Solanas that says that there's probably a better target for a bullet than a gay man

this is sort of true but plenty of gay men are still incredibly misogynistic. it drives me up the wall when gay men attempt to casually get away with sexual assault because "they're not into it," apparently it's the assaulter's feelings and intent that matter and it's all just fun and games to grope and intimidate your waitress for laughs.

As we all know, women and children constituted the bulk of the early industrial proletariat. They were the cheapest and most manipulable labour force and could be exploited like no other worker. The capitalists understood well that a woman with children had to accept any wage if she wanted to survive. On the other hand, women were less of a problem for the capitalists than men. Their labour was also cheap because they were no longer organized, unlike the skilled men who had their associations as journeymen and a tradition of organizing from the guilds. Women had been thrown out of these organizations long ago, they had no new organizations and hence no bargaining power. For the capitalists it was, therefore, more profitable and less risky to employ women. With the rise of industrial capitalism and the decline of merchant capitalism (around 1830), the extreme exploitation of women’s and child labour became a problem. Women whose health had been destroyed by overwork and appalling work conditions could not produce healthy children who could become strong workers and soldiers – as was realized after several wars later in the century.

Many of these women did not live in proper ‘families’, but were either unmarried, or had been deserted and lived, worked and moved around with children and young people in gangs (cf. Marx, Capital, vol. I). These women had no particular material interest in producing the next generation of miserable workers for the factories. But they constituted a threat to bourgeois morality with its ideal of the domesticated woman. Therefore, it was also necessary to domesticate the proletarian woman. She had to be made to breed more workers.

Contrary to what Marx thought, the production of children could not be left to the ‘instincts’ of the proletariat, because, as Heinsohn and Knieper point out, the propertyless proletariat had no material interest in the production of children, as children were no insurance in old age, unlike the sons of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, the state had to interfere in the production of people and, through legislation, police measures and the ideological campaign of the churches, the sexual energies of the proletariat had to be channelled into the strait-jacket of the bourgeois family. The proletarian woman had to be housewifized too, in spite of the fact that she could not afford to sit at home and wait for the husband to feed her and her children. Heinsohn and Knieper (1976) analyse this process for nineteenth-century Germany. Their main thesis is that the ‘family’ had to be forced upon the proletariat by police measures, because otherwise the propertyless proletarians would not have produced enough children for the next generation of workers. One of the most important measures – after the criminalization of infanticide which had already taken place – was, therefore, the law which abolished the marriage prohibition for propertyless people. This law was passed by the North German League in 1868. Now proletarians were allowed to marry and have a ‘family’, like the bourgeois. But this was not enough. Sexuality had to be curbed in such a way that it took place within the confines of this family. Therefore, sexual intercourse before marriage and outside it was criminalized. The owners of the means of production were given the necessary police power to watch over the morality of their workers. After the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, a law was passed which made abortion a crime – a law against which the new women’s movement fought, with only small success. The churches, in their cooperation with the state, worked on the souls of the people. What the secular state called a crime, the churches called a sin. The churches had a wider influence than the state because they reached more people, particularly in the countryside (Heinsohn and Knieper, 1976).

In this way the housewifization of women was also forced into the working class. According to Heinsohn and Knieper (1976) and others, the family had never existed among the propertyless farm servants or proletarians; it had to be created by force. This strategy worked because, by that time, women had lost most of their knowledge of contraception and because the state and church had drastically curbed women’s autonomy over their bodies.

The housewifization of women, however, had not only the objective of ensuring that there were enough workers and soldiers for capital and the state. The creation of housework and the housewife as an agent of consumption became a very important strategy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By that time not only had the household been discovered as an important market for a whole range of new gadgets and items, but also scientific home-management had become a new ideology for the further domestication of women. Not only was the housewife called on to reduce the labour power costs, she was also mobilized to use her energies to create new needs. A virtual war for cleanliness and hygiene – a war against dirt, germs, bacteria, and so on – was started in order to create a market for the new products of the chemical industry. Scientific home-making was also advocated as a means of lowering the men’s wage, because the wage would last longer if the housewife used it economically (Ehrenreich and English, 1975).

The process of housewifization of women, however, was not only pushed forward by the bourgeoisie and the state. The working-class movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also made its contribution to this process. The organized working class welcomed the abolition of forced celibacy and marriage restrictions for propertyless workers. One of the demands of the German delegation to the 1863 Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association was the ‘freedom for workers to form a family’. Heinsohn and Knieper (1976) point out that the German working-class organizations, at that time headed by Lassalle, fought rather for the right to have a family than against the forced celibacy of propertyless people. Thus, the liberation from forced celibacy was historically achieved only by subsuming the whole propertyless class under bourgeois marriage and family laws. As bourgeois marriage and family were considered ‘progressive’, the accession of the working class to these standards was considered by most leaders of the working class as a progressive move. The struggles of the workers’ movement for higher wages were often justified, particularly by the skilled workers who constituted the ‘most advanced sections’ of the working class, by the argument that the man’s wage should be sufficient to maintain a family so that his wife could stay at home and look after children and household.