Worse Than You Can Imagine

It's a long read, but if you can stomach contemplating a soul that was obscene to the core, blogger Robert Stacy McCain has written an extensive piece, with numerous quotes, on Andrea Dworkin (via Instapundit). Here's a small sample:

Those are the final words of Andrea Dworkin's most famous book, published in 1987, barely a dozen years after Dworkin's first book had extended carte blanche to child molesters, evidently because in 1974 she viewed pedophiles as feminism's natural allies in "a political action where revolu­tion is the goal," where the destruction of the normal family was an objective requiring the abolition of the incest taboo.

By 1987, the feminist revolution had already done much "to restructure community forms and human consciousness," as promiscuity, divorce, abortion and homosexuality proliferated. But feminists had to exculpate themselves from responsibility for the accompanying plague of other evils -- rape and incest, pornography and prostitution -- that anyone with common sense could have predicted would result from the revolution. Therefore, by the late 1980s, Dworkin needed an elaborate argument to blame all these evils on feminism's scapegoat, the male-dominated society.

Ariel Levy[, in her forward to the twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse ,] could not remind readers that what Andrea Dworkin denounced in 1987 as an atrocity of male "tyranny" was, in fact, a predictable consequence of an ideology Dworkin avowed in 1974.

Although I found McCain's analysis somewhat hit-or-miss, he makes several very good points and, overall correctly indicates that there is a seething antipathy (to put it charitably) for humanity in general and Western civilization in particular in Dworkin's work.

As I said, the above is just a sample of the astonishing depths to which someone can sink in the quest for the unearned which, in Dworkin's case, was in the spiritual realm:

Just as Blanche Du Bois was a type, so also was Andrea Dworkin a type -- the fanatical self-righteous loudmouth type, who never once in her life admitted to any error, any fault or failure. Everybody in the world was always wrong, unless they agreed with her. Here we have a woman whose anger at half the human race was her professional raison d'etre, for whom hatred of men was a litmus test of one's moral worth: If you did not hate men as much as she did, you were her inferior. And because nobody could ever hate men more than Andrea Dworkin did, this meant she was the most moral person on Earth. Conveniently, then, her worldview had the effect of making her better than everybody else, in her own mind.

But what mind? Dworkin's cognitive modus operandi appears to me to be almost entirely arbitrary with the exception of gauging what she could get away with to persuade others to follow her moral code. Her contempt for everyone else is no surprise here, as she hadn't a rational, reality-oriented mind to introspect and so, to begin to form a basis for respect.

Dworkin hated men, but I believe she hated herself and everyone else, too. This contempt comes across in her irrational methods of persuasion, which were wholly geared towards supporting her marching orders. (What else could a moral code even be to an altruist/collectivist?) These included: cherry-picking facts that could plausibly support her assertions, context-dropping, unwarranted generalization, fabrication of "evidence", and outright evasion, as seen above.

It should go without saying that when one encounters anything like this, anything coming from the same source should be greeted with suspicion. But it takes life experience and a degree of mental fastidiousness to see through many of these tricks, especially when woven together with any degree of cohesion. That is the danger Dworkin's ideology represents to the young, whom McCain notes are usually ill-prepared to challenge what she says. It is also the basis of my contention that Dworkin hates herself: If you see humanity as dupes and you spend all your time focused on seeking their admiration/becoming their puppet master, what does that say about you?

I suspect that, on some level, even Andrea Dworkin had a sense of the answer.

-- CAV