No, when I'm not ignoring the fact claim you point to when I say that Dworkin’s fact claims tend to be unsupported Fabrications of whatever is convenient for her ideological agenda.
> The sexual revolution dramatically reduced the reciprocal obligations men used to have in connection with sexual activity: i.e. taking care of the resulting kids.
Except that it, well, didn't do that at all. Except maybe in a transitory way, at the height of the sexual revolution, as far as informal social obligations within the subculture at the center of the sexual revolution, but that subculture had almost entirely collapsed as a coherent group and social force by the time Dworkin wrote Right-Wing Women, and is a distant memory today.
There's actually a not insignificant political movement centered around the fact that the increase in women's acceptable (including legally acceptable) choices in recent decades (in part, but not entirely, stemming from the Sexual Revolution) was not matched by a reduction in men's obligations (which the movement sees now as unilateral rather than reciprocal) but instead increased vigor in social and formal/legal enforcement of those obligations.
It's also hilariously ironic that people are resorting to Right-Wing Women as an authority in support of a reversion to the previous degree of support for traditional gender roles for women, quoting bits where she paints the sexual revolution as a false effort at women's liberation foisted upon women by patriarchal elements on the Left, since the central point of Right-Wing Women was describing how Dworkin saw those values as tools of patriarchal enslavement of women and, more to the point (hence the title of the work) female support for such values as a defensive adaptation to patriarchy that reinforces and normalizes their enslavement by it.
At the end of Chapter 2 of Right-Wing Women, Dworkin writes:
---[begin quote]---
Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on- one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.
No, when I'm not ignoring the fact claim you point to when I say that Dworkin’s fact claims tend to be unsupported Fabrications of whatever is convenient for her ideological agenda.
> The sexual revolution dramatically reduced the reciprocal obligations men used to have in connection with sexual activity: i.e. taking care of the resulting kids.
Except that it, well, didn't do that at all. Except maybe in a transitory way, at the height of the sexual revolution, as far as informal social obligations within the subculture at the center of the sexual revolution, but that subculture had almost entirely collapsed as a coherent group and social force by the time Dworkin wrote Right-Wing Women, and is a distant memory today.
There's actually a not insignificant political movement centered around the fact that the increase in women's acceptable (including legally acceptable) choices in recent decades (in part, but not entirely, stemming from the Sexual Revolution) was not matched by a reduction in men's obligations (which the movement sees now as unilateral rather than reciprocal) but instead increased vigor in social and formal/legal enforcement of those obligations.
It's also hilariously ironic that people are resorting to Right-Wing Women as an authority in support of a reversion to the previous degree of support for traditional gender roles for women, quoting bits where she paints the sexual revolution as a false effort at women's liberation foisted upon women by patriarchal elements on the Left, since the central point of Right-Wing Women was describing how Dworkin saw those values as tools of patriarchal enslavement of women and, more to the point (hence the title of the work) female support for such values as a defensive adaptation to patriarchy that reinforces and normalizes their enslavement by it.
At the end of Chapter 2 of Right-Wing Women, Dworkin writes:
---[begin quote]---
Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on- one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.
---[end quote]---