Since you also included Catherine Mackinnon in your diatribes against Andrea Dworkin, I went looking to refresh myself on her thinking. I found a fascinating essay from 1990 that, if I'd read it then, would have probably saved me at least fifteen years of delay in thinking about so many of the things in the orthodoxy of secular-liberalism that have produced a total disaster in the last half century.
The following two paragraphs from "Liberalism And The Death of Feminism" are deeply insightful as to how some of the foremost idols of current culture are far from guaranteeing equality and, in fact, support inequality and privilege and a full range of values of the genuine liberal American tradition, the liberalism of the Suffrage movement, the abolition movement, I would argue, as well, the labor movement.
These things are far from easy, there are no bright lines and the use of words to mean not only different things but things whose difference is revealed in producing an oppressive difference, something which you would have to be a dishonest wielder of casuistical language to pretend was not the outcome in reality.
What is the difference between the women's movement we had and the one we have now, if it can be called a movement? I think the difference is liberalism. Where feminism was collective, liberalism is individualistic. We have been reduced to that. Where feminism is socially based and critical, liberalism is naturalistic, attributing the product of women's oppression to women's natural sexuality, making it "ours." Where feminism criticizes the ways in which women have been socially determined in an attempt to change that determination, liberalism is voluntaristic, meaning it acts like we have choices that we do not have. Where feminism is based on material reality, liberalism is based on some ideal realm in the head. And where feminism is relentlessly political, about power and powerlessness, the best that can be mustered by this nouveau movement is a watered-down form of moralism: this is good, this is bad, no analysis of power or powerlessness at all. In other words, members of groups, like women, who have no choice but to live life as members of groups are taken as if they are unique individuals. Their social characteristics are then reduced to natural characteristics. Preclusion of choices becomes expression of free will. Material reality is turned into ideas about reality. And concrete positions of power and powerlessness are transformed into mere relative value judgments about which reasonable people can form different but equally valid preferences. Women's experience of abuse becomes a "point of view."
The way this gets itself up in law is as gender neutrality, consent, privacy, and speech. Gender neutrality means that you cannot take gender into account, you cannot recognize, as we once knew we had to, that neutrality enforces a non-neutral status quo. Consent means that whatever you are forced to do is attributed to your free will. Privacy protects the sphere of women's intimate oppression. Speech protects sexual violence against women and sexual use of women because they are male forms of self-expression. Under the First Amendment, only those who already have speech have protected speech. Women are more likely to be men's speech. No one who does not already have these rights guaranteed them socially gets them legally.
This kind of thing which, in 1990 Mackinnon discerned in terms of how such presumed civic virtues were used against women including by pseudo-"feminists" like those who supported pornography and pimps by claiming that the women involved in porn did so in an abstract, non-existent real world which coerced their involvement, at best, permitted their sexual enslavement, not at all uncommonly. The myth that the sex industry was creating "sex work" is a lie that affluent people who have no reason to expect that anyone in their family will "go into that line of work" tell each other. It has aided the explosion of sexual enslavement of impoverished and underclass women, children and men. The same ideas in the form of "rational choice" are useful to the oligarchs in their decades long program of destroying workers rights ("right to work") and the exploitation of overt forms of slavery in other countries. Affluent, secular-liberals even those who are supposedly supportive of equal rights either weaken the struggle for equality or leave it entirely over such secular ersatz virtues.
The subsequent events of the last 29 years have shown how prescient these ideas are. "Free speech" which is supposedly the great gurantee of "it not happening here" of becoming a rallying cry of neo-Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, racists, "choice" in so many ways becoming a slogan to cover a myriad of abuses from employers by making claims of "agency" and so may liberalish, though really libertarian notions that would only work if you presupposed an equality that isn't there and, if those using those slogans have their way, never will be, those very words used to deny the existence of inequality. The very ideas which should only ever have been seen as tools for the promotion of equality, elevated into standing as autonomous idols unconnected with that goal are even more useful to prevent equality.
Mackinnon's observation of how how things presented as "social characteristics are then reduced to natural characteristics" is the same phenomenon that Marilynne Robinson noted in which entirely artificial entities were treated as atavistic phenomena. I would say that habit is one of the byproducts of the casual scientism that is a result of modernism. I don't know if Mackinnon would endorse my conclusion but I think this is what happens when you create abstract, material gods as a replacement for God, something which even the most hostile to religion do, continually.
A lot of the things that Mackinnon discussed in that essay, applied to different problems that are the concerns of a real American liberalism that takes the lives and rights of real people as more important than academic and legalistic abstractions can enlighten so many seemingly incomprehensible puzzles. When you lose your fear of looking hard and critically at the idols of post-war liberalism, especially noticing when words can mean different and opposite things and, divorced from their legitimate higher goal, these necessities of equality and democracy and a decent life for all used to attack all of those.
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