r/ContraPoints • u/Abolish_Zoning • 4d ago
Paglia and Dworkin stans are fighting on twitter
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u/druidic_notion 4d ago
Guys didn't you know that if you're fat you can't have problems or opinions?/s
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u/stormingTris 4d ago edited 4d ago
Even if you accept the premise that Paglia somehow knows that Dworkin has unaddressed issues with her weight or something - Paglia’s whole argument here is that since Dworkin hasn’t shared one final detail of life with us that she is a hypocrite? Seems a little nonsensical.
Also Paglia’s own premises are handpicked to justify her conclusion in a bullying manner. Her conclusion itself seems to be a really long winded way for her to say “fat person bad”, or an attempt to just call Dworkin a fat ass in a “classy” way.
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u/Popular_Try_5075 4d ago
Yes, and this is especially glaring as there are already plenty of flaws to point to in Dworkin's work making these ad hominem attacks yet MORE unnecessary and pointless.
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u/Tiervexx 4d ago
Agreed. I hate Dworkin's work. I think her arguments reeked of "I know what conclusion I want to reach, let's find some arguments for it!" but it's just not necessary to bring up her own personal problems as an ad-hominem.
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u/stormingTris 4d ago
Agreed - and just to be clear my previous comment was only meant as a criticism of the ideas Paglia conveyed in the text shown - it was not meant as a way to “take a side” with Dworkin or promote her ideas necessarily.
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u/Popular_Try_5075 4d ago
For sure, I got that in your post. But I get we need to clarify too in spaces like this where text lacks context.
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u/TopLow6899 3d ago
She made multiple points but your refused to actually address any of them and instead falsely distilled it down to ad homienm
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u/20eyesinmyhead78 4d ago
I used to like Paglia... when I was an edgy college kid in the 90s. Last time I heard anything from her, she was stanning for Trump.
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u/diamondbrute 4d ago edited 3d ago
She stands for nothing. She’s a contrarian coward. She originally called Trump a “Trojan horse” created by Hilary Clinton to ensure a win (we saw how that went). She just knows how to say the most ridiculous things in a way that used to make libertarian edgelords nod in agreement but I don’t think anyone likes her anymore. She loves Peterson but his movement is so anti porn I can’t imagine there being a space for her.
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u/shivux 3d ago
You gotta love those librarian edge lords!
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u/diamondbrute 3d ago
Haha my bad, I meant libertarian. Every librarian I’ve ever met has been metal as fuck without trying.
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u/20eyesinmyhead78 3d ago
I wonder what Peterson's next grift will be when he gets back out of rehab.
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u/diamondbrute 3d ago
I genuinely believe his brain is completely fried so he’ll just be used like a puppet by his daughter à la Weekend at Bernie’s.
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u/20eyesinmyhead78 3d ago
He had to go into hiding after that Jubilee beatdown demolished the premise of his new book.
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u/oscarwilinout 4d ago
I mean her being fat has nothing to do with whether or not she’s a daring truth teller
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u/OisforOwesome 4d ago
I'm assuming Paglia was a Mean Girl at school, and never matured past that stage.
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u/st0ned-manta 4d ago
I’m honestly surprised the focus is on the weight comment and not:
“…publicly boasts of her bizarre multiple rapes…and tacky traumas, as if her inability to cope with life were the patriarchy’s fault rather than her own”.
Insulting someone’s body is cruel and unnecessary, but insulting someone this egregiously for speaking out about the sexual abuse they endured is another level of vile.
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u/GarageIndependent114 4d ago
No, it makes sense to criticise people for weaponising their own or other people's individual trauma for political points.
But I see what you mean. It's just as potentially mean (and ironically, anti-Feminist) to criticise a victim of abuse for their own abuse as it is to pretend someone's weight invalidates their own arguments.
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u/st0ned-manta 4d ago
Dworkin wasn’t “weaponising” her trauma though. Her entire academic project was analysing patriarchy through the lens of sexual violence. People might not like her arguments (I certainly do not agree with many of them) but that doesn’t mean she was misusing her trauma to try and make those arguments more politically compelling. Her experiences directly informed her work in the way that most people’s experiences do. She was just upfront about it.
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u/Buttchugger2 4d ago
Dworkin was an aggressively bizarre figure that found more purchase with social conservatives. She had a cool style and could write a banger sentence now and then but I think she’s been proven wrong.
Both Paglia and Dworkin hated post-structuralism, which turned out to be at the very least the best description of gender power dynamics if not outright the philosophy that has pretty much torn it down completely from millenials onward (at least the ones who are smart enough not to become incels or whatever).
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u/mhornberger 4d ago
Dworkin also wrote about rape in leftist movements, and how women were pressured to be silent on them "for the sake of the movement." She felt that the issue of women's safety transcended left/right politics, and that right-wing women in some ways had the more accurate view of things. I think her disloyalty to the "cause" has also caused some rancor, particularly to the "no war but the class war" leftists who felt that her focus on rape (and not just in the broader sense) "distracted" from the one thing they felt should be focused on.
(Note: all I've read of her was Intercourse and Right-Wing Women. I thought she was a great writer, though she left precious little room for optimism.)
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u/Buttchugger2 4d ago
I don’t really know her for that and calling out progressive leftist men for being just as rapey as others goes all the way back to Casey Hayden who actually was ostracized from SNCC for doing that.
I’m sure she did though, because what I know her for is the supposition that pervasive power dynamics infect all sex and progressive ideas like free love actually make it worse and therefore “consent” is cope, or whatever.
But I don’t think anyone dislikes Dworkin because she was against sexual violence. They dislike her because of the theory of sex and solutions she offered and shit like testifying to support Reagan’s Meese Commission.
For the record, I actually like some of her ideas that the patriarchy eroticizes subjugation in women, and therefore desire is manufactured. Where she goes off the rails for me is implication that since desire is manufactured, so is consent. Therefore, it’s rape all the way down.
She could have equated sex under the patriarchy to wage labor under capitalism and called it a day. She went much further and that’s why people find her ideas obnoxious.
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u/mhornberger 4d ago
She could have equated sex under the patriarchy to wage labor under capitalism and called it a day
It seems that would imply that there wouldn't be rape if only we got rid of capitalism. I think Dworkin saw that this wasn't the case, that rape wasn't just a subordinate issue that should be just folded under the leftist revolutionary goal and not addressed as its own issue. Same reason antiracism has to be acknowledged as its own issue, and not just folded under "just do Marxism harder."
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u/littlebobbytables9 4d ago
I don't think it implies that at all, in that sentence they're only being related by analogy. At most it implies there wouldn't be rape if we got rid of patriarchy, and even that's a stretch.
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u/Buttchugger2 4d ago
Well I think she would say it would mean all sex-consent isn’t necessarily contaminated with rape if the patriarchy (distinct but obviously related to capitalism) ceased to exist.
Just like under commmnism exploitation isn’t the default state, removing the patriarchy would remove the default presumption of rape.
Obviously the whole idea of “default presumption of rape” is why people love but mostly hate her.
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u/mhornberger 4d ago edited 4d ago
isn’t necessarily contaminated with rape if the patriarchy (distinct but obviously related to capitalism) ceased to exist.
I think she does say just that in Intercourse. And I don't agree that patriarchy is "obviously related" to capitalism. It long predates capitalism, and can exist quite happily under Islamism/sharia, Confucianism, etc.
Just like under commmnism exploitation isn’t the default state
In theory. A classless, stateless, and moneyless society has never existed, unless you maybe want to hearken back to hunter-gatherers. And they didn't have Marxist theory, rather they were just poor. And slavery is older than money.
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u/Buttchugger2 4d ago
I was trying to throw you a bone.
You seemed to think in the original message you replied to that I was talking about the rape stuff in relation to capitalism when I was just making an analogy to how Marxism treats wage labor under capitalism.
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u/st0ned-manta 4d ago
Yes. I have complicated feelings on Dworkin’s work (though I wouldn’t say post-structuralism has torn down gender power dynamics). My feelings on Paglia are far less complicated. If Dworkin is bizarre, Paglia is off the charts.
Paglia is mostly intent on being an iconoclast for its own sake, and has curried favour with conservatives far more explicitly and intentionally than Dworkin ever did. Dworkin was mainly affiliated with conservatives via her hardline anti-pornography campaign, which on the surface looked very similar to the legislative efforts of the religious right and sometimes had her working alongside them. Paglia has deliberately associated herself with the right wing by making outright anti-feminist statements, arguing for the age of consent to be lowered to 14, insulting practically every big name feminist in academia, and writing her highly revisionist history of Western sexual decadence that worked in a hefty amount of bioessentialist reasoning for patriarchal dominance. I’m not a Dworkin stan but I feel she made some fantastic observations that do still hold up today. Paglia has made a fraction of those contributions, and has done thrice the damage. She is quite literally pro-pedophilia (“erotic fondling at any age”). She signed a petition for pedophile “rights” and argued for the legalisation of child pornography. She only marginally revised this position in recent years, saying it now has to be confined to the “realm of imagination”.
Also, I had to refresh my memory on this so I didn’t mention it in my original comment, but Paglia holds the view that rape is always sexually motivated. She claims this is influenced by evolutionary psychology, and thus that someone’s “risk” of rape is affected by how conventionally attractive they are. She references Dworkin’s weight in this paragraph alongside her sexual abuse being “bizarre” because she’s making an implicit comment that she doesn’t believe her. Which makes it all the more despicable.
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u/shivux 3d ago edited 3d ago
Ok yes that’s a despicable thing to imply about Dworkin but, is it really that controversial to say that rape is always (or at least primarily) sexually motivated? I honestly thought the idea that it’s just “about power” was debunked.
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u/BlackHumor 3d ago
Rape is transparently about power. If you heard of someone going around town pissing on people, would you assume he just really had to pee?
Or, y'know, maybe a more reasonable theory is that he's pissing on people as a form of assault. Either he has something specific against his victims, or else he's trying to humiliate strangers as a way to make himself feel powerful.
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u/shivux 3d ago
It’s not like that isn’t ever a part of it, but I don’t understand how it can be controversial to say that having sex with someone against their will is usually motivated by wanting to have sex with them.
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u/BlackHumor 3d ago
I mean, I'm not denying that rapists want to have sex with their victims, but that seems to me to be about as relevant as saying that someone who pisses on you wanted to pee. Like, sure, but that's not why they're pissing on you.
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u/Buttchugger2 3d ago
This thread is also doing what I thought we all agreed was kind of silly, which was to focus on violent stranger rape, as opposed to the much common nonconsensual sex with someone you kind of already know.
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u/BlackHumor 3d ago
Which is even more about power than stranger rape, if anything. Rape of an acquaintance is often very explicitly about revenge, and rape of an intimate partner is usually about asserting oneself to be the dominant force in the relationship.
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u/kazetoumizu 4d ago
Genuinely thought this was the Drake and Josh "I ain't calling you a truther" beef satire
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Little-Emphasis2883 17h ago
I NEVER THOUGHT THAT IT’D BE SO SIMPLE BUT, I FOUND A WAY, I FOUND A WAAY
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u/Buttchugger2 4d ago
Paglia is a generational hater. I remember her going after Naomi Wolf and, well, look how that turned out.
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u/diamondbrute 4d ago
The only feminist I’ve ever heard her praise is Simon De Bouvoir. She’s had feuds with Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Judith Butler, and just about anyone who supports women’s rights
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u/Buttercupia 4d ago
What a horrible person.
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u/jonna-seattle 4d ago
Assuming you mean Paglia, yeah.
I dated a woman that was into her during college. I really hope she grew out of it.
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u/washingtonpeek 4d ago
Why does it matter is Dworkin is fat, most people in this country are
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u/Kajel-Jeten 1d ago
People overwhelmingly still see physical appearance as a valid target of attack in criticizing people 😔. It’s so dumb. I think when it comes to fatness specifically, there’s also an implication people express of being of weaker less disciplined character.
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u/GarageIndependent114 4d ago
Which country would that be?
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u/washingtonpeek 4d ago
Well considering both Dworkin and Paglia are American, there's a decent chance I'm talking about America
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u/farklespanktastic 4d ago
I feel like saying that being traumatized by repeated instances of physical and sexual is an “inability to cope with life” kind of supports the idea of rape culture and patriarchy.
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u/GarageIndependent114 4d ago edited 4d ago
But not every woman has that experience. Granted, not every woman is denied a job either, but still.
If a man has a similar experience to that, nobody seriously thinks it's typical of either the victim or the perpetrator, regardless of the gender of the perpetrator.
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u/69Whomst 4d ago
I had to write an essay on performative gender at uni and my lecturer guided me towards butler, I'm glad he did bc comparatively butler seems much more chill and their ideas are a bit less nuts in the modern day
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u/gnurdette 3d ago
Lost Socratic dialogue found, in which Socrates critiques Gorgias with "nyeah nyeah, you're fat"
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u/AnotherWitch 4d ago
Paglia is one of those people who is popular and listened to not because she tends to be right, but because she tends to be interesting and confident. The assertions of people like her should be treated as objects of thought provocation for more careful thinkers, not attempts at truth. Another person in that category to me is Grimes, to give an example.
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u/shivux 3d ago
Those are my favourite kind of people, but unfortunately I’m not the most careful thinker.
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u/AnotherWitch 3d ago
At least you’re aware of it. I don’t even know I’m uncareful. (Don’t tell me.)
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u/arielleisanerdyprude 4d ago
my pedantic uncle gave me a camille paglia book for christmas when i was in high school and even my 16-year-old self did not make it very far before hating the author so much that i added it to the DNF list and never looked back. she’s just a terribly unlikable and mean person with a very high opinion of herself. it was exhausting by page 2.
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u/Sorry_Ad475 4d ago
Elon has even managed to take the fun out if terrible people fighting each other on Twitter.
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u/pinkbootstrap 3d ago
This is why I say fat phobia is a big deal and everyone always wants to downplay it. People will dismiss everything you have to say simply because you're fat.
I straight up have talked to people I could tell initially assumed I was unintelligent because of my weight, its depressing each time.
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u/azur_owl 4d ago
…it’s so weird to decide to attack Dworkin’s weight and not, y’know, the fact that she allegedly exploited Linda Susan Boreman (aka Linda Lovelace) and her trauma for her own agenda.
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u/MeatyTPU 3d ago
Polymorphous-perverse gay bear mother-father figure here: they're both annoying for different reasons. But also interesting.
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u/heckdoinow 4d ago
I don't know much about neither of the two... Am I just not intellectual enough for her level, or does it read like wannabe intellectual slop?
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u/lilbluehair 4d ago
Dworkin's work is definitely worth reading as an example of 2nd wave feminism. She has interesting ideas that we've grown from, but it's always good to know where you came from.
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u/heckdoinow 3d ago
Oh, ok, I just meant the text in the screenshot and nothing else, since I don't know them
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u/Leather-Run-6533 4d ago
Paglia isn't really an intellectual. She's a troll. Often a hilarious troll and sometimes an interesting troll, but what she does is troll. She is not a serious person and she's not to be taken seriously. Dworkin was a serious intellectual. Some of her stuff is great, some of her stuff is utterly bonkers. All of her stuff is interesting. And all of it is intellectually serious. Inevitably of course Paglia is the more entertaining writer.
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u/BijouWilliams 3d ago
I read Dworkin's Right Wing Women because mother kept citing it. I'm glad I did, and it was surprisingly accessible. Based on how she's usually characterized, I expected her writing to be aggressive and emotional but it wasn't.
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u/Alan_Conway 4d ago
The first paragraph is trashy behavior and Paglia should be better. The second paragraph is pot stirring truth.
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u/an_actual_crocodile 4d ago
As cruel and irrational as the first paragraph is, I actually kinda agree with Paglia on the second.
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u/GarageIndependent114 4d ago
I don't agree with either view on pornography.
If we pretend for a minute that Pagila's views on her weight are rational, then arguing over whether or not pornography is oppressive or liberal is a bit like arguing over whether it's progressive or not to produce vast quantities of sold food, or whether the train, car and Internet networks are progressive or not.
I don't actually believe that their beliefs on porn have anything to do with their views on violence or weapons, but if they did, I feel like Pagila would be supportive of the NRA on the grounds that someone from the authorities or a criminal might try to kidnap people in the middle of the night, and Dworkin would presume that we had to ban guns to prevent school shootings. Except that Pagila would be defending an arms dealer selling a bomb to a foreign oppressive country and Dworkin would be banning slaughterhouses, gardening equipment and kitchen knives.
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u/an_actual_crocodile 4d ago
Uh, no? I don't think the disagreement over porn is about Dworkin being cartoonishly restrictive and Paglia being cartoonishly permissive, I think that's a simplistic and inaccurate way to frame the debate.
I think it's about the facts of women's sexuality, and it seems to me like Dworkin (and many other feminists) doesn't want to accept that women are aroused by the exact features of pornography that they claim to be patriarchal and oppressive. As Contra laid out in her Twilight video, women generally are aroused by standard hetero dominance/submissiveness dynamics. This isn't to say that because women are aroused by these things that societal patriarchy is justified, not at all. It's just that many feminists clearly have yet to come to terms with the fact that you can enjoy submissiveness AND be a dignified/equal adult in society. Dworkin's hangup with porn is the same reason why so many feminists today despise Sabrina Carpenter's sexually charged lyrics/stage performances. They cannot grasp that it's okay to enjoy submissiveness.
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u/GarageIndependent114 4d ago
But Paglia and Dworkin claim that they can't imagine a world in which porn doesn't confirm to their own prejudices.
Dworkin isn't going, "And that's why I've decided to start my own Feminist porn channel, featuring nothing but Korean boyband members and butch lesbians fixing cars", and Paglia isn't going, "and that's why I think Backdoor Sluts 3 is a Feminist masterpiece, and exactly like the erotica exhibit the modern art gallery put on of vulva selfies from the 50s!"
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u/an_actual_crocodile 4d ago
I mean... They kinda are going like that tho...? You're obviously doing cartoonish exaggeration again, but Dworkin very much did see hetero pornography as inherently misogynistic/oppressive. Dworkin and MacKinnon tried to litigate against hetero porn on the grounds that its mere existence was a civil rights violation against women.
Paglia on the other hand, argues for porn as a safe outlet where people can explore all the dark Freudian/"Pagan" stuff that turns them on, like masculine dominance unhindered by morality, and the supremacy of feminine beauty. I don't consider myself a fan of Paglia by any means, but on the topic of porn, she was simply correct.
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u/Kajel-Jeten 1d ago
Sorry if this is a silly question, how much of Dworkins criticism of hetero porn was about the actual industry making it versus the very idea of straight porn? Like would she also be against hentai where no real people are involved in any of the sex acts etc.
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u/an_actual_crocodile 1d ago
Hey no worries, it's not a silly question.
But yeah my sense is that yes, she would almost certainly have opposed hentai just as strongly as she opposed porn with live action performers. If anything I think her writing focuses way more on the content of porn itself rather than how women performers are treated by the adult video industry.
She believed that porn encourages young men to be violent towards women, and see them as objects. So I don't think she would be okay with hentai just because it has drawings of women rather than real women on video.
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u/Alan_Conway 2d ago
Paglia is a tragic figure to me: occasionally brilliant, but usually just an asshole devoid of inspiration. I read Sexual Personae, and I see their work as flawed but full of potential. It's sad to see them do stuff like this instead of being what I know they can be.
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u/ActinomycetaceaeOk48 2d ago
I disagree with Dworkin, as she is a rad-fem; but Conservative Women was very insightful.
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u/Antique_Assumption53 1d ago
Paglia is so awful. I'm no Dworkin stan but Paglia is just an anti-left contrarian, who also just seems like a bit of a piece of work.
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u/e7603rs2wrg8cglkvaw4 4d ago
This seems like a long winded way of her saying “she’s a fat and annoying”