Word: dworkin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brutal feminism. Possibly director Peter Medak, who specializes in Eurotrash artiness, sees the film as an upscale gloss on the gangster genre. Everyone else will observe that in structure and intent it is soft-core porn and, since it is written by a woman, something for Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon to ponder...
...borderless outrage at rape, wife battering, child abuse by men and other enormities produces a kind of capillary effect: a seepage of disgust that merges the proposition "All men are rapists" with "All men are jerks" and makes the two offenses somehow coequal. Andrea Dworkin has simplified the discussion by asserting that every act of sex between a man and a woman, no matter what, is rape. (Some feminists edge nervously away from Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who are the Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan of feminism, extremists who are convenient targets for antifeminists...
Romano insists his opening paragraphs were simply a gambit to make plain the distinction between representations of an act and the act itself. As his review continues, he decides against the rape -- "People simply won't understand" -- but goes on to posit an imaginary reviewer, named Dworkin Hentoff, who likewise decides to rape MacKinnon, with the difference that he follows through. Both Romano and Hentoff are arrested for rape. But wait, Romano protests in his cell, I didn't do it. I just imagined it. Isn't there a difference...
...doesn't always resist the opportunity to court confusion between the two. "Please disavow this rape of me in your name," she asked Nat Hentoff, the syndicated columnist and hard- line defender of the First Amendment, whose last name Romano had borrowed for his fictional reviewer. (The Dworkin part Romano lifted from another First Amendment stalwart, the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin.) Hentoff complied by publishing a column angrily doing just that. "Rape also means plundering or pillaging," he wrote. "Or using brutishness to humiliate someone...
Stanford, Dworkin says, is "one of the more responsive universities," and suggests two reasons for the gradual erosion of identity politics: "It may be hard to sustain interest in an issue for a long time. It may be that the demands have been...