Update + Two Very Different Books and Why I'm Hemming and Hawing at Both of Them

Now, in typical Grace fashion, I started reading Androids and then stopped, but still am kind of reading it, but read another book instead and am now reading two other books. I really need to learn how to not multi-read.

The two very different books in question are Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. They are both quite titular aren't they? Straight to the point.

But Here's Why I Can't Buy Either of Them for the Same Reason:

Let's start with Dworkin. Feminism is important but doesn't really interest me. I've been arguing about it quite a lot lately, particularly the politics of sex and rape. *sigh* It's a big issue, one I don't feel like reiterating here, but essentially I am baffled by the common and so-called feminist notion that 1) rape is worse than murder, and 2) all sex is rape to some degree. The former places sexual fidelity over life itself (would you like to ask some one who was raped if they'd rather be dead?) and the latter both strips power of consent from women and belittles the gravity of actual rape.

Intercourse argues, well, it's so incomprehensible it's hard to find a well-structured argument anywhere, but I'm told that it argues that gender politics are inherent in the bedroom, and that the nature of sex itself is intrinsically unequal. The last sentence of the back cover summary reads Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?

Blech. Maybe there was a time when this kind of feminism was important and relevant. They had to be on the offense. But I do not, and never have in my life, felt lesser than a man, societally or individually. Fight the power? I am the power. If I were to meet institutional inequality I would treat it with incredulity, not anger. Their system demands equality, my system expects it as a given. Their system makes the chauvinist man the "power", mine makes him the village idiot. I know that my sort of rationale isn't systemic yet, but can't we all agree that it's ideal? And if I feel this way, after all the fighting women have done for exactly these rights, if I feel no disadvantage as a woman, should I really be told that I am brainwashed? Licked? Accepting of male hegemony? No. Women like me should multiply and prosper, but this societal pocket that goes by the name of feminism seems oddly intent on the prevention of such.

Dworkin writes, with utter seriousness:

"... Tolstoy's repulsion for women as such is not modern either. Now this repulsion is literal and linear; directed especially against her genitals, also her breasts, also her mouth newly perceived as a sex organ. It is a goose-stepping hatred of cunt. The woman has no human dimension, no human meaning. The repulsion requires no explanation, no rationalization. She has no internal life, no human resonance; she needs no human interpretation. Her flesh is hated; she is without more. The hatred is by rote, with no human individuation, no highfalutin philosophy or pedestrian emotional ambivalence. The repulsion is self-evidently justified by the physical nature of the thing itself; the repulsion inheres in what the thing is. For the male, the repulsion is sexually intense, genitally focused, sexually solipsistic, without any critical or moral self-consciousness. Photograph what she is, paint it pink; the camera delivers her up as a dead thing; the picture is of a corpse , embalmed. The contemporary novelist does it with words: paints the thing, fucks it, kills it."

Why do I get the feeling that's it's Dworkin who hates women? A self-hating woman, perhaps? It should be noted that while she's spent the first several chapters analyzing misogynistic works of fiction, for all her pronouncements of the modern condition she offers up not one persuasive point, not one survey or shred of evidence.

Maybe it reaches that point later in the book, but I realized with horror that she was starting with this. I'm sorry, Dworkin, but if you think that societal "hatred of cunt" is a given, then we've got problems. I'm happy, eager even, to read arguments for positions I don't agree with, but you have to make me accept your premise first, or at least accept the rationale. I'm a bit scared to see where she progresses, if this is what she assumes at the outset.

I started reading C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity and found a similar problem. Read on:

"Book One: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe
Chapter One: The Law of Human Nature.

Everyone has heard people quarrelling. Something it sounds funny and something it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things the say. they say things like this: "How'd you like it if anything did the same to you?" - "That's my seat, I was there first" - "Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm" - "Why should you shove in first?" - "Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine" - "Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day. Educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about."

Lewis goes on to a few other anecdotes, some true, some not, but I've already stopped. I know what he's getting at. He's trying to cleverly reveal God as the source of our universal moral standard. First, the moral standard isn't as universal as everyone seems to think. Second, though I believe in a god of sorts, I think that morality as arriving from God is a load of baloney. I'm a strong believer in Hobbes and the Social Contract. It makes sense to me; there are no gaps here.

I like Lewis, and I like British brainiacs, but I don't like when very disputable and alternatively explicable things are presented to me as persuasion.

The difference is that I think there's hope for Lewis, so I'll keep reading. Eventually he'll get over his little moral standard and talk about something else. Dworkin, I'm not sure she'll ever get over her victimhood. I wish she would make one lick of sense so I could keep reading.

That's all for now.