Research Project Part 2Summary 1 [Article Title Goes Here].docx

Research Project Part 2
Summary 1: [Article Title Goes Here]
In this section, I summarize the major argument and findings of
the author(s) from the first article that I reviewed. Required
word count for this section is 400 words.
the author(s) from the second article that I reviewed. Required
the author(s) from the third article that I reviewed. Required
Synthesis
In this section, I weave together the three summaries around a
general theme or point to give the reader a clear take-away
message of these research articles. Required word count for this
section is 300 words.
Works Cited
Works cited are listed here according to APa formatting
guidelines. References are in alphabetical order.
1

Andrea Dworkin and the Social Construction of Gender: A
Retrospective
Author(s): Judith Grant
Source: Signs, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Summer 2006), pp. 967-993
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/500603
Accessed: 29-05-2017 02:13 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars,
researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to
increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected]
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the
Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to
Signs
This content downloaded from 206.224.223.235 on Mon, 29
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 31,
no. 4]
� 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0097-9740/2006/3104-0005$10.00
J u d i t h G r a n t
Andrea Dworkin and the Social Construction of Gender: A
Retrospective
D
econstructions of “Woman,” a second second Bush presidency,
and the
massive destruction of civil liberties that is the post-9/11 world
are
some of the things that make it nearly impossible to believe that
just
over thirty years ago feminists rallied for abortion on demand
and wrote
and spoke without irony about a coming feminist revolution. In
that early
moment, the terms women’s liberation and patriarchy were used
as if they
were unproblematic. In fact, they were part of a radical lexicon
of revo-
lutionary terms bent on renaming, reclaiming, and transforming
the
world. Manifestos with names like “The Myth of the Vaginal
Orgasm”
(Koedt 1973) or “The Bitch Manifesto” (Joreen 1973) were not
written
for tenure committees or as parts of dissertations. Rather, they
had the
passionate rhetorical flourishes characteristic of words intended

to incite.
As theoretically and politically naive as they may now sound,
they spoke
with unmediated authenticity from a place of women’s pain and
anger
that is sometimes made invisible by the jargon and glitz of
much theo-
retically richer and more sophisticated academic prose.
Andrea Dworkin was never accused of being theoretically
sophisticated.
She was a magnificent anachronism. Though not well known in
the early
years of radical feminism, Dworkin became a major figure in
feminist theory,
and she wrote in the spirit of radical feminism until her death
on April 9,
2005. She was a freelance writer, not an academic. She did not
engage in
academic debates but was the subject of more than a few. Some
dismissed
her as a victim feminist, an unreconstructed radical feminist
whose rhetoric
was an embarrassment to a movement now established in
universities, with
members who wrote for prestigious journals and were courted to
publish
with top university presses. Often journalists wrote about her
weight or her
ubiquitous overalls when they could not figure out how to write
about
what she was saying. Andrea Dworkin made people angry.
In fact, Dworkin made me angry. In the 1980s, during the
sexuality
debates, I aligned on the side of those who called themselves

prosex. It was
hard to hear and understand what Dworkin had to say in the din
of all the
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
968 ❙ Grant
shouting back and forth about whether one was prosex, antisex,
or pro-
censorship.1 The fact is, I have been reading and thinking about
Dworkin’s
work ever since I discovered her, as so many others did, in the
early 1980s
during her crusade with Catharine MacKinnon against
pornography. Over
the years, I have found that I simply could not get Dworkin’s
work out of
my head. Her idea that pornography and the sexual trade in
women is a
crucial marker of women’s oppression seems more true to me
now than it
did then. So does her idea that violence and hierarchy are
sexualized. How
could I think otherwise when I saw the pictures from Abu
Ghraib and heard
about the sexualized torture of prisoners there, a sexual torture
that used
the always already eroticized bodies of female soldiers as
weapons? Dworkin
wrote that violence was sexualized and that all sexuality was
based on vi-

olence. This second part is the more troubling part for many
feminists.
How can it be that sexual pleasure, whatever its form, is always
about male
domination and violence? Dworkin devoted her life to
answering this ques-
tion. Feminists had addressed this before, but never by placing
the sex act
itself at the center of their analyses. None had insisted, as
Dworkin did,
that sexual lust as we now know it is inalterably determined in
every one
of its manifestations by male domination—that under conditions
of patri-
archy, sex, gender, and sexuality are always linked with
violence and dom-
ination. I do not write now as a true believer or a fan but as
someone who,
in the end, respects Dworkin as one of the most important
voices of the
second wave. Dworkin deserves a second look.
Many feminist theorists have dismissed Dworkin. Since the
passion of
her work is well known, I will concentrate here on what I
understand to
be the underlying theoretical assumptions in her corpus. Often
read as
the quintessential essentialist, Dworkin can, I will argue, be
read as a social
constructivist. Her work begins from sexuality and gender
rather than
from woman. In that sense, it is more phenomenology than
epistemology.
Dworkin was interested in the structure of consciousness and
began from

an analysis of women’s reality in this structure rather than from
an epis-
temological foundationalism based on women’s experiences.
This helps
to explain why Dworkin did not believe that all female points of
view are
equally valid. The structure she describes is a binary one where
the most
hegemonic forms of masculinity and femininity figure as two
socially con-
structed poles against which all human beings are judged and
into which
we are all socially constructed as male and female. Her
argument is that,
1 The term antisex has been used as a derogatory
characterization of Dworkin and Dworkin-
like feminists. It has its origins in the 1980s in what have been
dubbed the sexuality debates.
See Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson 1983; Assiter and Carol
1993; Segal and McIntosh 1993.
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ 969
while some are captured by this patriarchal structure of
consciousness,
others are resistant to it. Some, feminists and nonfeminists
alike, remain
colonized by patriarchy, supporting and reproducing its main
prop, pa-

triarchal sexuality.
Sadomasochism as framework
For Dworkin, all oppressions are fundamentally linked in that
they exist
within the confines of a binary sex-gender-sexuality system in
which all
humans are divided into male and female and then
hierarchicalized. The
hierarchy is based on a principle of domination, and that
domination is
made to be romantic and sexy. Men and women are acculturated
into the
structure and reproduce it through their daily life practices,
including,
crucially, sexual intercourse. Dworkin’s claim is that gender as
sexualized
domination can be seen most keenly in sexual intercourse
because of its
dependence on the male-female dyad.
Often overlooked is the fact that Dworkin called for the creation
of a
truly human being who moves beyond gender completely. She
writes that
true androgyny is based on multisexual models that go well
beyond bi-
sexuality as we now know it. They suggest scenarios for
building com-
munity and “for realizing the fullest expression of human sexual
possibility
and creativity” (1974, 153). The two strictly separated,
hierarchicalized,
sexualized genders are not the truth of gender. Humans could be
multiple

and shifting but are harshly disciplined into the binary structure
of pa-
triarchy. Dworkin’s analysis is reminiscent of that of
poststructuralists and
deconstructionists. However, she is crucially different in that,
for her, the
way out does not lie in the free play of desire but in political
resistance
grounded in the creation of subjects with feminist consciousness
of the
relationship between sex and violence.
John Stoltenberg, Dworkin’s partner and an underrated feminist
writer
in his own right, has claimed similarly that “if you look at all
the variables
in nature that are said to determine human ‘sex’ you can’t
possibly find
one that will unequivocally split the species into two. . . . Either
human
‘male’ and human ‘female’ actually exist in nature as fixed and
discrete
entities and you can credibly base an entire social and political
system on
those absolute nature categories, or else the variety of human
sexedness is
infinite” (1990, 28). He goes on to quote Dworkin to the effect
that “man”
and “woman” are themselves fictions: “The discovery is, of
course, that
‘man’ and ‘woman’ are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs.
As models
they are reductivist, totalitarian, inappropriate to human
becoming. As roles
they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male
and female

May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
970 ❙ Grant
both” (Dworkin 1974, 174). Dworkin concludes, “We are,
clearly, a multi-
sexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid
continuum
where the elements called male and female are not discrete”
(1974, 183).
For Dworkin, the move away from fixed dualistic gender will
not be reform
but revolution in which the patriarchal man and woman will
both be abol-
ished. It is the gender structure, an ideological construct, not
actual human
beings, that is fixed and binary. Dworkin contends that “the real
core of
the feminist vision, its revolutionary kernel if you will, has to
do with the
abolition of all sex roles—that is, an absolute transformation of
human
sexuality and the institutions derived from it. In this work, no
part of the
male sexual model can possibly apply. Equality within the
framework of the
male sexual model, however that model is reformed or
modified, can only
perpetuate the model itself and the injustice and bondage which
are its
intrinsic consequences” (1976d, 12–13).

Cindy Jenefsky writes correctly that Dworkin’s “notion of
multisex-
uality promote[s] models of human behavior based upon sexual
fluidity
rather than polarization into fixed identities. . . . Anticipating
by almost
twenty years the claims of transgenderism, she argues that polar
biological
delineations drawn between so-called males and females are as
fictive and
arbitrary as the assignation of gender roles” (1998, 40).
Dworkin names the relationship of male-over-female
sadomasochistic.
In the current gender arrangement, sexual pleasure for men and
women,
gay and straight, is dependent on domination and is structurally
repro-
duced through fucking. In this violent and sexualized structure,
men,
masculinity, and the male systematically occupy the position of
the sadist,
while women, femininity, and the female are in the structural
position of
the masochist. She writes, “Our sexual definition is one of
‘masochistic
passivity’: ‘masochistic’ because even men recognize their
systemic sadism
against us; ‘passivity’ not because we are naturally passive, but
because
our chains are very heavy and as a result we cannot move”
(1976b, 47).
Dworkin argues that the patriarchal system is rife with
sadomasochistic

institutions and “social scenarios of dominance and submission .
. . all
based on the male-over-female model” (1976c, 72). This
wretched system
is kept in place, she contends, by male terrorism, female fear,
and collusion.
Fear is the primary sustaining element of “female masochism”
(1976f,
60), whereas it is “sexual sadism” that “actualizes male
identity” (1976e,
102). She writes that though femininity (e.g., passivity,
nurturance, co-
quettishness) is kept alive through fear, this does not excuse
women’s
acceptance of their own subordination. Feminist consciousness
allows one
to change one’s interpretation of the world.
Like many early second-wave feminists (Shulamith Firestone
and Ti-
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
Grace Atkinson come to mind), Dworkin makes no attempt to
disguise her
dislike of the archetypical forms of femininity that she
characterizes as ideo-
logical practice. She writes bluntly that “femininity is roughly
synonymous
with stupidity” (1976e, 101). This negative view of femininity

and her
willingness to criticize female behavior separates Dworkin’s
work from other
feminist readings of femininity, such as Carol Gilligan’s book
In a Different
Voice (1982), that see it as having such positive qualities as
nurturing, con-
cern for relationships, and a positive connection to nature.
Dworkin is close to early second-wave radical feminism in
problematizing
femininity as a survival response to male rule and oppression.
In Right-
Wing Women, she writes, “There are two models that
essentially describe
how women are socially controlled and sexually used: the
brothel model
and the farming model” (1978, 174). It is only romantic love
and religion
that keep the average woman from realizing the ideological
nature of these
allegedly natural and universal female roles (sexual or maternal
servant).
Thus, Dworkin argues, the promotherhood stance of women on
the ideo-
logical right is merely a rational response to the fact that
motherhood is
one of the few things valued in patriarchy. In contrast, Dworkin
argues that
motherhood is fundamentally oppressive and linked to female
sexual slavery.
For Dworkin, the end result of the valorization of the female as
mother
or idealized love or sex object is the obliteration of woman as
human

agent: “Women are kept from [this] moral agency not by
biology, but by
a male social system that puts women above or below simple
human
choice. . . . The spiritual superiority of women in this model of
ludicrous
homage isolates women from the human acts that create
meaning” (1978,
207). Finally, this valorization is fundamentally linked to
female maso-
chism. It is worth quoting Dworkin at length on this point:
This dynamic of fear as I have described it, is the source of
what men
so glibly, and happily, call “female masochism.” And, of
course, when
one’s identity is defined as a lack of identity; when one’s
survival is
contingent on learning to destroy or restrain every impulse
toward
self-definition; when one is consistently and exclusively
rewarded for
hurting oneself by conforming to demeaning or degrading rules
of
behavior; when one is consistently and inevitably punished for
ac-
complishing, or succeeding, or asserting; when one is battered
and
rammed, physically and/or emotionally, for any act or thought
of
rebellion, and then applauded and approved of for giving in,
recanting,
apologizing; then masochism does indeed become the
cornerstone of
one’s personality. And, as you might already know, it is very
hard for

masochists to find the pride, the strength, the inner freedom, the
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
972 ❙ Grant
courage to organize against their oppressors. The truth is that
this
masochism, which does become the core of the female
personality, is
the mechanism which assures that the system of male supremacy
will
continue to operate as a whole even if parts of the system itself
break
down or are reformed. (1976f, 60–61)2
So, for Dworkin, romantic love and sexuality are key players in
the
socialization of humans into a hierarchicalized dualism. One of
Dworkin’s
most powerful essays on this point is her analysis of Emily
Brontë’s Wuth-
ering Heights in the collection Letters from a War Zone
(Dworkin 1988c).
In it, Dworkin argues that almost more than any other in the
modern
period, Brontë’s novel provides an accurate description of the
social origins
of sadomasochism. The novel shows how “men learn hate as an
ethic,”
how “sadism is created in men through physical and
psychological abuse

and humiliation by other men,” and how “femininity [is] a
betrayal of
honor and human wholeness” (69). Dworkin applauds Brontë for
then
going on to provide a model for the way men and women should
relate
to one another in love relationships, namely, as human beings.
Dworkin
understands the goal of being human to be an androgynous
being with
sex differences that, if they exist in a meaningful way at all, are
not based
on hierarchy. She writes, “The love story between Catherine
Earnshaw
and the outcast child, Heathcliff, has one point: they are the
same, they
have one soul, one nature. Each knows the other because each is
the other.
. . . Together, they are human, a human whole, the self twice
over; apart,
each is insanely, horribly alone, a self disfigured from
separation, muti-
lated” (1988c, 69). She argues that their maleness and
femaleness (i.e.,
their gendered selves) become important to them only when
they are
separated and when they develop into sexual beings. In this
adult sepa-
ration, Heathcliff becomes a sadist (i.e., a man), and Catherine
becomes
a “shadow of herself” (i.e., a masochistic, feminine-ized
woman). The
alternative ideal Dworkin presents is one based on love and
humanism,
based on “sameness not difference” (1988c, 70).

The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff also operates
on
the axis of their difference(s) as a privileged white woman and
an im-
poverished, orphaned gypsy, that is, on their differences vis-à-
vis class and
race. Brontë describes Heathcliff as a dark gypsy foundling. In
short, he
2 Dworkin’s link to early radical feminism is most clearly
evident in her 1974 book,
Woman Hating, which has the tone and ferocity of the early
radical feminist manifestos. The
book begins, “This book is an action, a political action where
revolution is the goal. . . .
It is not . . . academic horseshit” (1974, 17). For examples of
early radical feminist manifestos
of the second wave, see Koedt, Levine, and Rapone 1973.
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
is a racially coded character: “Being dirty, dark, a gypsy, black-
haired,
having a black humor, all are synonyms for a virtually racial
exclusion, a
lower status based on skin and color: this racism is the reason
for
Heathcliff’s exile from the civilized family” (Dworkin 1988c,
71). Evi-
dence for this is found in the many references in Brontë’s book

contrasting
Heathcliff’s darkness and Catherine’s whiteness. It is important
to note
that not only is Cathy implicated for acquiescing to Heathcliff’s
demise
but that his demise is also her demise: “In betraying Heathcliff,
she betrays
herself, her own nature, her integrity; this betrayal is precisely
congruent
with becoming feminine, each tiny step toward white, fair, rich,
a step
away from self and honor. . . . The gowns, the gloves, the
whitened,
useless, unused skin, are emblems of her contempt for honor,
self-esteem”
(1988c, 73). Dworkin finishes, “Cathy’s femininity is a slow,
lazy, spoiled
abandonment of self” (73). In surrendering to femininity, Cathy
surren-
ders her humanness. In becoming a woman befitting the
requirements of
the gender structure, Cathy must abandon the higher love she
once felt
for Heathcliff, a love that transcended race, class, and gender.
We might expect Dworkin to be very hard on the sadistic and
sexual
Heathcliff. But what is interesting to me is her analysis of the
Earnshaw
women. Dworkin points to the moral culpability of the women
in the
Earnshaw household insofar as they repeatedly watch—even
preside
over—the abuse of others more vulnerable than themselves and
remain
silent. While it is the men of the novel who actually engage in

various
forms of abuse directed toward children and animals, Dworkin
clearly
regards the female silence as complicitous (1988c, 75). Though
sympa-
thetic to the pain and fear of the women at the hands of male
authority,
she views their collaboration with contempt. It is for her a sign
of the
“basic immorality of feminine love . . . no conscience to stop
the brutality
against others just so one is exempt from it—that underlines the
meaning
of femininity: there is no integrity, no wholeness, no honor”
(1988c,
82–83). Rather than a knee-jerk man hater, Dworkin emerges
here as a
critic of gender itself and shows how the gender structure
connects male
to female in a relation of eroticized dominance and
subordination.
Dworkin does not mean to say that women in love are immoral
but
that feminine love is immoral (as is masculine). The problem is
not love
per se but the kind of love practiced from the subject position of
the
gendered sadomasochistic structure of patriarchy, which gives
rise to the
“moral bankruptcy familiar to women in love” (1988c, 83).3
She continues
3 Dworkin argues that the pitfalls of feminine love are most
starkly portrayed by Brontë

May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
974 ❙ Grant
on to say that this socially constructed patriarchal model of
feminine love
automatically places one in the position of the masochistic
coward. Since
the ideological point of view structured by gender is a subject
position,
not a particular body type, it can be rejected by women. It can
also be
occupied by men. This will become important in understanding
Dworkin’s
views on pornography, discussed below.
The real, profound tragedy of the abuse of women and children
(and,
she argues, of animals) is that the sadism exercised in families
under the
silent gaze of feminine-ized women is one of the major ways in
which
patriarchy reproduces itself. For Dworkin, the brilliance of
Brontë’s novel
is that it shows how Heathcliff’s subjecthood is constructed in
the context
of abuse he undergoes as a child at the hands of men, under the
watchful
gaze of women. Dworkin argues that Heathcliff is uniquely
situated and
self-conscious about the roots of his own sadism by virtue of his
status

as other, that is, as a person of color in a privileged white
household.
However, this does not prevent him from growing up to be
sadistic and
abusive himself. In youth, Heathcliff and Cathy have a
relationship that
is close to Dworkin’s ideal human androgynous relationship.
But this is
quickly destroyed by the rigors of their socialization into sexual
and thus
gendered beings. The initial androgynous relationship is one of
human
oneness where differences based on class, race, ethnicity, and
gender are
simply not at issue. Importantly, the eradication of this idyllic
relation
is eventually effected not only through Heathcliff ’s
transformation into
a sadistic adult man but also through Cathy’s transformation
into a
feminine-ized adult woman with class and race privileges. Thus
Dworkin
reads Brontë’s book as illustrating her own theories about
sadomaso-
chism; the social construction of the gender structure; the
sadomaso-
chistic aspects of masculinity, femininity, gender, love, and
lust; and the
ideal of pure, genderless human equality based on a higher love.
This analysis is repeated in many places in Dworkin’s work. For
ex-
ample, in her short essay “Mourning Tennessee Williams”
(1988a) she
writes approvingly that Williams never imagined that “men and
women

had different natures, only different lives” (66). What was
extraordinary
about him, she continues, was “the remarkable, unique way he
used gen-
der—mythically, hauntingly—to get to the root of what is
simply and
absolutely human: fear of love that takes up time while death
comes closer”
(67). Elsewhere she lauds Williams for portraying women as
beings who
understand that sex should be about “tenderness and sensitivity”
(1987,
in the character of Isabella, Heathcliff’s wife, who first
sentimentalizes her husband’s dark
nature and then is repeatedly and cruelly abused by him.
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
44). As her remarks about Brontë and Williams indicate,
Dworkin is
equally, if differently, critical of both masculine and feminine.
Heathcliff
represents the sexual sadism of men and the ways men use
romantic love
and sex to further female domination. However, Dworkin’s
analysis of
gender in Wuthering Heights also explicates the moral failings
of women
who support sadism in men. She finds Cathy culpable, even

stupid, for
capitulating to the norms of feminine ideology, writing that
Cathy is a
collaborator in the furtherance of male domination.
This critical view of femininity is complicated, however, by
views such
as the one Dworkin took on a case that achieved wide press
coverage in
the United States in the late 1980s, the case of Hedda Nussbaum
and
Joel Steinberg. In this essay, “Living in Terror, Pain” (1997),
Dworkin
discusses the case of the battered, crack-addicted Nussbaum, a
New York
City woman who stood by and watched while her attorney
husband,
Steinberg, beat their adopted daughter to death. It is challenging
to ac-
count for the difference in her analysis of Cathy, on the one
hand, and
her public defense of Nussbaum, on the other. Dworkin claims
that Nuss-
baum should not be held accountable for the murder of her
daughter on
the grounds that as a battered woman Nussbaum was living in
fear and
could not be considered rational. She was not innocent,
Dworkin hedges,
but neither was she guilty. In the case of Catherine Earnshaw,
Dworkin
argues that women who capitulate to fear and unquestioningly
accept
their feminine roles are culpable in the reproduction of
patriarchy. But in
the essay on Nussbaum, she takes the rather different view that

women
are to be excused from moral and legal culpability when they
are abused
by men. Since Dworkin believes that women are nearly always
in a state
of coercion, abuse, and fear simply by virtue of their subject
positions in
patriarchy, it is difficult to imagine how they might ever give
meaningful
consent or be held accountable for anything. At some point, it
would
appear, the masochist loses agency. This can be illuminated by
under-
standing Dworkin’s analysis of the key role of sexual
intercourse itself in
the maintenance of the patriarchal system.
Intercourse as power and the (im)possibility of choice
The blurb on the paperback edition of Dworkin’s 1987 book
Intercourse
touts it as “the most shocking book any feminist has yet
written.” This is
perhaps overstated since Intercourse owes so much to early
radical feminist
consciousness about sexuality and romance. At the time of its
publication,
U.S. feminists were engaged in the revalorization of femininity
best ex-
emplified by what is now sometimes referred to as care theory.
At the same
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC

976 ❙ Grant
time, discussions of sexuality in feminist theory were morphing
into queer
theory. Dworkin represents a third prong of the discourse
wherein sexuality
was being discussed in the context of debates about
pornography, debates
in which Dworkin was, of course, a major player. Because she
actively as-
sociated herself with the highly controversial antiporn side of
the sexuality
debates, her analysis of sexual intercourse as a world historical
instrument
of female domination has escaped serious consideration.
The attention Dworkin pays to sexuality is not as far away from
insights
in queer theory as one might suppose, as both center on
sexuality. It will
be protested at once that Dworkin’s puritanical views about
sexuality are
surely very different from, say, Gayle Rubin’s sexual
libertarianism. Still,
Dworkin was among the first to argue against what was later
termed het-
eronormativity, the idea that heterosexuality is the ideological
norm against
which all other sexualities appear as deviant. Dworkin does not
follow queer
theory in arguing that heteronormativity can be fought by
engaging in
alternative sexual practices. Rather, she contends that all sexual
practices are

imbued with patriarchal values and meaning such that their use
as resistant
practices is impossible. Since the patriarchal structure
contaminates all sex-
ualities with the male-female sadomasochistic domination
scheme, the ques-
tion becomes, what would sexuality feel like if there were no
gender hi-
erarchy? Dworkin argues that lust as we now know it is not
possible absent
a power imbalance. If we knew that sex would lose its sexiness,
would we
still want to abolish patriarchy and other systems of
domination?
Dworkin further contends that the act of intercourse as we now
know
it is linked to death through power and domination. Sex is able
to effec-
tively masquerade as life affirming because it is linked to birth
and mother-
hood, economies of power that Dworkin says also redound to
the det-
riment of women. By the same token, desire and pleasure in sex
mask
their dependence on power, domination, and possession. In fact,
Dworkin
concludes, sex is an expression not of men’s love for women but
of “the
pure sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women”
(1987,
138). Contrary to the views of some feminists, loving one’s
sexuality is,
therefore, far from liberating. It is “diversion into complicity
and igno-
rance” (1987, 125).

While Intercourse explores many of the same themes that appear
in
Dworkin’s previous nonfiction, going all the way back to her
1974 book,
Woman Hating, Intercourse is arguably her most clear and
powerful state-
ment on the topic. It is here that Dworkin makes the case that
sexual
intercourse, male domination, and pornographic representation
are three
moments of the same event. Intercourse is antisex in the sense
that Dworkin
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
maintains that sexual intercourse in patriarchy cannot be
anything other
than a force used to dominate women.
Dworkin turns to the words of male writers such as Leo Tolstoy,
Wil-
liams, James Baldwin, and the authors of the Hebrew and
Christian Bibles
to paraphrase Sigmund Freud’s question, asking, “What do men
want?”
By their own admission, Dworkin claims, what men want is
unfettered
access to sex, most often with women. Dworkin uses texts by
men to

show that they understand on some level that intercourse is
inherently
violent and that, in the context of male domination, such
violence is
inherently sexual. More difficult is Dworkin’s claim that while
men are
driven to have sex and to dominate, sex with women is also in
some sense
revolting to them. This follows, she claims, because, since lust
is funda-
mentally about domination and possession, it is by extension a
way to
annihilate women both metaphorically and literally. In short,
not only
does Dworkin fail to see the liberatory possibilities in desire;
she sees a
straight line of progression from desire of the other to
objectification of
the other and finally to annihilation of the other. For Dworkin,
sexual
desire is the desire to conquer, to possess, and finally to kill.
Therefore,
she concludes, woman-as-feminized-subject is a being who
experiences
pleasure in the moment of her own annihilation, since her
participation
in patriarchal sexuality is simultaneously the abdication of her
authentic
human agency. Until she reclaims this, she cannot give
meaningful consent
to anything. And if she allows the abuse to continue long
enough, her
metaphysical death as a subject becomes a permanent condition,
and the
possibility of future subjecthood, freedom, and consent is
dubious.

As long as a woman chooses from the structural point of view of
fem-
inized woman, Dworkin argues, her choices will be
ideologically tainted
by patriarchy and in reality will not be choices but only
charades that
reinforce and reproduce her own submissiveness. Only by
making the
ultimate choice to be human can she meaningfully choose
anything at all.
Of course, it is not possible to merely choose human agency in a
system
where one is systematically objectified. One can, however,
choose to choose
to be human. That is, by being a feminist (in Dworkin’s terms),
one rejects
the principles and validity of femininity and patriarchy, thus
damaging the
constitutive power of patriarchy. It is from this perspective that
women
can begin to reclaim their humanhood, create a new woman, and
join in
the creation of the future possibility of an androgynous human
being.
Like women, men who live under patriarchy and do not attempt
to
raise their consciousnesses lack human being (hence the title of
Stolten-
berg’s Refusing to Be a Man [1990]). The problem for men is a
different
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC

978 ❙ Grant
one, however. It is not that they lack power and agency but that
they
have too much. What it means to be a man is precisely that one
can make
choices, enforce one’s preferences, and get others to submit to
those
choices. Still, Dworkin argues, this version of being human is
also mu-
tilated. While man acts, he does not act from the moral point of
view of
universal justice and equality. Rather, he acts from the point of
view of
one who wishes to retain his own power and agency; that is, he
acts from
the subject position of man. Thus, men who voluntarily remain
identified
with the patriarchal version of maleness (and most men will,
because it is
a position of power and influence) can be said to be making
choices,
though not completely free choices. Only men who renounce
their priv-
ileges as men can be said to be human in the way Dworkin
means when
she talks about androgyny, since androgyny is, for her, a state
of being
beyond the bounds of gender.
Feminists are only one example of female resistance to
patriarchy. For
Dworkin, complete rejection of and nonparticipation in the

institution of
sexual intercourse are key components of this resistance. These
have been
effected by nonfeminist women as well. For instance, Dworkin
writes
compellingly about several saints, including St. Catherine, the
patron saint
of unmarried girls, and St. Margaret, the patron saint of women
in child-
birth. But it is her retelling of the story of Joan of Arc that is
most
instructive. St. Joan, the young warrior and martyr, was a
literate peasant,
a cross-dresser, and a virgin who by the age of nineteen had
been tried
and convicted of witchcraft. Dworkin reads her story against the
grain
and sees it not as a story of Christian martyrdom but as a
parable of female
resistance. In Dworkin’s words, “she refused to be fucked”
(1987, 85).
Refusing to be married at sixteen, she won a breach of contract
case against
the man to whom she was promised. After having been accused
of a myriad
of crimes against both church and state, Joan was sentenced to
life in
prison “in women’s clothes” (1987, 91). Though warned that it
would
cost her her life, Joan defiantly dressed in men’s clothes until
some three
to four days later, when she was burned at the stake (1987, 92).
“Each
of these women fought off a rapist who used the apparatus of
the state—
prison and torture—to destroy her as if she were an enemy

nation,” Dwor-
kin writes. “Each refused the male appropriation of her body for
sex, the
right to which is a basic premise of male domination” (1987,
94). Dworkin
labels this “rebel virginity” (1987, 94). By retelling the story of
St. Joan
in this way, Dworkin lays claim to her as an antipatriarchal
heroine, just
as Bertolt Brecht once tried to claim the saint for socialism.
Intercourse presents arguments about the meaning of intercourse
in
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
patriarchy. It is a male-defined meaning that Dworkin thinks is
inescapable
and daunting. She writes,
In a world of socially sanctioned sexual possession, the
meaning of
possession escalates to include being passed from man to man,
or
being dumped then used again; and each time a woman is
possessed
inside this social dynamic, she is pushed into a deeper level of
coma,
the aggregate effect of possession being to turn her into a thing
of

sex . . . she becomes social pornography; an impersonally
possessed
female used as female with no remnant of a human life
animating
or informing the use of her in sex. She is used by men
impersonally
with no reference to her as human and no comprehension of her
as
an individual. As social pornography, she is a living corpse,
existing
for sexual use. (1987, 76)
Intercourse is also the means by which women become, literally
and fig-
uratively, occupied people, as men literally occupy women’s
bodies during
the sex act. Because of this material reality, women will never
have real
sexual self-determination as long as men have anything to say
about when,
how, or under what circumstances sexual intercourse occurs.
The reality
of male and female bodies means that rape is a male crime. For
Dworkin,
this accident of biology puts intercourse and rape forever on a
continuum
of violence and warlike occupation. It is a “measure of women’s
oppression
that we do not take intercourse—entry, penetration,
occupation—and ask
or say what it means; to us as a dominated group or to us as a
potentially
free and self-determining people” (1987, 133). As an instrument
of social
control, intercourse can be reformed, but these reforms do not
answer

the question of whether intercourse itself can ever express an
authentic
female sexuality.4 Dworkin wonders,
Can intercourse exist without objectification? Would
intercourse be a
different phenomenon if it could, if it did? Would it be shorter
or
longer, happier or sadder; more complex, richer, denser, with a
ba-
roque beauty or simpler with an austere beauty; or bang bang
bang?
Would intercourse without objectification, if it could exist, be
com-
patible with women’s equality—even an expression of it—or
would
it still be stubbornly antagonistic to it? Would intercourse cause
orgasm
in women if women were not objects for men before and during
intercourse? Can intercourse exist without objectification and
can ob-
4 These reforms might include deference to female sexual
needs, less romanticizing of
rape, less verbal abuse, economic equality, good role models,
etc. (Dworkin 1987, 126–27).
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
980 ❙ Grant
jectification exist without female complicity in maintaining it as

a
perceived reality and a material reality too: can objectification
exist
without the woman herself turning herself into an object—
becoming
through effort and art a thing, less than human, so that he can
be
more than human, hard, sovereign, king? Can intercourse exist
with-
out the woman herself turning into a thing, which she must do
because
men cannot fuck equals and men must fuck: because one price
of
dominance is that one is impotent in the face of equality? (1987,
140)
At the time of the book’s publication, commentators ridiculed
her sug-
gestion that only something like what sexologist Shere Hite
suggested
might be acceptable: heterosexuality with no thrusting, where
couples
simply lie together in pleasure with “vagina-covering-penis”
where the
only penile stimulation is provided by the female orgasm
(Dworkin 1987,
128–29). While this is mere caricature, it is nonetheless clear
that Dworkin
believes that intercourse would change dramatically were it not
an insti-
tution of male domination. What is more problematic for most
feminists
is the question of whether, absent its function as a system of
domination,
sexual intercourse would exist at all. Certainly, Dworkin is at
the very least

suggesting that we simply do not know what sex would look or
feel like
if it did. Her claim is that whenever there is lust, there is power
and
therefore the deployment of the male-female hierarchy, as these
are linked
in the patriarchal structure.
There is a tentative vision of another possible kind of sexuality
in
Dworkin’s book Intercourse. It would be one that occurs on a
human
level outside the confines of sadomasochistic gender
arrangements. It
would be more radical than the reforms (such as homosexuality)
that
she derides, and one that would take into consideration the
whole sit-
uation of women and the integral role that sexuality plays in
maintaining
it. Apropos of this, one can contrast Dworkin’s antisex view to
her brief
discussion of postpatriarchal sexuality in Woman Hating (1974).
In that
book, she muses about an expansive human sexuality and
envisions some
very un-Dworkinesque practices. Instead of the basically
sadomasochistic
institution of heterosexuality, women would be encouraged to
have the
full range of erotic impulses. Women and men could have sex,
but the
sex would not be genitally centered, she suggests, and the types
of
possible erotic practices would increase dramatically. For
instance, ev-

eryone who wanted one would be guaranteed a transsexual
operation.
Likewise, the taboo against cross-dressing would be obliterated.
How-
ever, the need for both would soon disappear as both are
predicated on
fixed gender identities. She writes further and more brazenly
that the
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
incest taboo would also disappear as it assumes the nuclear
family and
the repression of children’s sexual feelings. Bestiality too
would be more
common, but it would not be based on the abusive,
sadomasochistic
model that currently defines human-animal relations. Instead,
animals
and humans would be part of the same community.
Reproductive tech-
nologies of the type imagined by Firestone in her feminist
classic The
Dialectic of Sex (1970) would relieve women of some of the
burdens of
childbirth, but women themselves would control the technology
(Dwor-
kin 1974, 183–92). Remarkably, when read in the context of her
entire
corpus, far from antisex, Dworkin sounds like a sexual libertine.

Conceptualizing Dworkin as an antisex feminist glosses over
some im-
portant points in an otherwise notoriously indelicate series of
polemics
against sexuality. One of these is the idea that sexuality is
always experi-
enced as a gendered activity and that it is always about power.
Even gay
and lesbian relations are, for her, entirely structured by the
patriarchal
heterosexual ethic. Unlike many feminists, Dworkin does not
see lesbi-
anism as a way out of the problems created by sadomasochistic
hetero-
sexuality. Lesbianism is merely a “transgression of rules, an
affront” (1978,
224) to the dominant system of heterosexuality and cannot
change the
structure of women’s exploitation. For Dworkin, gay and
straight men
alike are privileged by phallocentric identity and subject
location. Indeed,
she argues, prohibitions against male homosexuality are, in
effect, pro-
tections of male power, as they maintain heterosexuality by
keeping men
sexually inviolate and women sexually vulnerable.
According to Dworkin, sadomasochism as a sexual practice is
not an
ironic or playful way to resist power, as some have argued. It is
not a
perversion of “normal” heterosexuality but a dramatization of it.
Sado-
masochism as a sexual practice makes the dramatic power-based

subtext
of all sexuality explicit. Likewise, rape as forced sex is, for
Dworkin, vir-
tually indistinguishable from intercourse. Both are coerced. She
writes
that “the uses of women in intercourse are permeated by the
reality of
male power everywhere else. We need their money; intercourse
is fre-
quently how we get it. We need their approval to be able to
survive inside
our own skins; intercourse is frequently how we get it. They
force us to
be compliant, turn us into parasites, and then hate us for not
letting go.
Intercourse is frequently how we hold on: fuck me. How to
separate the
act of intercourse from the social reality of male power is not
clear” (1987,
127). Importantly, she does not argue that intercourse is rape, as
has
sometimes been said. Rather, intercourse and rape are connected
for her
in that they are both coerced sex.
Likewise, prostitution is indistinguishable from gang rape and
marriage.
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
982 ❙ Grant

Prostitution is a kind of rape in that it is based in force; women
only sell
their sexual services because patriarchy sets up the demand and
sex be-
comes the most valuable thing many women have to sell. By
extension,
prostitution, as Dworkin defines it, is gang rape since a variety
of men
“have” the prostitute repeatedly and by force. Again, Dworkin
seems to
argue that it is not possible for women to give meaningful
consent to any
sexual activity under conditions of patriarchy insofar as all
forms of desire
are contained by the structure of patriarchy, which forms the
very meaning
of women as sexually subordinate. Sexuality is prior to gender
in that a
dualistic, hierarchical gender structure is necessary for it to be
sexy. As
we now understand and define it, the erotic is inherently about
the power
of men over women.
In participating in sexual relations, one acts out an ideological
practice
that only gendered beings can enact. This is true whether one is
hetero-
sexual, transsexual, into sadomasochism, and so on. Sexuality is
always a
gendered practice because gender is an intrinsic part of the
erotic under
patriarchy. One is always either resisting or playing out the
rules of the
subject position of man or woman in patriarchy, and it is in
sexual inter-

course that lust and gender are most connected, because
intercourse is
the nexus of power, gender, and lust.
Sex is often and correctly written about as a form of possession,
Dwor-
kin contends: “In other words, men possess women when men
fuck
women because both experience the man being male. This is the
stunning
logic of male supremacy. In this view, which is the predominant
one,
maleness is aggressive and violent; and so fucking, in which
both the man
and the woman experience maleness, essentially demands the
disappearance
of the woman as an individual; thus in being fucked, she is
possessed:
ceases to exist as a discrete individual: is taken over” (1987,
64). Again,
Dworkin makes the point that sexuality “works,” that is, is
erotic, because
it is gendered. A woman’s capacity to “feel sexual pleasure is
developed
within the narrow confines of male sexual dominance. . . .
Women feel
the fuck—when it works, when it overwhelms—as possession;
and feel
possession as deeply erotic; and value annihilation of the self in
sex as
proof of the man’s desire or love, its awesome intensity” (1987,
67). For
Dworkin, the logic of sex is not eros but Thanatos. Since
patriarchal sex
is fundamentally linked to violence and domination, its logic is
death.

Death comes either in the form of the man discarding the body
of the
woman by using it up psychologically or by his actually
murdering her.
These are on a continuum. Dworkin thus views intercourse not
as a private
act but as a profoundly political one with great social
significance since it
is always the central ideological practice in the reproduction of
patriarchy.
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
The logical extension of lust and romantic love into death and
the
romanticization of loss so evident in popular culture provide
opportu-
nities to return to the contradiction I pose earlier in this essay
between
Dworkin’s analysis of Wuthering Heights and her analysis of
the moral
culpability of an American battered woman, Nussbaum. For
Dworkin,
the case of Nussbaum provides an example of how romantic
love and
sex lead to death and sheds light on Dworkin’s understanding of
female
agency and subjectivity. As I note above, Dworkin writes
provocatively
that Nussbaum was neither guilty nor innocent. Women are not

guilty
when their choices are constrained by patriarchy because female
agency
appears to be limited to acts of resistance. Women have agency
and bear
guilt insofar as they are able to resist patriarchy by embracing a
posited
human, androgynous identity rather than a gendered one. Only
from
this new human vantage point does Dworkin acknowledge the
possibility
of meaningful choice and consent. It is this that allows Dworkin
to
simultaneously apologize for Nussbaum and criticize Cathy in
Wuthering
Heights for embracing her own femininity and race and class
privileges.
Cathy’s is a femininity that embraces lust and romance. In a life
with
Heathcliff, it is possible that Cathy might have become more
like Nuss-
baum, broken by battery and past all hope of human agency. In
fact,
Cathy does die in the novel, annihilated by her love affair with
Heathcliff.
Dworkin’s argument then is that at some point female
subordination
erases human agency. Being battered, or rather occupying the
episte-
mological position of one who is battered, locates one in a
space where
consent is not possible. The epistemological question of how
one can
move from this space to feminist consciousness is murky.
Cathy’s is
essentially the subject position of one who actively participates

in her
feminine role and thus colludes in male sadism against others.
Nussbaum
also colluded in male sadism (i.e., in her husband’s murder of
their
child). But Nussbaum is treated as different by Dworkin, as if
her moral
agency was constrained, perhaps even removed, by extreme
physical
abuse. While the abuse initially stemmed from Nussbaum’s
commitment
to feminine romantic love and sexuality, that very commitment
even-
tually erased the possibility to resist. Nussbaum could no more
stand
up for her daughter than she could for herself.
Sex, death, and pornography
Dworkin’s arguments about heterosexuality and the
sadomasochistic
nature of male-female relations lead her to ever more ominous
con-
clusions about the dangers of men. Indeed, bloodletting, a
favorite
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
984 ❙ Grant
theme of Dworkin’s, is reflected in the title of her collection of
essays

Our Blood (1976a). An interesting way to trace the link she
makes
between sexuality and violence, heterosexuality and
bloodletting, is to
look once again at the book Intercourse (1987). Dworkin is
interested
in how changes in what it means to be a virgin point to
attendant
changes in the meaning of intercourse itself. Virginity, she
claims, no
longer really refers to the state of not having had intercourse.
Rather,
it now refers to the state of not having had one’s blood spilled,
because
intercourse has come to be fundamentally associated with
violence and
bloodletting. Moreover, intercourse no longer merely refers to
the act
of penis thrusting inside vagina. Intercourse, she argues, is now
tied
to humiliation and can take place in other parts of the female
body.
The vagina is the privileged site for intercourse only because it
on-
tologically defines what it means to be a woman under
conditions of
male domination. This does not mean that other holes cannot
and do
not stand in for the vagina.
To understand the importance of blood and the “hole” for
Dworkin,
I turn to her readings of The Story of O and Dracula. The Story
of O is a
classic in the genre of erotic novels, made all the more
interesting because

it was written by a woman, Pauline Reage.5 The novel tells the
story of
Claire, a woman who chooses to become known as “O” and who
submits
to sadistic sex acts for the man she loves. He eventually turns
her over to
be used in a house of sadism by Sir Stephen, where she submits
to a variety
of erotic indignations. The story culminates in her being taken
to a party
wearing nothing but an owl mask and being led on a leash
hooked to a
metal hoop that pierces her labia.
According to Dworkin, The Story of O is the archetypical
pornographic
narrative, mixing as it does sex and death. It is a story of
“psychic can-
nibalism” (1974, 63) illustrating that men and women are
complete op-
posites and that the one can survive only by destroying the
other. The
“O” represents the female genitals where the character is
scarred and
marked as if with a wedding ring. The narrative annihilates the
woman
(i.e., as owl, as hole, as merely an empty ontological category)
and re-
fashions her into a fantasy where the woman wants exactly what
she gets:
5 For a fascinating story about Reage, see de St. Jorre 1994. A
very old Reage denies
that the novel depicts a male fantasy, though she now
acknowledges that she wrote the novel
as a way to win back a lover who was intended as the book’s

only audience. In a strange
way, this does bear out Dworkin’s points about women having
to engage in masochism for
men, in this case, in a fantasy written by a woman for her lover.
Dworkin has called Reage
a “Stalinist of female equality” (1991, 226).
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
absolute powerlessness. Pornography, for Dworkin, is
fundamentally char-
acterized by this fantasy depicted in the Story of O.
Sexual intercourse, then, is transforming as an institution,
becoming
more dependent on female subordination and violence, less
centered on
the vagina and more connected to representation. A major
illustration of
this change in the nature of sexual intercourse is found in
Dworkin’s
reading of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. For her, this is a
pivotal story
in the history of the discourse of intercourse because it shows
the trans-
formation of the categories intercourse, virginity, and oral sex
in terms of
the sex-violence matrix. Stoker’s famous vampire story about an
undead
man who lives by feasting on the blood of the living has been

read as a
tale of erotic mayhem. When the vampire preys on young
women, they
are most often virgins, and they are referred to as the vampire’s
brides.
Dracula centers around two virgins, Lucy and Mina, both of
whom fall
prey to the vampire. Other major characters, all male, include a
doctor
and Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur. Dworkin is taken with the saga
because it
illustrates the way that death stands in for sex while
annihilation becomes
romance. For her the story shows, further, that violence against
women
is central to the bonding relationship among men and that
voyeurism and
oral sex have become central to contemporary male sexuality.
Dworkin’s
argument that in Dracula vampirism becomes a metaphor for
intercourse
is probably a suggestion with which few would disagree.
However, she is
interested in it as a story that goes beyond metaphor and reflects
a change
in the cultural meaning of intercourse, which is now understood
as vio-
lence and bloodletting.
Vampirism reflects the “appetite for using and being used . . .
the
submission of the female to the great hunter; the driving
obsessiveness of
lust . . . the great craving” (1987, 118). The act also becomes,
as Dworkin
puts it, a pun on blood and intercourse as the source of life. The

story
is a narrative where the “great wound, the vagina, moved to the
throat,”
where the throat is as soaked in blood as the vagina is in
menstruation
and childbirth. Thus the story is also an allegory about oral sex,
or what
Dworkin calls “throat rape” (119). Finally, and perhaps most
significantly,
the story is about male bonding via the spectacle of the
eroticization of
female pain and death.
Thus, in the story, when Arthur tries to save the life of his
fiancée,
Lucy, by giving her blood, he remarks idly that he likes to think
that this
makes them truly married. The other men decide not to tell
Arthur that
they too have been married to Lucy in this way, having also
given her
blood. Dworkin concludes that this is a kind of gang rape in the
sense
that “by this standard, Lucy had been had and had and had: by
all the
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
986 ❙ Grant
men in the story, including Dracula” (1987, 115).6 Not
insignificantly, it

is Arthur who finally kills Lucy by driving a stake through her
heart. When
reflecting on the murder of his fiancée, Dworkin notes Arthur’s
peculiar
remark that “the feeling was not so strong as I had expected”
(115).
Dworkin concludes that Dracula is a story of gang rape, male
bonding,
and voyeurism (pornography) and that it culminates in this
“snuff” scene,
where Arthur actually kills his beloved.7
In sum, Dracula is a story in which we see “the throat as a
female
genital; sex and death as synonyms; killing as a sex act; dying
as sensuality;
men watching the slow dying, and the watching as sexual;
mutilation of
the female body as male heroism and adventure; callous,
ruthless, pred-
atory lust as the one-note meaning of sexual desire; intercourse
itself
needing blood, someone’s, somewhere, to count as a sex act in a
world
excited by sadomasochism, bored by the dull thud thud of the
literal fuck”
(1987, 119). The new era of intercourse, then, is marked by the
ability
of other holes in the body to stand in for the vagina, the explicit
linking
of sex to violence, and the advent of voyeurism as a bona fide
component
of the sex act for men. This analysis is clearly very much
informed by
Dworkin’s ideas about sadomasochism as well as by her well-
known cri-

tique of pornography. Dworkin’s interpretation of Dracula is
also notable
in that it illustrates how central oral sex is in her overall
analysis. In fact,
her view is that oral sex has become the primary example of
male sexual
violence and exploitation.
The emphasis on the transformed role of oral sex in the
maintenance
of patriarchy explains Dworkin’s interest in the hard-core
pornographic
film classic Deep Throat and its star Linda Lovelace. In
Dworkin’s novel
Mercy (1991), the central character describes the film Deep
Throat, the
plot of which revolves around a woman whose clitoris is in her
throat:
Then there’s this guy with the world’s biggest penis and he
fucks her
throat . . . he fucks her in the throat to cure her, he fucks her
hard
in the throat but slow so you can see the bottom of her throat . .
.
you choke, you vomit, you can’t breathe, and if he goes past it
with
a big penis he stretches muscles that can’t be stretched and he
pushes
your throat out to where it can’t be pushed out . . . you’d rather
have a surgeon drill holes in the sides of your throat than have
him
push it down, the pain will push you down to hell, near death, to
6 The theme of the conjoining of sex and murder is present even
in Dworkin’s earliest

work. See, e.g., her Right-Wing Women (1978, 55).
7 Snuff films are pornographic films in which a woman is
actually killed on-screen.
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
coma, to the screamless scream, an agony, no voice, a ripped
muscle,
shreds swimming in blood in your throat thin ribbons of muscle
soaking up blood. (1991, 301–2)
Seen this way, Dracula emerges as a nineteenth-century version
of Deep
Throat. Both rely on a narrative wherein blood is linked to sex,
the throat
becomes a sex organ, men watch for pleasure, and sex is linked
to death.
For Dworkin, Dracula emerges as one of the first pornographic
repre-
sentations of orality. In reading Dworkin’s work as a whole we
can, per-
haps, come to a fuller understanding of the critique of
heterosexuality
expressed in Intercourse and elsewhere. Dworkin makes the
critique in the
context of an alternative and far-reaching humanist vision
where she imag-
ines the possibility of a vast array of egalitarian sexual
practices. This

context does not change the fact, however, that she believes that
the
current difference between rape and intercourse is virtually
nominal. Both,
she contends, are built on sadomasochistic principles of male
domination.
Intercourse as it now exists is antiwoman and universally
devastating to
women across class, culture, race, and ethnicity. To feminists
and others
who hold a contrary viewpoint—for example, that sexuality is a
matter of
personal choice, that it can be liberating or fun—Dworkin has
only con-
tempt: “Liberals refuse categorically to inquire into even a
possibility that
there is a relationship between intercourse per se and the low
status of
women” (1987, 124).
The connection between intercourse and violence was most
famously
explored by Dworkin in the work she did against pornography
with Ca-
tharine MacKinnon. Dworkin and MacKinnon’s novel approach
seeks to
regulate pornography as a manifestation of violence against
women rather
than as obscenity and to delink it from obscenity law.
Dworkin’s analysis
of heterosexuality figures prominently in the Dworkin-
MacKinnon col-
laboration on pornography. Dworkin writes, “One can know
everything
and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are
fused in the

male consciousness, so that one without the imminent
possibility of the
other is unthinkable and impossible. One can know everything
and still,
at bottom, refuse to accept the annihilation of women is the
source and
meaning of identity for men” (1988b, 21). Dworkin and
MacKinnon’s
analysis of pornography thus begins from Dworkin’s assumption
that the
gender hierarchy is related to the hierarchy and domination
found in the
sex act. It goes further in saying not only that this domination is
repre-
sented in pornography but that pornography is in and of itself an
act of
sexual aggression.
Historically, those who have argued against the regulation of
pornog-
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
988 ❙ Grant
raphy fall into three basic camps. The first are pragmatists who
simply
argue that pornography is too difficult to define and therefore
cannot and
should not be regulated except insofar as it involves violence or
children.
A second point of view is neutral about pornography as such but

passionate
about civil liberties, arguing simply that pornography is
protected speech.
Finally, there are those who actually advocate pornography as a
way to
combat the repressiveness of Western capitalist countries whose
puritanical
heritages inhibit sexual freedom and social experimentation.8 In
this lib-
ertine view, free access to pornography is linked to the
sensibilities of the
sexual revolution of the 1960s. Dworkin and MacKinnon’s
approach not
only varies significantly from previous legal approaches but
also disrupts
the heretofore neat left-right split among those who condone or
oppose
pornography and free sex. In the first place, Dworkin and
MacKinnon
rejected outright the claim that pornography has any positive
effects on
society or individuals. This immediately put them at odds with
what
some thought of as the natural political allies of women’s
liberation—
the Left—and placed them closer to the traditional space of the
ideo-
logical right and center, leaving them vulnerable to charges of
collab-
oration with Reagan-era right-wing agendas. To this Dworkin
and
MacKinnon parried, “And exactly what is sinister about women
uniting
with women across conventional political lines against a form
of abuse
whose politics are sexual has remained unspecified by the

critics” (1997,
11).
However, their argument differed in that it was not a moralist
one,
nor did it advocate censorship as the term is conventionally
used. Rather,
Dworkin and MacKinnon wrote in favor of a civil law approach
based on
the notion that individual women should be able to sue
pornographers
on grounds that pornography harmed them as members of the
group
women. In their view, the mistake of all previous attempts at
regulating
pornography was in conceptualizing it as harmless
representation: “The
legal conception of what pornography is has authoritatively
shaped the
social conception of what pornography does. Instead of
recognizing the
personal injuries and systemic harms of pornography, the law
has told the
society that pornography is a passive reflection or one-level-
removed ‘rep-
8 Once moral proscriptions were removed, sexual
revolutionaries were free to employ
the popular slogan “If it feels good, do it.” Thus,
experimentation with homosexuality,
pederasty, masturbation, group sex, and so on were condoned
precisely because they brought
down the old social order built around the nuclear family and
monogamy. The latter was
actually a myth, rarely if ever realized and nearly always
accomplished through hypocrisy,

adultery, and repression.
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
resentation’ or symptomatic-by-product or artifact of the real
world”
(Dworkin and MacKinnon 1988, 26). This has meant, they
argued, that
its harms were rendered invisible and unreal.
Dworkin and MacKinnon’s approach also deviated from the
conven-
tional jurisprudence on pornography. Though they agreed with
other legal
scholars that a major component in regulating pornography had
to be
harm, they differed as to what was meant by harm and who
should be
allowed to define it. In the feminist antiporn view, the issue was
concep-
tualized not as social harm but as harm to women. Porn was to
be defined
not by the 1973 Miller v. California test of contemporary
community
standards but according to those women who felt harmed by
pornogra-
phy.9 Since the victims of pornography are not society but
women, it is
women who should be able to define the extent of that
victimization.

Speaking about the paucity of previous legal standards
regulating porn,
Dworkin and MacKinnon write that they “have meant almost
nothing,
being (actually) dependent upon the viewpoint of the observer.
This makes
obscenity law less useful the more pornography is a problem,
because the
more pornography is consumed, the more observers’ views are
shaped by
it, and the more the world it makes confirms that view” (1988,
27).
Indeed, it is precisely the community standard itself that
Dworkin and
MacKinnon call into question and redescribe as harmful to
women. Con-
temporary community standards cannot serve as benchmarks for
obscen-
ity, since a community that is very tolerant of pornography
simply harms
women all the more. For Dworkin and MacKinnon, viewing
harm ac-
cording to the Miller test is like saying that racism should be
judged
according to community standards, and if lynching, for instance,
is ac-
ceptable to a given community, then it ought to be legal.
Clearly, that
would be very bad law. Just as the toleration of something like
lynching
indicates a serious problem for people of color rather than a
standard by
which one ought to judge sound law, so the toleration of
pornography
indicates a problem for women, they claim.

Dworkin and MacKinnon point out that once pornography is
defined
as that which is sexually arousing, anything that is sexually
arousing is
potentially pornographic. This means that laws against it are
rarely en-
forced in practice. Rather than imposing some a priori standard,
their
approach “looks at the existing universe of the pornography
industry and
simply describes what is there, including what must be there for
it to work
in the way that it, and only it, works” (1988, 37). For some, the
more
problematic aspect is their description of why pornography
works. It
9 Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973).
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
990 ❙ Grant
works, they claim, because it “excites the penis” (1988, 38) by
showing
sex and subordinating women at the same time. Thus, Dworkin
and Mac-
kinnon’s antipornography jurisprudence was consistent with
Dworkin’s
feminist theory. Sex is domination against women. Since male
sexual ex-

citement can be achieved by viewing pornography that “excites
the penis,”
then viewing pornography is itself a sex act. They write that
“this law is
based on proof of a harm, not a judgment about the
permissibility of an
idea. And like all civil-rights legislation, it addresses a harm
that derives
its meaning and sting from group status” (Dworkin and
MacKinnon 1988,
30). They argue that because its very existence diminishes the
status of
women as human beings, “pornography is recognized as a
practice of civil
inequality on the basis of gender” (Dworkin and MacKinnon
1988, 31).
Since MacKinnon and Dworkin believe that sexuality and
motherhood
are functions that define women in patriarchy, legally
mandating that
women not be perceived as sexually dominated amounts to a
major rev-
olutionary act against patriarchy. Dworkin and MacKinnon’s
strategy uses
legal doctrine to point up and create a controversy about
women’s role
in society. To the extent that it has been viewed as natural that
women
are sexual objects, and to the extent that that view has been
codified in
law, Dworkin and MacKinnon attempt to denature the status of
woman
as sex object, to decodify the patriarchal view of women as sex
slaves.
They attempt to insinuate into the law a new principle for

codification,
namely, that some women categorically reject their own sexual
victimi-
zation and do so as women who are reclaiming their humanity.
Humanity
is thus partly defined as one’s ability to opt out of sex. In this
sense,
Dworkin and MacKinnon hope that women will be empowered
to claim
agency, first by resisting sexual access, and presumably then by
claiming
a new and transformed agency.
MacKinnon and Dworkin distinguish theirs from other feminist
legal
strategies in several important ways. For example, in the United
States,
abortion has been secured as a right for women on the ground
that a
woman’s body is her own private business. This doctrine of
privacy is the
same one that has been used to uphold laws protecting
pornography.
MacKinnon and Dworkin take the view that privacy is not good
law for
women since, absent legal protections, women will tend to be
subordi-
nated to male power, and that the home and the private sphere
have
historically been very dangerous places for women. They write,
“Privacy
law has further institutionalized pornography by shielding the
sexual
sphere, where so much of pornography’s violence to women is
done,
including by outright guaranteeing the right to possess

pornography in
the home, the most violent place for women” (1988, 27). Instead
of
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
privacy, Dworkin and MacKinnon suggest a legal doctrine based
on
“equality” (1988, 12).
While Dworkin and MacKinnon’s approach is substantively bold
and
takes a radical position in the context of the feminist movement
as a whole,
it is also very much in keeping with certain aspects of
conventional wisdom
in feminist theory. That is, the form of Dworkin and
MacKinnon’s ar-
gument appears to be consistent with the rest of feminist theory
insofar
as they suggest that women’s experience is foundational in an
episte-
mological sense and should be made juridically foundational as
well. It is
puzzling, then, that they seem to argue that women’s
experiences count
in this way only if they take a negative view of pornography. In
fact, I do
not think that Dworkin and MacKinnon’s view of pornography
is based

in a conventional feminist understanding of experience as an
epistemo-
logical foundation. The experiences of women who defend
pornography
or who own businesses that rely on its production and
distribution can
be dismissed, according to this argument, because these women
support
the current sexual arrangement of male domination. As such,
women who
support pornography have been colonized by the patriarchal
structure of
consciousness and are acting from the feminized subject
position of pa-
triarchal woman.
Conclusion
Andrea Dworkin believed in the social construction of gender.
She argued
that it is tied to violence, sexuality, and male domination in a
structure
that reproduces itself through the complicity of male and female
agents.
But male and female are subject positions in a structure that can
be refused
or ratified. For women, the ability to consent or to refuse
patriarchy rests
on the extent of one’s damage. Women who have been
metaphysically
annihilated can no longer consent. Women who have not have a
moral
obligation to resist.
It was easy for Dworkin to understand the stake that men have
in

reproducing the system. But she struggled with women’s
collusion since
they suffer so greatly under its yoke. Her arguments were
polemical and
reductivist, harkening back to a feminism of an earlier time.
This was their
power. Still, she had begun to theorize the historical nature of
sexual
intercourse. Its transformation from a genitally focused act to
one centered
on orality, voyeurism, and bloodletting was related to the
central place
she afforded to pornography.
Dworkin used the violence of sexuality and the eroticization of
violence
to explain everything from sexism to racism to anti-Semitism.
She clearly
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC
992 ❙ Grant
understood that there were many other factors, but she persisted
in the-
matizing the one structure that she saw as foundational. Male
domination
was, for her, the primal structure of oppression and a model for
all others.
That structure depended on its victims to reproduce it, and they
did so
on the promise of love and sexual pleasure. I think that the

troublesome
issue in approaching Dworkin’s work is not that she was an
essentialist.
She was not, at least not in the way that term is usually defined.
A careful
reading shows that she was meticulous in theorizing the social
construc-
tion of human beings into male and female beings. What is at
issue, in
my view, is perhaps a more interesting problem, namely,
Dworkin’s uni-
vocal analysis of domination as sexual violence and of sexuality
as domi-
nation. In my view, what is most provocative about her is also
what is
most troubling: the notion that there is a gender structure that,
in her
account, is utterly damned as a monolithic and fundamentally
repressive
apparatus. Worse, sexuality and sex are so completely linked to
it that the
three are, for all intents and purposes, inseparable. I do not
want to believe
Dworkin. If she is right then much of what makes life
worthwhile is part
of a dark dialectic wherein life is reproduced in death. Is the
answer to
obliterate the sex distinction itself, as Firestone, Beauvoir, and
many other
early second-wave feminists argued? Is the answer, as Dworkin
might have
thought, to revisit the possibility of a feminism based less on
ironic play-
fulness and more on revolutionary activism?
Women’s Studies Program and Department of Political Science

Ohio University
References
Assiter, Alison, and Avedon Carol, eds. 1993. Bad Girls and
Dirty Pictures: The
Challenge to Reclaim Feminism. London: Pluto.
de St. Jorre, John. 1994. “The Unmasking of O.” New Yorker
70(23):42–50.
Dworkin, Andrea. 1974. Woman Hating. New York: Dutton.
———. 1976a. Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual
Politics. New York:
Harper & Row.
———. 1976b. “The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door.” In
Dworkin 1976a,
22–49.
———. 1976c. “Redefining Non-violence.” In Dworkin 1976a,
66–72.
———. 1976d. “Renouncing Sexual Equality.” In Dworkin
1976a, 10–14.
———. 1976e. “The Root Cause.” In Dworkin 1976a, 96–111.
———. 1976f. “The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage.” In
Dworkin 1976a,
50–65.
———. 1978. Right-Wing Women. New York: Perigee.
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC

———. 1987. Intercourse. New York: Free Press.
———. 1988a. “Mourning Tennessee Williams.” In her Letters
from a War Zone:
Writings, 1976–1989, 65–67. New York: Dutton.
———. 1988b. “Pornography and Grief.” In her Letters from a
War Zone: Writ-
ings, 1976–1989, 19–26. New York: Dutton.
———. 1988c. “Wuthering Heights.” In her Letters from a War
Zone: Writings,
1976–1989, 68–86. New York: Dutton.
———. 1991. Mercy. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
———. 1997. “Living in Terror, Pain: Being a Battered Wife.”
In her Life and
Death, 51–54. New York: Free Press.
Dworkin, Andrea, and Catharine A. MacKinnon. 1988.
Pornography and Civil
Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality. Minneapolis:
Organizing against
Pornography.
———. 1997. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights
Hearings. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for
Feminist Revolution.
New York: Morrow.
Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological
Theory and Women’s

Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jenefsky, Cindy, with Ann Russo. 1998. Without Apology:
Andrea Dworkin’s Art
and Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Joreen. 1973. “The Bitch Manifesto.” In Koedt, Levine, and
Rapone 1973, 50–59.
Koedt, Anne. 1973. “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” In
Koedt, Levine, and
Rapone 1973, 198–207.
Koedt, Anne, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone, eds. 1973.
Radical Feminism. New
York: Quadrangle.
Segal, Lynne, and Mary McIntosh, eds. 1993. Sex Exposed:
Sexuality and the
Pornography Debate. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Snitow, Ann, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds.
1983. Powers of Desire:
The Politics of Sexuality. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Stoltenberg, John. 1990. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex
and Justice. New
York: Penguin.
May 2017 02:13:30 UTC

Dilemmas of Femininity: Gender and the Social Construction of
Sexual Imagery
Author(s): Linda Kalof
Source: The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Nov.,
1993), pp. 639-651
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Midwest Sociological
Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121372
Accessed: 29-05-2017 02:15 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars,
researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to
increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected]
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the
Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Midwest Sociological Society, Wiley are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The Sociological Quarterly
May 2017 02:15:09 UTC

DILEMMAS OF FEMININITY:
Gender and the Social Construction
of Sexual Imagery
Linda Kalof*
State University of New York at Plattsburgh
This work builds on an interactive, interpretive approach to the
study of cultural texts
in an investigation of how images of gender and sexuality in
music television (MTV)
are read by the audience. After viewing a music video by
Michael Jackson, 80 respon-
dents described the video's portrayal of feminine and masculine
images. A content
analysis of the respondents' open-ended descriptions of the
images indicate that there
are significant gender differences in how young women and
men socially construct the
meaning of femininity in the video, particularly concerning the
intersection of gender,
sexuality and power. There are no major gender differences in
the interpretations of the
masculine image. The findings show that MTV texts have
multiple meanings for the
audience, and the interpretations of sexual imagery reflect
traditional gender ideology
about gender and sexuality.
This is a study of how young people interpret the images of
gender and sexuality as

portrayed in the "texts" of music television (MTV), one of the
most widely consumed
forms of popular culture among adolescents. The research
builds on the assumption that
gender and sexuality are social constructions, or "interactional
accomplishments," situ-
ated in and shaped by patriarchal cultural myths as articulated
in the popular culture
(Denzin 1992). The ideological "codes" for gender and
sexuality are learned early in the
socialization process, entrenched during adolescence and
transmitted in large part by the
popular culture. An exploration of how the audience interacts
with and interprets MTV
imagery advances our understanding of how "ideological
meaning is coded into the taken-
for-granted meanings that circulate in everyday life" (p. 34). It
demonstrates how contem-
porary ideology can be revealed in text which is read as a
"fact" but is only a myth
(Barthes 1972).
While MTV has historically reproduced and maintained a
gender ideology of male
power and dominance of men over women (Lewis 1990), little
is known about how
viewers actually interpret these messages. Texts have multiple
meanings because readers
create texts as they interpret and interact with them (Denzin
1992). This research explores
how the reading of an MTV text differs among young viewers
according to their inter-
pretation of the ways in which gender, sex and power are
intertwined. I argue that gender
Direct all correspondence to: Linda Kalof, Department of

Sociology, State University of New York, Plattsburgh, NY
12901.
The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 34, Number 4, pages 639-
651.
Copyright 0 1993 by JAI Press, Inc.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
ISSN: 0038-0253.
May 2017 02:15:09 UTC
640 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 34/No. 4/1993
socialization and gendered experiences have led to different
patterns of reality construction,
so that the same text will be read differently by women and
men, reflecting and reinforcing
patriarchal ideology concerning the relationship between
gender, sexuality and power.
BACKGROUND
The cultural images of femininity, masculinity and female-male
relationships have an
enduring quality. Indeed, the portrayal of men as powerful and
women as powerless and
constantly trying to "entertain, please, gratify, satisfy and
flatter men with their sexuality"
(Millett 1970, p. 81) has historically been a consistent theme

within the popular culture.
For example, in a study of popular fiction for women since
1940, Cantor (1987) found that
the electronic and print media present messages that women are
subordinate to men both
in society and in female-male relationships, that men are
powerful, and that women
depend on romance for happiness. Cantor concluded that the
media produce stories and
articles that carry a basically conservative message: "Happiness
depends on having a
heterosexual relationship ... (and) the ideal is to get the
'protection' of men as sexual
partners" (p. 210). Further, in a study of the form and structure
of the soap opera, Cantor
and Pingree (1983) found that while over the years soap opera
content has changed, the
change has been in the portrayal of sexual relationships and
morality, not in the portrayal
of gender roles.
Popular culture scholars have only just begun to analyze the
cultural content and impact
of music television. Research has found MTV to be, like other
areas of the popular
culture, decidedly sexist in orientation (Brown, Campbell and
Fischer 1986; Sherman and
Dominick 1986; Vincent, Davis and Boruszkowski 1987). In a
study of MTV content,
Vincent et al. (1987) found that 74 percent of 300 sampled
videos portrayed women in
traditional, stereotypical roles. It was common for women to be
used exclusively as
decorative objects, and there were very few videos in which
men and women were treated
equally. Baxter (1985) notes that although music video content

stresses sex, it is sex with
an adolescent orientation in which fantasy exceeds experience,
and sexual expression
centers primarily on attracting the opposite sex.
Observers of youth culture suggest that the traditional portrayal
of gender and sexual
images have important consequences on adolescent consumers
of popular culture. For ex-
ample, Brake (1985, p. 166) argues that adolescent females
receive "distinct signals about
the cult of femininity" from popular fiction and the mass
media, and these cues have a
central theme-romantic attachment and dependency on men.
But the ways in which young
people construct, interact with, and interpret the imagery in
music television is rarely the
focus of scholarly research. For example, in a comprehensive
analysis of the MTV industry,
Kaplan (1987) focuses on MTV as a powerful production-
consumption tool that sells
images, styles, and albums, but she does not address how MTV
is actually received by
teenagers. Yet, it is critical to examine "how interacting
individuals connect their lived
experiences to the cultural representations of those
experiences" (Denzin 1992, p. 35).
There is evidence that viewers make connections between MTV
texts and their personal
experiences. For example, Abt (1987, pp. 106-107) found that
teenagers, particularly
young women, are more likely than other consumers to report
personal connections or
conscious "bridging experiences" with music videos. Teen
viewers are also highly in-

volved in music television, and videos often remind them of
people or things that happen
May 2017 02:15:09 UTC
Dilemmas of Femininity 641
in their daily lives (Abt 1987). In a study of gender ideology
and MTV, Lewis (1990) argues
that MTV's "female-address videos" have had an important
impact on the female audi-
ence. She discusses the history of MTV as a popular culture
product that reflects an ideolog-
ical struggle over gender inequality, and, as textual readers,
women bring psychological,
sociological and political interests to their interpretations of
female video texts. Finally, in
an analysis of how MTV is received by the audience, Brown
and Schulze (1990) re-
searched the effects of race, gender and fandom on the
interpretation of scenarios in
Madonna's music videos. Their analysis of college students'
reactions to two of Madon-
na's videos shows that there are gender and racial differences
in how the scenarios are
received by the viewers.
My work focuses on the active role viewers assume in
constructing their interpretations
of the images of gender, power and sexuality in one of Michael
Jackson's music videos,
"The Way You Make Me Feel." This study explores the

meanings attributed to MTV
imagery by analyzing young viewers' descriptions of gender
and sexuality as portrayed in
the video. Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel" was
selected as the music video
viewing source for this study for a number of reasons. First,
during the initial stages of the
study period (Fall 1987-Spring 1988), the video was very
popular among adolescents and
considerable "air-time" was devoted to it. Second, the video
depicts strikingly traditional
images of gender and sexuality. Thus, the Michael Jackson
video was considered to be an
ideal source to discover the ways in which young people
perceive the expressions of
popular culture as "vehicles for the transmission of patriarchal
myths and attitudes"
(Sheffield 1987, p. 186).
The video portrays Michael Jackson as a young man who
becomes infatuated with a
beautiful woman as she walks down a dark, urban street.
Michael Jackson follows, indeed
stalks, the woman, singing and dancing his adoration for her,
becoming more insistent on
his need and desire for her, and clearly not allowing the woman
to escape his attention.
The young woman says nothing, initially ignoring and rejecting
him, but eventually
warming to the "cat and mouse" game. In the end, she opens
her arms to him after a
somewhat frightening and threatening scene which suggests a
gang rape by a group of
tough street men, implying that beautiful women are in danger

unless they have a man to
protect them.
I read the Jackson video as a text laden with ideological
messages that validate patri-
archal gender arrangements, e.g., that women can and should
use their sexual attractive-
ness to get the attention of men, that men must pursue women
to convince them that they
are sincere and that women, in order to avoid appearing
promiscuous, should reject initial
advances and then finally submit to the desires of men. In
addition, this video is a good
example of what Lewis (1990) identifies as MTV's male-
oriented address that dominated
the video industry until the recent advent of female MTV
performers with a female-
oriented address, such as Tina Turner and Madonna. The image
of "the street" was MTV's
preferred address to male adolescents and evoked "male-
adolescent discourse by repre-
senting boys' privileged position . . . (w)hen girls appear, they
were represented as equal
participants in the symbolic system of the street, but functioned
as devices to delineate the
male-adolescent discourse" (Lewis 1990, pp. 43-44). But while
the messages and sym-
bolism of the Jackson video appear distinct and clearly
conveyed, the goal of the project
was to understand how the teenage viewer constructs the
images of gender in the video,
particularly the relationship between gender, sexuality and
power.

May 2017 02:15:09 UTC
642 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 34/No. 4/1993
METHOD
The Jackson video was shown to 80 young women and men,
ranging in age from 13 to 22
years and primarily from white middle- and working-class
backgrounds.' The youngest
respondents (13 to 16 years) were recruited on a volunteer
basis from a large metropolitan
neighborhood in Northern Virginia. Written permission was
obtained from parents to have
the children watch and discuss the Jackson video, and the
young teens were shown the
video in five-person, same-gender focus groups. After watching
the video, the teens were
asked to respond to the following questions on a self-
administered open-ended question-
naire: 1) "What is the image of women (men) as portrayed in
the video?" 2) "What
adjectives or verbs would you use to describe the image of
women (men) as portrayed in
the video?" and 3) "Does the video remind you of anything in
your personal life, such as
specific relationships, people or situations?" After the
questionnaires were collected by
the investigator, the teens were asked to share their reactions,
and the three questions were
discussed in an open format to focus the group discussion of
music television. The older

respondents (17 to 22 years) were undergraduate students at a
state university in upstate
New York. These college students were recruited from two
classes in research methods,
and they received course credit for participation in a research
project. Students viewed the
video at the beginning of the class session, and immediately
after watching the video,
each student was asked to respond to the above questions using
a self-administered open-
ended questionnaire.
The open-ended responses were analyzed for content using a
procedure and categories
developed as part of an earlier study of MTV image
interpretations (Kalof 1990).2 In this
pilot study, 39 respondents similar to those used here viewed
42 different music videos
(between 6 and 13 different videos each) for a total of 283
viewings during a four day
period in October 1988. For each video watched, respondents
wrote a brief, open-ended
description of the video's portrayal of gender and sexuality.
This large number of re-
sponses on a large sample of videos was content analyzed using
a "gender-blind" protocol
in which the analyst did not know the gender of the respondent.
The goal of the content
analysis was to identify gender image categories as constructed
by the viewers. Every
effort was made to preserve the viewers' interpretation of
meaning and to insure that the
resulting categories provided a reasonably exhaustive list of
gender images as read by the
viewers of MTV texts.

The major image categories were then employed in a second
pass through the 283
observation sheets to code the frequency with which an image
description fell into one or
more of the major categories. In general, it was not difficult to
assign responses to
categories because there were strong textual cues used by
nearly all respondents in their
descriptions, and their descriptors (words and phrases) were
used to operationalize spe-
cific categories. For example, "strong, dominant, confident,
forceful, superior, in control"
were coded into a Powerful/In Control category, "unsure,
insecure, inferior, less domi-
nant, low self-esteem" were coded into a Indecisive/Submissive
category, "scared, fright-
ened, trapped, helpless" were coded into a Vulnerable/Weak
category, and so on.3
The open-ended descriptions of imagery in the Michael Jackson
video were content
analyzed using the same categories as in the pilot study. An
image was considered
dominant if the respondent observed and wrote about only one
image category or if one
image was clearly primary and structured most of the written
description. In 95 percent of
the cases a single image was dominant in the respondents'
written descriptions. In the case
May 2017 02:15:09 UTC

Dilemmas of Femininity 643
of multiple images that seemed of equal weight to the
respondent, the response was placed
in an "other" category.4 Each response was coded
independently by two coders. An ini-
tial round of coding produced agreement between the two
coders on the dominant image
categories for 81 percent of responses. Any responses for
which there was disagreement
were discussed and recoded after an agreement on the
appropriate category was reached.
The final step in the methodology was to compare the
responses from females and males
to capture gender differences in interpretation.
It is important to note that the content analysis method used in
this study is not
thoroughly reader-responsive and restricts the analysis of how
readers interpret MTV
texts.5 Content analysis inevitably stresses the manifest
content of specific messages
(Woollacott 1982). My strategy is a hybrid that tries to build
on the insights of contempo-
rary cultural theory but also produces sufficient information for
an examination of gender
variation in textual readings. Respondents constructed their
interpretations of the video
and expressed that interpretation on response sheets that
structured their response only to
the extent that it directed their attention, after the fact, to the
male and female images in
the video. The content analysis of these responses then imposes
categories on those

interpretations. This compromise is still reasonably faithful to
the readings of the teen-
agers watching the videos and yields substantive rather than
just statistical conclusions
(Tesch 1990, p. 25) about the reading of MTV texts.
RESULTS
As shown in Table 1, the results of the analysis of the open-
ended descriptions of gender
image in the Michael Jackson video show that there is a large
gender difference in the
interpretation of the female image, but essentially no difference
in the interpretation of
Table 1
Description of Gender Image in Michael Jackson's Music
Video, "The Way You Make Me Feel."
Gender of Female Male
Respondent (N = 34) (N = 46)
Female Image*
Powerful/In Control 29 15
Vulnerable/Weak 26 6
Teasing/Playing Hard-to-Get 18 35
Passive/Indecisive/Submissive 15 24
Other 12 20
Total 100 100
Male Image**
Powerful/In Control 62 65
Vulnerable/Weak 20 20

Research Project Part 2Summary 1 [Article Title Goes Here].docx

Research Project Part 2Summary 1 [Article Title Goes Here].docx

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Research Project Part 2Summary 1 [Article Title Goes Here].docx

Similar to Research Project Part 2Summary 1 [Article Title Goes Here].docx (16)

More from ronak56

More from ronak56 (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Research Project Part 2Summary 1 [Article Title Goes Here].docx