Scrungle Gungle’s Reviews > Right-Wing Women > Status Update

Finishing the chapter out, Dworkin theorizes two ways women are socially controlled: the brothel and the farm model. She goes on to outline how each function and how the farm model is becoming overlaid with the brothel mode. Then, she begins to predict the consequences of new medical technologies - claiming these, in part, will allow the eventual circumscription turned eradication of women’s rights.

Here in the chapter The Coming Gynocide, Dworkin examines how welfare, medicalization, and retirement homes all are examples of systemic approaches to ridding a male-supremacist society of “useless” women. She is concerned primarily with how welfare policies enforce paternalistic sexual regulation and how they are used to crudely control how women, be they poor, not white, etc., act.

Onto Abortion - here Dworkin’s evaluations are at most risk of being dated, with marital rape being outlawed across the US in 1993. But, the main point that intercourse is laden with the use of force on every level remains - this is where people assume Dworkin is against sex (which is not true!). Also, her observations about the use of religion on the matter of marital rape and abortion are very timely.

Rereading Ch.2: The Politics of Intelligence. Dworkin provides some interesting analysis on literacy, different kinds of intelligence (sexual, creative, etc.), how Moralism is deployed to hedge women in, and how right-wing women respond to it. She argues for the sex-class distinction before anything else. I wish she spent more time discussing labour and the workplace, which is not actually a focus later in the book.