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DiscussionDworkin's "Woman Hating"
So when Macmillan announced they were re-publishing 3 of Dworkin's books in paperback, I snapped them up that very day. I had never read Woman Hating before, so chose that to read first as my nightstand book.
It was great, but when I got to the end, Dworkin discusses how the only possible liberation for women is moving towards androgyny. OK, I can somewhat see what she's getting at--roles of active/passive, dominant/submissive have done a lot of mischief and harm to women. But then she follows it up by talking about how transsexuals are in a sense leading the way, and that "every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions." She goes on to say that as the society moves further into androgyny, "transsexuality as we know it" will disappear. She also states that "As sex roles dissolve, the particular erotic content of transvestism dissolves." Something else that is going to dissolve, she says, will be the incest taboo: "The incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free." Destroying the incest taboo also entails the need to "destroy the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture."
I feel like she didn't really think this all through very well. If she was living now, I choose to believe her stance would be different. But maybe I am being naive? What do you think?