From Matthew Yglesias:<\/p>\n
“A liberal,” Irving Kristol once observed, “is one who says that it’s all right for an 18-year-old girl to perform in a pornographic movie as long as she gets paid the minimum wage.” I guess Kristol’s dictum needs to be updated. Today, a liberal is one who says it’s all right for an 18-year-old girl to perform in a pornographic movie as long as the cast “looks like America.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That Kristol quote is actually pretty smart, though it obviously fails to take into consideration that (in my opinion, rather illiberal) anti-porn faction of feminism. A libertarian is someone who says that it’s all right for an 18-year-old girl to perform in a pornographic at whatever wage, and a conservative says it’s all wrong.<\/p><\/div>\n
I’m not sure why the quote should take into account the anti-porn faction of feminism. That faction has been more-or-less led by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, both of whom would, I think, passionately deny being liberal. In her writings, MacKinnon is as bitterly anti-liberal as any conservative.<\/p>\n
MacKinnon and Dworkin’s leadership was unfortunate, in my view. As brilliant as both women are, they nonetheless led radical feminism into a futile fight for anti-porn legislation that split feminism. The result was to sabatoge what had been, up to that point, an effective radical feminist movement with many great accomplishments. (Susan Brownmiller makes a similar argument in her memoir In Our Time<\/i>). I don’t think radical feminism has yet recovered from the wrong turn it took in the 80s..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From Matthew Yglesias: The end of the latest G-file: “A liberal,” Irving Kristol once observed, “is one who says that it’s all right for an 18-year-old girl to perform in a pornographic movie as long as she gets paid the … Continue reading