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I suppose it’s a bit disrespectful to write this piece before Andrea Dworkin – avid anti-porn feminist –
is even laid to rest after her death at the age of 58 on April 11; however, I have a particularly rocky history with Ms. Dworkin
and am not all that concerned with proper goodbyes.
Last night, in honor of AD’s passing, Jason and I watched “Debbie Does Dallas” on DVD. Jason picked it
up for me at Jerry’s Video Rewind in Los Feliz, an establishment renowned for its collection of cult classics and pornography
– cult classic porn, especially. I’ve been wanting to develop an old school porn habit for a while now, and Dworkin’s
passing seemed the appropriate moment. Her life ended too soon, and I’m sorry for that, but her death signals a close,
I hope, to a trend in feminism that has plagued the movement for far too long.
While Dworkin had some good points about the role of rape and abuse in pornography, she was quite fond of tossing the baby
in with the bath water. What she consistently failed to recognize in her writings is that rape and abuse (sexual or otherwise)
are not products of pornography, they are illegal acts of violence, whether photographed/recorded or not. She defines pornography
as “the graphic and sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words,” going on to report
the role of rape and violence; however, it is never her way to differentiate between, say, a fairly innocuous (but poorly
made) film like “Debbie…” and recorded acts of violence against women (obviously, there is a range of staged
S & M type stuff that falls somewhere in between, but I’m playing the extreme devil’s advocate here and have no
time for deconstructing the history of porn theory). She attacks the porn industry, a rather seedy, but legitimate affair,
instead of independent criminals recording illegal acts. The truth is, the porn industry (here I’m referring mostly
to film), which includes unions just like Hollywood, has very strict guidelines for the material it produces. It’s
a big cash cow that, according to Frank Rich in his essay “Naked Capitalists,” brings in at least $10 billion
a year – more than professional baseball, football and basketball combined. When it comes to dough like that, people
get a little anal about following the rules so as to not lose any of the earnings. Dworkin’s mistake is that she takes
pornography personally. It is only degrading to women, not beneficial to them, when the reality is that it’s
a little bit of both. The women of “Debbie Does Dallas” give a lot of blow jobs, but they also enjoy reminiscing
about their experience on VH1’s I Love the Seventies nearly thirty years later. They aren’t sweating it.
But we’ll come back to Debbie and her crew in a moment.
In my sophomore year of college – 1992-93, the height of second-wave, separatist feminism on Michigan State’s
campus – Andrea Dworkin was chosen as the speaker for Take Back the Night. As a member of the university’s “Women’s
Council,” I was required to take part in this affair. My introduction to Dworkin’s work had been minimal –
I’d only taken one Women’s Studies class at the time – but I already had begun to question her absolutism
(I would eventually distance myself, in my junior year, from the MSU feminist crowd largely due to attacks on pornography
workers and strippers led by privileged college chicks who had the audacity to define what is appropriate for other women,
largely far less privileged than themselves). As a low-lady on the council’s totem pole, I was one of the three or
four women assigned to work security. See, Andrea Dworkin wanted female only security, and we could not afford to hire anyone,
so we did it ourselves. She seemed just fine with that. She just felt that some security was needed, as she was, presumably,
the target of violence due to her controversial views. I was rather stunned, as a twenty-year old college student with no
real training in anything beyond smoking a lot of pot and listening to grunge music, that I would be on the front lines with
a woman who expected possible violent acts against her. So there I stood, to the front and side of the stage as AD spoke,
and thought not only about getting high but also about my safety and how willing Dworkin was to sacrifice it for her own (not
that I could have kept her safe, really). I was not trained to lay down my life for anyone, nor was I paid a single dime.
Plus, I had to wear a particularly ugly PURPLE Take Back the Night T-shirt (the color of “security”) and stand
around looking like an asshole. It seemed to me that Andrea Dworkin felt it was her duty to watch the backs of women all
over America against potential violence against them – irregardless of studies that indicate pornography as a symptom,
sometimes, of the disease of the man already prone to violent acts and not the other way around – but not her duty to
concern herself with those charged to protect her body from potential violence. This pissed me off. But back to Debbie.
I’ve never really felt one way or the other about porn. Ultimately, I think the attention it gets from either side
– those virulently for or against it – is a bit overplayed. It’s porn. It has it’s place, and that
place, at least for mainstream pornography, is more related to the genre shared by the Farrelly brothers than by a room full
of, as Arlo Guthrie might posit, father rapers. This brings me to Debbie, who never actually does Dallas at all; rather,
she does her boss, Mr. Greenfield, who helps to pay her way to Dallas so that she may try out to be a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader.
Debbie and her friends, presumably high school students (they’re all pushing thirty, and the “high school”
guys are often balding), decide to offer men their services (not strange men – mostly their bosses and the school librarian
who likes to spank) to raise cash for their trip to Dallas. Each man asks “How much would it cost to…”
and each girl invariably answers, “Whatever you want.” They are not very savvy prostitutes, which I think is
the point. They’re doing it for “fun”; they don’t plan on making a habit of such behavior. The film’s
acting is its greatest asset, as every actor stumbles through lines that are, likely, written on a cue card in front of them.
The actress who plays Debbie, Bambi Woods, is the worst of all, gasping through words in a not at all sexy way and rolling
her eyes open so wide she looks like a creepy horror film dolly. The plot loosens rapidly, as the focus becomes sex. The
sex scenes are overly long and the shots are so close up that they mesmerize like a kaleidoscope. Rather than being at all
sexually arousing, the sex sequences seem like they could serve as the non-specific visual background at a rave – bouncing
to the music in a rhythmic dance. The thing I found to be so amusing about “Debbie Does Dallas” (aside from the
fantastic soundtrack) is its lightheartedness. Much of the seventies porn that is vilified by Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon
is admittedly violent (I won’t even touch the “Deep Throat” discussion wherein Linda Lovelace admits to
having been “coerced” with violence into the acts she performed in the film – an issue I, personally, think
is undermined in any discussion of the film itself when the problem is clearly one concerning the making of the film
and any illegalities therein), whereas “Debbie…” could not be more, well, innocent. It’s not particularly
arousing, but it’s not offensive, either. It looks like an episode of “Charlie’s Angels” with some
bonus scenes. Now, I don’t know whether Bambi and her pals performed their acts willingly, but the product itself,
though it ended up on the list of five films reviewed by the congressional committee on pornos in 1985, is somewhat silly
and actually quite watchable.
I’m not sure that I have anywhere to go here. I don’t mean to vilify Dworkin, though I’m not fully against
doing so, either. In a feminist philosophy class in my junior year of college, we looked at photos and comics in Penthouse,
Hustler and other porno mags. My professor, separatist feminist Marilyn Frye, went out of her way to point out the
violence in the photos. The degradation. The heternormation of submissive women. I saw that. I did. I got what she was
saying, and I have a lot of respect for Dr. Frye; however, I never felt the urgency she postulated in regards to pornography.
I don’t think Debbie’s choice to hump her boss in his sporting goods store, fulfilling his wild pubescent male
fantasies of football players and cheerleaders decades post-due, really hurts anyone. I don’t think watching it is
harmful. I think being fucked up enough to not differentiate between fantasy and reality is remarkably harmful. But that’s
something for shrinks to deal with. For now, I’m going to continue my foray into 1970’s porn. It lifts “bad”
to a new level, and helps me to remember that there’s no great mystery to sex. It’s just a kaleidoscope, afterall.
Salon.com article on Dworkin
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