Why does Catharine MacKinnon claim that Andrea Dworkin would have supported gender woo woo?

The Andrea I knew would have been appalled at the men claiming to be women and demanding access to female-only rape crisis centres, bathrooms and prison cells

MacKinnon

Below is part of a 2003 review by Andrea Dworkin of Amy Bloom’s 2002 book ‘Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude.’ It appeared in the ‘New Statesman’ under the title “Out of the Closet,” published on September 22, 2003.

An online version of the review once had been available until sometime within the past year. But it appears to have disappeared.

Only two pieces by Dworkin now appear in the publication: “The Day I Was Drugged and Raped” (June 5, 2000) and “Andrea Dworkin on Kate Millett: Sexual Politics” (July 14, 2003).

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“The heterosexual men who dress as women like the artifice. They have a fetishistic relationship to dressing in women’s clothes and using make-up. There is a lustful, narcissistic desire to be viewed as female. The fetish is a ‘mixture of attraction and envy that often leads these men to have sex with women while thinking of themselves as male lesbians.’ These are the ‘cross-dressing cops’ promised in the subtitle of ‘Normal’; according to Bloom, ‘Heterosexual cross-dressers are disproportionately represented among the retired military; they are often first-born sons, and often quite masculine-looking, which is why the rest of us struggle so with their appearance.’

The men claim a hidden female side that cross-dressing expresses but, as Bloom puts it, ‘the woman within is entirely the Maybelline version.’ The men do pay some lip-service to feminism and tree-hugging. It is their wives who suffer. Bloom points out that these are conventional women who stay in marriages with an unforgiving double standard. If the wives cross-dressed—didn’t shave their body hair, or spent money on expensive artificial facial hair—the marriages wouldn’t survive. The double standard has another side.

As one wife remarked: ‘For 20 years he couldn’t help with the dishes because he was watching football. Now he can’t help because he’s doing his nails. Is that different?’ Bloom had trouble with these guys. She did not want to be cruel or illiberal, but had to conclude ‘that a passion for a person, or a capacity to love people, is different from a sexual impulse that is directed toward an object or an act and is greater than the desire for any person.’ Welcome to the wider world of heterosexual men who don’t cross-dress.” (pp. 53-54)

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Andrea Dworkin, “Out of the Closet,” ‘New Statesman,’ September 22, 2003, pp. 53-54

Andrea Dworkin