The Failure of Rage

Death has been big in the news lately. First and most publicized has been the passing of pope John Paul II, and tucked neatly in the same few days Prince Rainier of Monaco. And on April 9, 2005, the well known radical feminist and anti-porn crusader Andrea Dworkin died at the age of 58. Now, I never met Dworkin, and so far as I know she was never aware of my work, but I think it is safe to say the two of us wouldn't have gotten along.

The reasons for my guess are multiple. First, I reject many of the basic assumptions Dworkin made about both the human condition and the nature of human beings. I reject her argument that human relations are strictly political and power-based, and I reject the Marxist idea that human beings are defined by which groups they belong to (in the case of radical feminist ideology, male and female, particularly), which I believe has crippled modern feminism. But it must be said in Dworkin's favor that she cast enough of a shadow that her death and probable legacy have brought out in me a few introspective moments, which I will attempt to elaborate on here.

As is usually the case with controversial lives, the details of Dworkin's feelings and opinions can sometimes be hard to pin down, and doubtless they changed as she aged, as they do for all of us. Some accused her of arguing that all heterosexual intercourse was rape, for example, though she denied having said this. She also denied that the Canadian ban on pornography commonly thought to be influenced by her and fellow anti-porn crusader Catharine MacKinnon wound up banning her own works. To be fair, I won't dwell on such specifics, since I have not researched them adequately, and since the details of them are not really relevant to my thoughts here.

Beyond her politics and reputation, though, I think it is safe to say after reading even a sampling of her work that Andrea Dworkin was defined by her rage. It permeates her writings, just as it permeates radical feminism. She was angry, and despite a reputation for shyness, seldom hesitated to tell us how she felt.

To be sure, Dworkin had a lot to be angry about. The history of humanity is filled with brutality against women, and one of the most prominent features of today's world is that on many parts of our planet, it actually seems to be getting worse, though this may well simply be a feature of the fact that the general methods of oppression have become so sophisticated. Nonetheless, the simultaneous efforts among a wide variety of religious groups worldwide to eliminate the rights of women should provoke us into rage, as should the modern growth of slavery, including sexual slavery that preys on the most vulnerable. We should be enraged by the tolerance of extremes of poverty and social decay that strike women and children hardest, even as the governments of the developed world freely sell weapons that frequently contribute to and even cause genocides like the one being largely ignored in Darfur, where rape is simply another weapon.

But since it was her defining feature, we should now ask ourselves: what did Dworkin's rage accomplish? Can we point to her work and her life and say they were successful? This is not merely a question we should ask of Andrea Dworkin, of course-- it is a question we should all regularly ask of ourselves. In Dworkin's case, I think her legacy is likely to be seen as a mixed bag, something Susie Bright seemed to indicate in her own comments on Dworkin's death. To be sure, Dworkin's attitudes about pornography, sex and the erotic were defined by her rage, but as Bright notes, she did at least talk about the subject before others did, giving it some level of intellectual attention that it had never had before.

But here her contributions ended. Rage had brought Dworkin to porn, but it got her stuck there too. Again and again she said the same thing, making the same assertions, using the same flawed, simplistic assumptions about men and women and sexuality. She really did seem to believe that pornography does only one thing (encourage rape), that it exists for only one reason (encourage rape), and all men are alike in their sexuality, all working together in a social construct designed to rape, humiliate, and control women. Actual research into sex crimes and sexuality was only useful to Dworkin when it supported her rage, regardless of its quality as science, and this led her, in circumstances both tragic and ironic, to reject modernity itself and ally herself with social conservatives who saw and continue to see all sex as sin and pornography as a foot in the door for their desires to restrict freedom generally, and the freedom of women in particular. In the end, Dworkin's efforts alienated far more feminists than they attracted, even as many of her legal efforts against porn were rebuffed as unconstitutional.

Here, I think we can learn from Dworkin and her life. As an example of distilled and unrepentant rage, she can teach us about anger and its effects. In the early days of modern feminism, rage was commonplace, and I think it had its place in that context. Women were actively discriminated against, and that discrimination was so pervasive and so institutionalized that very public rage was needed to jar society out of its complacency and to point out that by the standards of freedom and equality America had fought to protect in the Second World War, women were being cheated. As the comfortable post-war society of the 1950's aged, and as the birth control pill found its way into American life, the sudden appearance of protesters in large numbers, yelling in their anger and frustration, could and did effect some very real changes. Dworkin's early work came in this environment, and as Bright noted, it did cause discussion about pornography in a new way. Rage, then, has its place; to feel it is natural, as natural as our sex drives and our need for love. There are few more effective calls to action, few more effective ways to get people to pay attention. For this very reason, in fact, much (but not by any means all) of my upcoming novel Portent was written in a state of advanced rage.

But in the end, rage does not build anything; in the long run it is destructive, not constructive. We can see this in Dworkin's efforts against porn, which were mostly just thinly veiled efforts to harm men by branding all of them as rapists or their accomplices, which naturally led most men to reject her ideas as nonsense. She did not seek a compromise with men, the overwhelming majority of whom are not rapists and who seek, as most women do, the love of a good partner; rather, reading Dworkin's work leaves the impression that she felt all things male need to be destroyed, and the notion that women might enjoy and appreciate men and many aspects of their sexuality was seen as treason in her war. And so her message became only the rage, never building anything, never offering us a better world, never offering us meaning or hope.

This is the tragedy of Andrea Dworkin. It seems to me likely that Mackinnon and others will carry on her campaign, and that they, like her, will do so fueled by rage. For the rest of us, however, and certainly for me, there is a different and more positive lesson Dworkin can teach us. Rage has its place, and it must be given its due. But just as there is a time for rage, there must as well be a time to step back from it. I know that rage will come for me again, as it does for us all, but it need not consume us as it seems to have consumed Andrea Dworkin. Others, like for example John Walsh, deal with a rage no less intense than Dworkin's, but they manage to turn it into something positive, something that adds to the quality of the human condition rather than detracts from it. As I face my own life and my own rage, I can only hope to do the same.

Real Horror Movies

Once in a while, I find myself in a hotel, and since most hotels have cable TV, I get the chance to watch things I wouldn't ordinarily watch. Such was the case recently, when I took a look at the apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later. Now, I must warn the reader that some spoilers lie below, so read on at your own risk.

28 Days Later is part of a subgenre of moviemaking that includes such end of the world films as The Omega Man (which must have been like a wet dream for future NRA president Charlton Heston, running around an abandoned city with a machine gun shooting at anything that moved) and The Quiet Earth, combined with the classic zombie film, best typified by Night of the Living Dead and its zillions of knock-offs.

In brief, the plot of 28 Days Later is as follows: Violent anti-vivsectionists break into a primate lab where research is being done on a virus called "Rage". They release an infected chimp, get infected, and spread the disease off camera. The virus seems to be a rather nasty combination of rabies and ebola, spreading through blood, with the effect of making the victim homicidal. We must suspend our disbelief a bit here, since any disease that acted as quickly as this one does would be fairly easy to contain in a country with an advanced public health infrastructure like Great Britain, given its apparent incubation period of about a minute and the fact that its symptoms are so hard to miss. But back to our story...

28 days later Jim, our protagonist, awakens from a coma to find that the virus has infected most of the population, effectively ending civilization in England and presumably the world (outbreaks in New York and Paris are mentioned).Jim joins up with some other uninfected folks and for a while he fights the hordes of the infected zombies while trying to remain uninfected himself. Eventually, he joins with a lady pharmacist and a father and daughter to locate the source of a radio message that promises hope, and they flee London for the countryside.

What they find is a group of about a dozen soldiers who have barricaded themselves in an old English manor house, hoping to hold out until the infected all starve to death. For a brief time there seems to be hope, but then the movie takes a darker turn, as the despairing soldiers have been promised women by their commander in order to maintain hope and discipline. Apparently they have given up on the future and figure they might as well spend the rest of their lives at least getting laid, even if it's with a young teen girl. The later part of the movie focuses not on Jim fighting the infected, but on Jim fighting the soldiers, who decide to kill him since he won't join in their little rape-a-thon (the girl's dad is already dead, having become infected and then getting shot).

Responses to this turn, if we may judge by the reviews for the movie over at Amazon, are mixed. To be sure, it is an unusual twist for a zombie film, which typically thrive on their black and white ethics (kill or be killed), and many horror film fans were disappointed by the movie's lack of explicit gore and its shift in attention away from the zombies. But I found the plot twist, and indeed the depiction of "Rage" as a disease, to be quite interesting. Rage, as we can see in the astonishingly violent world of today, is indeed infectious. What distinguishes the "infected" of 28 Days Later is that their rage is depicted in such a physical way, screaming and vomiting blood and all. Rage is ugly, and to manifest it physically the way this film does is a fascinating allegory.

But rage is not the most terrifying thing about 28 Days Later. The infected zombies are in fact not terrifying at all; they are sick and dangerous, and there are certainly some scary moments when Jim and his comrades are fleeing from them, but what makes this film most horrifying is the behavior of the survivors, particularly the soldiers.

British soldiers are among the best trained in the world, notorious for their discipline, and when the soldiers first appeared in the film I felt a natural sense of relief. They represented hope, organization, and civilization, all of which had been lost in the chaos of the epidemic. But as I noted above, this quickly turned sour as they made their intentions clear. These men were in fact much more frightening than the zombies, because the evil they intended could not be blamed on a virus but was rather a basic part of their being human. And most of all, it was so believable, their behavior.

In today's world soldiers occupy a fairly exalted place. There are people out there like Osama bin Laden who really do want to kill millions of us, who want to destroy civilization, and soldiers are quite correctly seen as a part of our defense against such monsters. We need soldiers, as anyone who has ever witnessed the use of the military in response to natural disasters can attest. But it is important as well to remember that soldiers are human too, and that they are trained to kill, and that war is never as ethically simple as a zombie movie. By virtue of their weapons and training, soldiers possess very real power, and it is an unfortunate fact of history that human beings with power are inherently corruptible.

We combat this danger with laws and tradition. In the United Stares and Britain, the military is supposed to be under civilian command, and these civilians are, in theory at least, elected officials. And there is no doubt that the militaries of both countries do not, by and large, currently present a threat to their own populations, as the militaries of nations without the rule of law often do; the situation becomes even worse in societies where the rule of law has broken down and the streets are ruled by armed gangs. But the recent Abu Ghriab scandal, no less than the My Lai massacre, demonstrates that none of us, even the soldiers of the most professional armies in history, are immune to the corrosive effects of violence and the sense of power that comes from controlling a weapon.

We need the military, and to be sure the majority of our veterans deserve our compassion and our respect (two things our current administration often seems loathe to give them) but to worship the institution as flawless and to overlook its very real failings is to court disaster. If anything, the need for firm ethics is strongest in wartime or other times of stress, because these are precisely the times when the abuse of power is most likely. And so we should, I think, take the plot twist found in 28 Days Later as a warning; the time to be most careful of our own behavior, and the time to demand the best behavior from our armed forces is not in times of peace when things are easy, but rather in hard and frightening times, when armies of zombies are at the gates, or when the far more frightening monsters are flying airplanes into buildings.

If our military does not hold itself to high ethical standards, we will quickly find that the country they are supposed to defend will not be worth defending.