Thanks to Mark V. Kormes for the link to ContraPoint’s vlog on envy. It’s an excellent diagnosis of this pathology — including apt insights from Aristotle, Nietzsche, Paglia, and other important names. And she’s even read Schoeck’s masterwork Envy. Contrapoints’s video is well worth your time for its coverage of envy’s many manifestations.
Towards the end (around 1:36:30), she gives me some snark for my Explaining Postmodernism take on Andrea Dworkin and the all-men-are-rapists charge. Dworkin did say a lot of things, some harsher and some milder, and she was not always consistent (even in the same book). But here is the key quotation I give in support of my assessment, taken directly from Dworkin’s Intercourse:
“The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation.”
Dworkin, *Intercourse* (p. 63)
Does that not sound like a description of rape?
A side point about interpretation: Consistency is not a virtue for postmodernists, nor for their fellow-travelers for whom language is a tool of social power only, not a tool for finding truth and for communication with the purpose of rational persuasion.
Related:
My 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. On page 4 I quote Dworkin and link her to Catharine MacKinnon and their joint call for the censorship of pornography on radical feminist — including some postmodernist — grounds.
My January 2019 podcast “Envy’s Moral-Psychological Challenge.”