Dworkin on Blowjobs
A while back I linked to a fun essay on blowjobs in the Village Voice, which talked about the way dominance and submission add to the heat of the cocksucking experience for both parties. There was briefly on Yes Portal a response taking serious issue, too serious I might argue, with that view of the blowjob. What’s most interesting about the response, however, is this characterization of Andrea Dworkin’s writings on blowjobs:
In her book Mercy, she [Dworkin] described a blow-job as “stretching muscles that can’t be stretched” and warned women curious about the act, that “the pain will push you down to hell, near death, to coma, to the screamless scream, an agony, no voice, a ripped muscle, shreds swimming in blood in your throat.”
Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever saw? I’m thinking maybe Dworkin was doing it wrong.
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Dworkin was definitely doing it wrong! It is one of the best experiences a woman can have sexually if done right.
A few years to late, but anyhow: I read those same words earlier today, quoted in the Cinema Sewer book, where it seems she’s talking specifically about Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat. So it’s not really her views on blowjobs (though I guess I wouldn’t put it past her), but her stream-of-thoughts, it seems, when seeing a deep-throating for the first time.
“[…] So he fucks her in the throat to cure her, he fucks her hard in the throat but slow so you can see the whole thing; and she don’t seem ripped apart, she’s smiling, and happy, shit — she’s conscious, she’s alive; if someone goes past that place in your throat you choke, you vomit, you can’t breathe. And if he goes past it with a big penis he stretches muscles that can’t be stretched and he pushes your throat out where it can’t pushed out, as if the outsides tore open so it could expand so the penis could go through, the pain will push you down to hell, near death to coma, to the screamless scream, an agony, no voice, a ripped muscle, shreds swimming in blood in your throat, thin ribbons of muscle soaking in blood. But Linda smiles, and the camera doesn’t let up, and the penis is big, it comes out so we can see how big it is in case we forgot and it goes down, her throat stretches like a snake eating an alligator [… etc]”
(I’d never have imagined myself defending Dworkin on the net, and having Cinema Sewer book as reference makes the experience even stranger. Oh well.)
Andreas, thanks for the extra context. But why do you imagine that it functions as a defense of Dworkin?
I’ve seen that movie. And even Dworkin admits, Lovelace keeps smiling. All that choke / vomit / blood / pain imagery, it only exists in Dworkin’s mind. And that’s exactly what I criticize her for — for taking her own dark fantasy of pain and insisting it’s the reality, even as the photographic evidence that she’s wrong looks her in the eye, and smiles.
Do the frat boys and sorority girls who chug (shotgun) beer, first have to shred their throats with broom handles? Do circus sword-swallowers (some swallow quite a number at once!) lose there voices performing their art? No… They merely relax their throat muscles. Linda Lovelace divulged that she had self taught herself with green bananas, and when filmmakers later discovered her talent, the original title of what later became “Deep Throat” was scuttled, and the movie took on a whole new plot line.
It sounds to me as though Dworkin may have had vaginismus of the throat (I’m not sure what the proper medical term would be). She may have had a mild to severe phobia (Phallaphobia or perhaps ithyphallophobia or medorthophobia). If she had consulted with a therapist, she might have gotten over it, with the right prescription medications and/or desensitizing exercises.
Lovelace is on video interviews and in print articulately defending her DEEP THROAT work during the height of her fame. Her screen career later took a dive after home video-players and home video-cameras made everyone a porn star. She became bitter and turned to the feminists who wooed her for their own agenda purposes. When she realized that there was no real money in it for her in anti-pornography (Dworkin made money, but didn’t share it with Linda), she went back to the porn industry to earn a living. In “The Other Hollywood”, Lovelace said she felt “used” by the anti-porn movement. “Between Andrea Dworkin and Kitty MacKinnon, they’ve written so many books, and they mention my name and all that, but financially they’ve never helped me out. They made a few bucks off me, just like everybody else.”
Author Hart Williams coined the term “Linda Syndromeâ€? to refer to women who leave pornography for various reasons and later repudiate their past career by condemning the industry.
Thank you for pointing out an actual quote of Andrea Dworkin. I think everyone needs an education on the craziest people to exist, and their crazy, irrational followings. She is a prime example, yet is not criticized nearly enough in proportion to her insanity.
Certainly this nut had a “phallaphobia” at the very least, seeing as how she is a pathological man-hater and a bigot. Okay, brief rant concluded.
[…] this made explicit in the notorious “threads swimming in blood in your throat” passage by Andrea Dworkin, who, upon seeing the movie Deep Throat, seems to have re-imagined it as a horror movie based on […]