NEWS: Bearing Responsibility

Exactly. Those who I know of (and my personal/anecdotal of this is limited, I admit) who talk of addiction are a disease are typically the ones trying to deal with it. Referring it as a disease does not give them a cop-out from personal responsibility, it gives them something to focus on in terms of doing battle.

That's all separate from the medical classification issue. It's simply about claims and assertions that the word "disease" implies an attempt to evade responsibility.

Just a suggestion -- it might be useful to think what you can add to the discourse here. It's a site full of nude pictures (mostly, but not entirely, nude female pictures), and a fairly open attitude to sex and sexuality, and apparently that's set the cat among your pigeons amongst your readers. Talking about it at your blog rather than opening up a discussion in here seems like doing a judgemental anthropological study without actually talking to the villagers whose behaviour you are about to judge.

(Your question on your blog about whether it's "theoretically possible" to have women-friendly porn is what I'm getting at. I'd put it that there's no "theory" that can decide this a priori, just one's ideological preconceptions. Alternatively, you could, y'know, ask some women. You'll find there's a few here. That requires you not presuming you're smarter than they are, PhD regardless. See below.)

I've been exposed to well and truly enough radical feminism to not be at high risk of misunderstanding Twisty, nor of needing her to keep me intellectually honest.

Let me give you an alternative interpretation of the statement "In a Sexist Society, All Sex is Inevitably Tainted by Sexism": rather than being "self-evident", it's a moveable feast that allows the asserter to judge whoever's behaviour they don't approve of, but at least if it's someone they don't want to personally disapprove of (like, say, a woman going to a strip club), you can always, as her blog's title suggests, blame the patriarchy, right? The unwitting female strip club patron's mind has been addled by the oppressive sexist/capitalist/imperialist value system, and so she's not the problem, so much as the unwitting victim of the prevailing patriarchal structure. Right?

Here Twisty's positively nonplussed:

Oh my fucking god. Really? With their wives?

That evil patriarchy!

I wonder what she'd make of this. And by that, I mean, whether Twisty would actually take it as an interesting data point ("Hmm, something interesting to consider" or whether it'd be just another example of a woman behaving impurely in an impure (sexist) world. That old patriarchal programming just seeps on in, doesn't it.

Y'know, I get that Twisty's blog is about "explaining radical feminism" but, uh, so what? If I pointed you to someone saying "They're smart and funny and the point of their blog is to explain intelligent design", I shouldn't be awfully surprised or unhappy when you shrug your shoulders and turn away.

Well, I don't want to speak for any other member of this site, but I've read my Andrea Dworkin. Hell, I even wrote an obituary for her elsewhere on this site.

I haven't anticipated a fucking thing.

You may be surprised to learn that in a meta-sense, it's not as off-topic as it seems.

This may be enough to clarify the issue, which isn't an error of logic, it seems, so much as a result of a choice of definitions. If the ability to make choices is not defined as equivalent to (or at least directly related to) "free will" then we can claim free will as an impossibility (without really being able to prove it either way).

I point out that this wasn't completely off-topic for reasons that might be semi-clear from some comments I made up above -- a dominant theme from 1960s/70s feminism that still lingers is the idea that "free will" is a cultural construction. (So, if a girl poses nude for this site, she can't claim to have made a free choice so much as she is taking an action conditional on the cultural/social/political influences that have shaped her thinking and her values. Feminists like Twisty Faster (linked to in previous post) are smarter than everyone else, in the sense that they claim to know when behaviour is feminist or not.)

(I wish I was that smart. Gosh, that'd be fun!)

I know what you're saying exactly, and while I've yet to see Twisty say a single thing that makes me want to read her again, this isn't my biggest complaint. What I truly hate is how people like Twisty whine nonstop about female strippers and porn that appeals to men, yet you know her and her amen choir probably go to male strip shows, have their own naked men porn, etc, etc. The hypocrisy is what makes me want to puke.