I read Camille Paglia while staying at the San Francisco Zen Center in Haight Ashbury in the summer of 1992. The late Suzuki Roshi's SFZC was a palace compared to Sasaki Roshi's center in Los Angeles where I used to practice Zen, but most of its energy then was going into running an AIDS hospice in an area that seemed like a ghost town. I wandered around reading Paglia in a neighbourhood that had been gentrified years earlier and seemed like an abandoned Disneyland set. Men pushed their lovers in wheelchairs on empty sidewalks and there were torn posters on the lampposts for an AiDS walk months before. A lone cowboy stood nursing a beer in a deserted bar. There was a restaurant done up as a Mexican cemetery with skulls and votive candles where I had lunch and read Paglia who seemed to fit right into that landscape.
I didn't read Dworkin because I was acquainted with women who devoured her work at a time when i needed to find my way in life i.e. early twenties. I saw they were making their choice out of some trauma background they couldn’t articulate any other way than by grabbing a book that, to them, explained everything. I remember some of these women and their sadness and resignation. I couldn't embrace " Woman Hating " as the ultimate truth although I wasn't oblivious to the argument. Still to define your young life in terms of all the ways men hate you, seemed a wee bit self-fulfilling and dangerous.
No one has picked up on the "Jewish Satanic cult upbringing" that could explain Dworkin's rage, confidence, fragility and poor health.
