Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist and writer. She is best known for her bombastic polemics (e.g., Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman."). She fiercely criticized pornography, which she argued led to rape and other forms of violence against women.

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Andrea Dworkin

Her life and work

Early life

Dworkin was born in Camden, New Jersey to Harry Dworkin and Sylvia Spiegel. She had one younger brother, Mark. Her father was a schoolteacher and dedicated socialist, whom she credited with inspiring her passion for social justice. Her relationship with her mother was strained, but Dworkin later wrote about the influence that her mother's belief in legal birth control and legal abortion "long before these respectable beliefs" inspired her later activism (Heartbreak 23). Though she described her Jewish household as being in many ways dominated by the memory of the Holocaust, it nonetheless provided a happy childhood until the age of 9 when an unknown man molested her in a movie theater.

When Dworkin was 10, her family moved from the city to the suburbs of Cherry Hill Township, New Jersey, which she later wrote she "experienced as being kidnapped by aliens and taken to a penal colony" (Life and Death, 3). In sixth grade, at her new school, she was punished by school administration for refusing to sing "Silent Night;" she later wrote "I wasn't a religious zealot; I just didn't like being pushed around, and I knew about and liked the separation of church and state, and I knew I wasn't a Christian and didn't worship Jesus. ... To this day I think about this confrontation with authority as the 'Silent Night' Action, and I recommend it. Adults need to be stood up to by children, period" (Heartbreak, 21-22).

Dworkin studied music as a child (Heartbreak 1-4), and began writing poetry in sixth grade. Throughout high school, she read heavily (with encouragement from her mother and father). She was especially influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Che Guevara, and the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg (Life and Death 23-24, 28; Heartbreak 37-40).

College and early activism

In 1965, while a student at Bennington College, Dworkin was arrested during an anti-Vietnam War protest at the United States Mission to the United Nations. She was sent to the New York Women's House of Detention, where she was subjected to an internal examination by two prison doctors that was so rough that she bled for days afterwards. She spoke out in public and testified before a grand jury about her experience, and the media coverage of her testimony made national and international news (Dworkin, Heartbreak, 77-81). The grand jury declined to make an indictment in the case (80), but Dworkin's testimony stirred public outrage over the mistreatment of inmates, which culminated in the closure of the prison seven years later.

Soon after testifying before the grand jury, Dworkin left Bennington to live in Greece (Heartbreak 80, 83) and pursue her writing. She traveled to from Paris to Athens on the Orient Express (83-85), and went to live and write in Crete (87). While in Crete, she "wrote a series of poems called (Vietnam) Variations; poems and prose poems I collected in a book printed on Crete called Child; a novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on Burning Boyfried" -- a reference to the pacifist Norman Morrison, who had burned himself to death in protest of the Vietnam War -- "and poems and dialogues I later hand-printed using movable type in a book called Morning Hair" (98).

After living in Crete, Dworkin returned to Bennington for two years, where she continued to study literature and participated in campaigns against the college's student conduct code, for contraception on campus, for the legalization of abortion, and against the Vietnam War (Heartbreak, 107-112).

Life in the Netherlands

After graduating with a degree in Literature, she moved to Amsterdam to interview Dutch anarchists in the Provo countercultural movement (117). She became involved with, and then married, one of the anarchists that she met. She recalled how he began to abuse her severely soon after they were married -- punching and kicking her, burning her with cigarettes (Heartbreak, 119; Letters from a War Zone, 332), beating her on her legs with a wooden beam (Letters from a War Zone, 332), and banging her head against the floor until he knocked her unconscious (Letters from a War Zone, 103).

After Dworkin left her husband late in 1971 (Life and Death, 17), Dworkin spent a year caught in the Netherlands, and "attacked, persecuted, followed, harassed, by the husband I had left" (17), and was beaten and threatened by her former husband when he found where she was hiding (Life and Death, 19, 21). She found herself desperate for money, often homeless, thousands of miles from home and family, later writing that "I often lived the life of a fugitive, except that it was the more desperate life of a battered woman who had run away for the last time, whatever the outcome" (17). For a while, she worked as a prostitute in order to survive. A feminist and fellow ex-patriate, Ricki Abrams, offered her help, sheltered her in Abram's own home, and helped her find places to stay on houseboats, a communal farm, and deserted buildings (Life and Death, 18-19) while Dworkin hid from her former husband and tried to work up the money to return to the United States. Abrams introduced Dworkin to early radical feminist writing from the United States, and Dworkin was especially inspired by Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, and Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful (Life and Death 19; Hearbreak 118). She and Abrams began to work together on "early pieces and fragments" (Woman Hating, Acknowledgement) of a radical feminist text on the hatred of women in culture and history, including a completed draft of a chapter on the pornographic counterculture magazine Suck (which was published by fellow expatriates in the Netherlands) (Life and Death 21; Heartbreak 122).

Eventually, Dworkin agreed to help smuggle a briefcase of heroin through customs in return for $1,000 and an airplane ticket, thinking that she could either return home with the ticket and the money if she was not caught or escape her husband by going to prison if she was; the deal for the briefcase fell through, but the junkie who had promised her the money gave her the airline ticket, and she was able to return to the United States in November 1972 (Letters from a War Zone 332-333; Life and Death 22).

Before she left, she talked with Ricki Abrams about their book, Dworkin's experiences in the Netherlands, and the emerging feminist movement. Dworkin agreed to complete the book and get it published when she reached the United States (Life and Death, 22). In her memoirs, Dworkin relates that during the conversation, she vowed to dedicate her life to the feminist movement:

Sitting with Ricki, talking with Ricki, I made a vow to her: that I would use everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women's movement stronger and better; that I'd give my life to the movement and for the movement. I promised to be honor-bound to the well-being of women, to do anything necessary for that well-being. I promised to live and to die if need be for women. I made that vow some thirty years ago, and I have not betrayed it yet.

— Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, 122.

Return to New York and contact with the feminist movement

Dworkin first encountered radical feminism while living in the Netherlands, through her reading of radical feminist writing. When she returned to New York City, she brought back the "early pieces and fragments" of the book that she had begun to write with her friend Ricki Abrams, and took odd jobs to support herself while she expanded and finished the book, which became Woman Hating. In the book she offered radical feminist analyses of fairy tales and literary pornography, which she argued presented each presented women as passive, dependent, and defined by a male sexuality that eroticized women's humiliation and submission, and then discussed "gynocidal" expressions of that view of femininity, in the form of European witch hunts and Chinese foot binding. She argued that binary gender roles were a myth, expressed in the stories and enforced by the violence, that could and should be overcome, in favor of an "androgynous society," for the sake of women's freedom and human flourishing. Woman Hating became Dworkin's first published book in 1974.

In New York, Dworkin worked again as an antiwar organizer, participated in demonstrations for lesbian rights and against apartheid in South Africa (Heartbreak, 123). The feminist poet Muriel Rukeyser hired her as an assistant (Dworkin later said "I was the worst assistant in the history of the world. But Muriel kept me on because she believed in me as a writer" [Letters from a War Zone, 3]). Dworkin also joined a feminist consciousness raising group (Heartbreak 124), and soon became involved in radical feminist organizing, focusing on campaigns against violence against women. In addition to her writing and activism, Dworkin gained notoriety as a speaker, mostly for events organized by local feminist groups (139-143). She became well-known for passionate, uncompromising speeches that inspired her audience to action, such as her speech at the first Take Back the Night march in November 1978, and her 1983 speech at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men, entitled I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape. Her strident style earned her repeated comparisons to the Old Testament prophets; Susan Brownmiller recalls her Take Back the Night speech in 1978:

Saturday evening culminated in a candlelit "Take Back the Night" march (the first of its kind) through the porn district, kicked off by an exhortation by Andrea Dworkin. I'd seen Andrea in my living room, but this was the first time I'd seen Andrea in action. On the spot I dubbed her Rolling Thunder. Perspiring in her trademark denim coveralls, she employed the rhetorical cadences that would make her both a cult idol and an object of ridicule a few years later. Dworkin's dramatized martyrdom and revival-tent theatrics never sat well with me, but I retained my respect for her courage long after I absented myself from the pornography wars. Her call to action accomplished, three thousand demonstrators took to the streets ...

— Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, 302-303

Many of Dworkin's early speeches are reprinted in her second book, Our Blood (1976). Later selections of speeches were reprinted ten and twenty years later, in Letters from a War Zone (1988), and Life and Death (1997).

Relationship with John Stoltenberg

In 1974, she met gay male feminist writer and activist John Stoltenberg when they both walked out on a poetry reading in Greenwich Village over misogynist material. They became close friends, eventually came to live together, and Stoltenberg wrote a series of books and articles critizing manhood or maleness, such as Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice (Meridian, 1990), Why I Stopped Trying to be Real Man, [1] and The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience (Penguin USA/Plume, 1994). They continued to identify themselves as lesbian and gay, even after their marriage in 1998. (Stoltenberg, recounting the perplexity that their relationship seemed to cause people in the press, summarized the relationship by saying "So I state only the simplest facts publicly: yes, Andrea and I live together and love each other and we are each other's life partner, and yes we are both out.")

Anti-pornography activism and work on sexuality

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Dworkin gained national notoriety as a spokeswoman for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and for her writing on pornography and sexuality, particularly in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979) and Intercourse (1987, ISBN 0684832399), which remain her two most widely known books.

Critique of Pornography

Dworkin's critique of pornography began with Woman Hating, in which she offered a critical analysis of the contemporary pornography in the novels Story of O and L'Image, and the counterculture pornographic newspaper Suck, as the adult and explicit development of the sexual politics expressed implicitly for children in fairy tales. In February 1976, Dworkin took a leading role in organizing public pickets of Snuff in New York City and, during the fall, joined Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Gloria Steinem, Shere Hite, Lois Gould, Barbara Deming, Karla Jay, Letty Pogrebin, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller in forming the activist group that would eventually become Women Against Pornography (Brownmiller 297-299). She spoke at the first Take Back the Night march in November 1978, and joined 3,000 women in a march through the red-light district of San Francisco (Brownmiller 391-392).

In 1979, Dworkin published Pornography: Men Possessing Women, which analyzes (and extensively cites examples drawn from) contemporary and historical pornography as an industry of woman-hating dehumanization. Dworkin argues that it is implicated in violence against women, both in its production (through the abuse of the women used to "star" in it), and in the social consequences of its consumption (by encouraging men to eroticize the domination, humiliation, and abuse of women).

Civil rights ordinance

In 1980, Linda Boreman (who had appeared in the pornographic film Deep Throat as "Linda Lovelace") published a memoir, Ordeal, in which she stated that she had been beaten and raped by her ex-husband Chuck Traynor, and violently coerced into making Deep Throat. Boreman held a press confernce, with Dworkin, feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon, and members of Women Against Pornography supporting her, in which she made her charges public for the press corps. Dworkin, MacKinnon, and Gloria Steinem began discussing the possibility of legal redress for Boreman under federal civil rights law. Two weeks later, they met with Boreman to discuss the idea of pursuing a lawsuit against Traynor and other pornographers. She was interested, but Steinem discovered that the statute of limitations for a possible suit had passed, and Boreman backed off (Brownmiller 337). Dworkin and MacKinnon, however, began to discuss the possibility of civil rights litigation as an approach to combatting pornography.

In the fall of 1983, MacKinnon secured a one-semester appointment for Dworkin at the University of Minnesota, to teach a course in literature for the Women's Studies program and co-teach (with MacKinnon) an interdepartmental course on pornography. Hearing about the course, community activists from south Minneapolis contacted Dworkin and MacKinnon to ask for their help in curbing the rise of pornography shops. Dworkin and MacKinnon explained their idea for a new civil rights approach to pornography, which would define pornography as a civil rights violation against women, and allow women who had been harmed by pornography to sue the producers and distributors in civil court for damages. The Minneapolis city council hired Dworkin and MacKinnon to draft an ordinance based on their ideas, which they completed by December 1983. Public hearings were held by the city council, with testimony from Linda Boreman, Ed Donnerstein (a pornography researcher from the University of Wisconsin), and Pauline Bart, a radical feminist professor from Chicago. The ordinance was passed on December 30, but vetoed by Mayor Donald Fraser (who claimed that the city could not afford litigation over the law's constitutionality). The ordinance was passed a second time, and vetoed again, in 1984. Meanwhile, the city council in Indianapolis invited Dworkin and MacKinnon to draft a similar ordinance, and also held public hearings. The ordinance was passed by the Indianapolis city council and signed into law by Mayor William Hudnut on May 1, 1984. However, the law was quickly challenged in court, and overturned as unconstitutional by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals's ruling on American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. Hudnut. The Supreme Court upheld the appellate court's ruling without comment. The case is often cited as an important decision in balancing pornography against censorship.

Attorney General's Commission on Pornography

Dworkin testified for "one half-hour" before the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (sometimes referred to as the "Meese Commisssion") on January 22, 1986 in New York City, and answered questions from the members of the Commission. (Letters from a War Zone, 276; her testimony and the questions and answers are reprinted as "Pornography Is A Civil Rights Issue", pp. 276-307). Dworkin's testimony against pornography was praised and reprinted in the Commission's final report,[2] and Dworkin and MacKinnon marked its release by holding a joint press conference [3]. Meese Commission officials went on to successfully demand that convenience store chains remove from shelves popular men's magazines such as Playboy (Dworkin wrote that the magazine "in both text and pictures promotes both rape and child sexual abuse") [4] and Penthouse [5]. The demands spread nationally and intimidated some retailers into withdrawing photography magazines, among others [6]. The Meese Commission's campaign was eventually quashed with a First Amendment admonishment against prior restraint by the D.C. Federal Court in Meese v. Playboy (639 F.Supp. 581).

In her testimony, Dworkin condemned the use of criminal obscenity prosecutions against pornographers, stating, "We are against obscenity laws. We don't want them. I want you to understand why, whether you end up agreeing or not" (285). She argued that obscenity laws were largely ineffectual (285), that when they were effectual they only suppressed pornography from public view while allowing it to flourish out of sight (285-286), and that they suppressed the wrong material, or the right material for the wrong reasons, arguing that "Obscenity laws are also woman-hating in their very construction. Their basic presumption is that it's women's bodies that are dirty" (286). Instead she offered five recommendations for the Commission, recommending (1) that "the Justice Department instruct law-enforcement agencies to keep records of the use of pornography in violent crimes" (286), (2) a ban on the possession and distribution of pornography in prisons (287), (3) that prosecutors "enforce laws against pimping and pandering against pornographers" (287), (4) that the administration "make it a Justice Department priority to enforce RICO [the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] against the pornography industry" (287), and (5) that Congress adopt federal anti-pornography civil rights legislation which would provide for civil damages for harm inflicted to woman. She suggested that the Commission consider "creating a criminal conspiracy provision under the civil rights law, such that conspiring to deprive a person of their civil rights by coercing them into pornography is a crime, and that conspiring to traffic in pornography is conspiring to deprive women of our civil rights" (288). Dworkin compared her proposal to the Southern Poverty Law Center's use of civil rights litigation against the Ku Klux Klan (285).

Dworkin also submitted into evidence a copy of Linda Boreman's book Ordeal, as an example of the abuses that she hoped to remedy, saying "The only thing atypical about Linda is that she has had the courage to make a public fight against what has happened to her. And whatever you come up with, it has to help her or it's not going to help anyone." Boreman had testified in person before the Commission, but the Commissioners had not yet seen her book (289).

Right-wing Women

In 1983, Dworkin published Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (ISBN 0399506713; with an excerpt from Chapter 3 online), an examination of women's reasons for collaborating with men for the limitation of women's freedom. In the Preface to the British edition (reprinted in Letters from a War Zone, 185-194), Dworkin remarked on how the New Right in the United States focused especially on preserving male authority in the family, the promotion of fundamentalist versions of orthodox religion, combating abortion, and undermining efforts to combat domestic violence (192-193), but that it also had, for the first time, "succeeded in getting women as women (women who claim to be acting in the interests of women as a group) to act effectively in behalf of male authority over women, in behalf of a hierarchy in which women are subservient to men, in behalf of women as the rightful property of men, in behalf of religion as an expression of transcendent male supremacy" (193). Taking this as her problem, Dworkin asked, "Why do right-wing women agitate for their own subordination? How does the Right, controlled by men, enlist their participation and loyalty? And why do right-wing women truly hate the feminist struggle for equality?" (194).

Intercourse

Main article: Intercourse (book)

In 1987 Dworkin published Intercourse (ISBN 0684832399), in which she extended her analysis from pornography to heterosexual intercourse itself, and argued that the sort of sexual subordination depicted in pornography was central to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse in a male supremacist society.

Citing from both pornography and literature -- including The Kreutzer Sonata, Madame Bovary, and Dracula -- Dworkin argued that depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture consistently emphasized heterosexual intercourse as the only kind of "real" sex, portrayed intercourse in violent or invasive terms, portrayed the violence or invasiveness as central to its eroticism, and often united it with male contempt for, revulsion towards, or even murder of, the "carnal" woman. She argued that this kind of depiction enforced a male-centric and coercive view of sexuality, and that, when the cultural attitudes combine with the material conditions of women's lives in a sexist society, the experience of heterosexual intercourse itself becomes a central part of men's subordination of women, experienced as a form of "occupation" (cf. Chapter 7, "Occupation/Collaboration") that is nevertheless expected to be pleasurable for women and to define their very status as women.

Such descriptions are often cited by Dworkin's critics, claiming that Intercourse argued that "All heterosexual intercourse is rape." That statement, however, occurs nowhere in the book. Dworkin rejected the interpretation as a grave misunderstanding of her work [7]. When asked in a later interview, she explained,

No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say [sex is rape], then or ever. ... The whole issue of intercourse as this culture's penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the all sex is rape slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don't think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.

— Andrea Dworkin, Fighting Talk, from New Statesman & Society. Interviewed by Michael Moorcock. 21 April 1995.

Some critics, such as Gene Healy [8] and Cathy Young [9] claimed that they found Dworkin's explanation hard to square with her frequent willingness to describe ordinary heterosexual practices in terms of violence or coercion (such as her statements, in The Night and Danger, that as Dworkin had argued that the romanticization of male predators and sexualized female death in vampire films "is the essence of so-called romance, which is rape embellished with meaningful looks," and that "Night licenses so-called romance and romance boils down to rape" (Letters from a War Zone, 14). Young went on to claim that, given Dworkin's expressed views, arguments over whether Dworkin actually said that heterosexual intercourse is rape can be dismissed as "quibbling" [10].

Butler decision in Canada

In 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada made a ruling in R. v. Butler (the "Butler decision") which incorporated some elements of Dworkin and MacKinnon's legal work on pornography into the existing Canadian obscenity law. In Butler the Court held that Canadian obscenity law violated Canadian citizens' rights to free speech under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms if enforced on grounds of morality or community standards of decency; but that obscenity law could be enforced constitutionally against some pornography on the basis of the Charter's guarantees of sex equality. The Court's decision cited extensively from briefs prepared by the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), with the support and participation of Catharine MacKinnon. Andrea Dworkin opposed LEAF's position, arguing that feminists should not support or attempt to reform criminal obscenity law. In 1993, copies of Dworkin's bRook Pornography were held for inspection by Canadian customs agents [11], fostering an urban legend that Dworkin's own books had been banned from Canada under a law that she herself had promoted. However, the Butler decision did not adopt Dworkin and MacKinnon's ordinance; Dworkin did not support the decision; and her books (which were released shortly after they were inspected) was a standard procedural measure, unrelated the Butler decision [12].

Fiction

Dworkin's first novel, Ice and Fire in 1986. It is a first-person narrative, rife with violence and abuse; Susie Bright has claimed that it amounts to a modern retelling of one of Sade's most famous works, Juliette. However, Dworkin aimed to depict men's harm to women as normalized political harm, not as eccentric eroticism. Her second novel, Mercy (ISBN 0941423697), was published in 1991.

Later life

In 1997, she published a collection of her speeches and articles from the 1990s in Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War on Women, with articles discussing violence against women, pornography, prostitution, Nicole Brown Simpson, the use of rape during the civil war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Montreal massacre, Israel, and the gender politics of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In the same year, the New York Times Book Review published a lengthy letter of hers in which she describes the origins of her deeply-felt hatred of prostitution and pornography ("mass-produced, technologized prostitution"): her history of being violently inspected by prison doctors, battered by her first husband and numerous other men. [13]

In 2000, she published Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, in which she compared the oppression of women to the persecution of Jews, examined the sexual politics of Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, and came to endorse a version of lesbian separatism, calling for the establishment of a women's homeland (with "land and guns") as a response to the oppression of women.

In June 2000, Dworkin published controversial articles in the New Statesman and in the Guardian, stating that one or more men had raped her in her hotel room in Paris the previous year, using a drug in her drink (GHB, according to Dworkin) to disable her. Her articles ignited public controversy when writers such as Catherine Bennett [14] and Julia Gracen [15] published doubts about her account, polarizing opinion between skeptics and supporters such as Catharine MacKinnon, Katharine Viner [16], and Gloria Steinem. Emotionally fragile and in failing health, Dworkin mostly withdrew from public life for two years following the articles.[17]

In 2002, Dworkin published her autobiography, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (ISBN 0465017541). She soon began to speak and write again, and in a 2004 interview with Julie Bindel said, "I thought I was finished, but I feel a new vitality. I want to continue to help women." She published three more articles in the Guardian and began work on a new book, Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation, on the role of novelists such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner in the development of American political and cultural identity, which was left unfinished when she died.

Illness and Death

During her final years Dworkin suffered from fragile health, and she revealed in her last column for the Guardian that she had been weakened and nearly crippled for the past several years by severe osteoarthritis in the knees. Shortly after returning from Paris in 1999, she had been hospitalized with a high fever and blood clots in her legs. A few months after being released from the hospital, she became increasingly unable to bend her knees, and underwent surgery to replace her knees with titanium and plastic prosthetics. She wrote, "The doctor who knows me best says that osteoarthritis begins long before it cripples -- in my case, possibly from homelessness, or sexual abuse, or beatings on my legs, or my weight. John, my partner, blames Scapegoat, a study of Jewish identity and women's liberation that took me nine years to write; it is, he says, the book that stole my health. I blame the drug-rape that I experienced in 1999 in Paris."

Dworkin died in her sleep on the morning of April 9, 2005, at her home in Washington, D.C. [18]. She was 58 years old. When a newspaper interviewer asked her how she would like to be remembered, she said "In a museum, when male supremacy is dead. I'd like my work to be an anthropological artefact from an extinct, primitive society" [19].

Legacy and controversy

Dworkin authored numerous ground-breaking feminist books, articles, and speeches, each designed to assert the presence of and denounce institutionalized and normalized harm against women. She characterized pornography as an industry of damaging objectification and abuse, not merely a fantasy realm. She discussed prostitution as a system of exploitation, and intercourse as a key site of subordination in patriarchy. Though she has often been quoted as saying "All sex is rape," or "all men are rapists," no evidence exists to support her having written these words (but see the discussion above -- Intercourse). Dworkin made provocative statements even while denying the above quotes, though. “Penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent. But I'm not saying that sex must be rape.[20]”

Dworkin's uncompromising positions and strident style of writing and speaking — described by Robert Campbell as "apocalyptic,"[21], and frequently compared by Gloria Steinem to the Old Testament prophets — often sharply polarized debate, and made Dworkin herself a figure of intense controversy. After her death, the conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan claimed that "[M]any on the social right liked Andrea Dworkin. Like Dworkin, their essential impulse when they see human beings living freely is to try and control or stop them – for their own good. Like Dworkin, they are horrified by male sexuality, and see men as such as a problem to be tamed. Like Dworkin, they believe in the power of the state to censor and coerce sexual freedoms. Like Dworkin, they view the enormous new freedom that women and gay people have acquired since the 1960s as a terrible development for human culture" [22]. Critic Cathy Young complained of a "whitewash" in feminist obituaries for Dworkin, argued that Dworkin's positions were manifestly misandrist whether or not she said that "All sex is rape", and stated that Dworkin was in fact insane [23]. Many feminists, on the other hand, published sympathetic or celebratory memorials online and in print ([24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30]). Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin's longtime friend and collaborator, published a column in the New York Times, celebrating what she described as Dworkin's "incandescent literary and political career", suggested that Dworkin deserved a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and complained that "Lies about her views on sexuality (that she believed intercourse was rape) and her political alliances (that she was in bed with the right) were published and republished without attempts at verification, corrective letters almost always refused. Where the physical appearance of male writers is regarded as irrelevant or cherished as a charming eccentricity, Andrea's was reviled and mocked and turned into pornography. When she sued for libel, courts trivialized the pornographic lies as fantasy and dignified them as satire" [31].

Dworkin's reports of violence suffered at the hands of men sometimes aroused skepticism, the most famous example being the public controversy over her allegations of being drugged and raped in Paris. In 1989, Dworkin wrote an article about her life as a battered wife in the Netherlands, "What Battery Really Is" (1989), in response to fellow radical feminist Susan Brownmiller, who had argued that Hedda Nussbaum, a battered woman, should have been indicted for her failure to stop Joel Steinberg from murdering their adoptive daughter. Newsweek initially accepted "What Battery Really Is" for publication, but then declined to publish the account at the request of their attorney, arguing that Dworkin needed to publish anonymously "to protect the identity of the batterer" and remove any references to specific injuries, or else to provide "medical records, police records, a written statement from a doctor who had seen the injuries." Dworkin submitted the article to the Los Angeles Times, which published it on March 12, 1989 (Letters from a War Zone 330).

Some critics, such as Gene Healy [32], Larry Flynt's magazine Hustler, and the "Alliance Marxist-Leninist" [33], allege that endorsed incest. In the closing chapter of Woman Hating (1974), Dworkin wrote that "The parent-child relationship is primarily erotic because all human relationships are primarily erotic," and that "The incest taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them. The incest taboo does the worst work of the culture [...] The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism" (Dworkin 1974, p.189). Dworkin, however, does not explain whether "fulfillment" is supposed to involve actual sexual intimacy, and one page earlier characterized what she mean by "erotic relationships" as relationships whose "substance is nonverbal communication and touch" (188), which she explicitly distinguished from what she referred to as "fucking" (187). Dworkin's work from the early 1980s onward contained frequent condemnations of incest and pedophilia as one of the chief forms of violence against women (Letters from a War Zone 139-142, 149, 176-180, 308, 314-315; Intercourse 171, 194; Life and Death 22-23, 79-80, 86, 123, 143, 173, 188-189), arguing that "Incest is terrifically important in understanding the condition of women. It is a crime committed against someone, a crime from which many victims never recover" (Letters from a War Zone, 139). In the early 1980s she had a public row with her former friend Allen Ginsberg over his support for child pornography and pedophilia, in which Ginsberg said "The right wants to put me in jail," and Dworkin responded "Yes, they're very sentimental; I'd kill you" (Heartbreak 43-47). When Hustler published the claim that Dworkin advocated incest in 1985, Dworkin sued them for defamatory libel (Dworkin v. L.F.P., Inc., 1992 WY 120, 839 P.2d 903; the court dismissed Dworkin's complaint on the grounds that whether the allegations were true or false, a faulty interpretation of a placed into the "marketplace of ideas" did not amount to defamation in the legal sense).

Other critics, especially women who identify as feminists but sharply differ with Dworkin's style or positions, have offered nuanced views, suggesting that Dworkin called attention to real and important problems, but that her legacy as a whole had been destructive to the women's movement[34].

Bibliography

Nonfiction

• Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002) ISBN 0465017541
• Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000) ISBN 0684836122
• Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (1997) ISBN 0684835126
• In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (with Catharine MacKinnon, 1997) ISBN 0674445791
• Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (1991) ISBN 0399506713
• Letters from a War Zone: Writings (1988) ISBN 1556521855 ISBN 0525248242 ISBN 0436139626
• Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality (1988) ISBN 096218490X
• Intercourse (1987) ISBN 0684832399
• Pornography—Men Possessing Women (1981) ISBN 0399505326 (summary)
• Our Blood: Prophesies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1976) ISBN 039950575X ISBN 006011116X
• Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (Dutton, 1974) ISBN 0452268273 ISBN 0525483977
• Morning Hair (1968) (self-published)

Fiction

• Mercy (1990) ISBN 0941423883
• Ice and Fire (1986) ISBN 043613960X
• The New Woman's Broken Heart: Short Stories (1980) ISBN 0960362800

Numbered short articles

• ASIN B0006XEJCG (1977) Marx and Gandhi were liberals: Feminism and the "radical" left
• ASIN B0006XX57G (1978) Why so-called radical men love and need pornography
• ASIN B00073AVJA (1985) Against the male flood: Censorship, pornography and equality
• ASIN B000711OSO (1985) The reasons why: Essays on the new civil rights law recognizing pornography as sex discrimination
• ASIN B00071HFYG (1986) Pornography is a civil rights issue for women
• ASIN B0008DT8DE (1996) A good rape. (Book Review)
• ASIN B0008E679Q (1996) Out of the closet.(Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross-Dressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitude)(Book Review)
• ASIN B0008IYNJS (1996) The day I was drugged and raped

Books and essays about Andrea Dworkin

• Califia, Pat, ed. Forbidden Passages: writings banned in Canada. Pittsburgh: Cleis, 1995.
• Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights (Paperback) by Nadine Strossen
• "The Devil and Andrea Dworkin". Parfrey, Adam. in Cult Rapture. Feral House Books. Portland, OR: 1995. Ppg. 53-62.

See also

• Take Back the Night

References

• American Booksellers Ass'n, Inc. v. Hudnut Alternate URL 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985), aff’d, 475 U.S. 1001 (1986)
• Brownmiller, Susan (1999). In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (ISBN 0385314868).

External links

• Andrea Dworkin Online Library
• Andrea Dworkin Memorial Page
• Andrea Dworkin Quotes
• The Rape Relief Files: Take Back The Night - Vancouver Herstory
• Radical Feminist Writer Andrea Dworkin Dies Alternate URL
• BBC News story: Anti-porn crusader Dworkin dies
• Salon.com editorial: The passion of Andrea Dworkin
• Salon.com: Andrea Dworkin in agony reports on doubts about her rape account
• Times Online Andrea Dworkin
• Guardian Andrea Dworkin
  • Through the pain barrier
  • She never hated men
• Andrea Dworkin, well-known feminist writer and anti-pornography activist, dies
• Andrea Dworkin media blackout lifts, a little Serious obituary links
• Template:Nndb name
• Who Was Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?Alternate URL
• Editorial: Dworkin’s Death Highlights Feminism’s Mainstream Demise
• Extensive Dworkin bio
• This strong feminist voice was hardly a man-hater
• Andrea Dworkin Has Died at Susie Bright's Journal
• http://www.virago.co.uk/virago/meet/dworkin_profile.asp
• The Prisoner of Sex
• The misdirected passion of Andrea Dworkin
• Unburning a Witch: Re-Reading Andrea Dworkin
• Andrea Dworkin: heterosexuality vs. bestiality and incest
• Reading and Lecture at the 2002 Ohio University Spring Literary Festival - RealAudio
• "They took my body from me and used it", Andrea Dworkin, Guardian, 2 June 2000
• A Post-Mortem Analysis of Andrea Dworkin by David A. Roberts April 27, 2005 ifeminist.com
• A review of Andrea Dworkin's book "Intercourse" from "The Nation" by Maureen Mullarkey May 30, 1987