Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was an influential American radical feminist who is primarily known for her crusade against pornography. Her views became more radical and more sensational later in her life, which unfortunately added fuel to the antifeminist fire.

Views and Beliefs

Anti-pornography activism

In her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, she argued that pornography is a misogynistic, dehumanizing industry. She also analyzed pornography as a form of sexual assault on women.

Her anti-pornography rhetoric, as translated into legalese by her fellow radical feminist and lawyer Catharine MacKinnon, was hijacked by wingnuts who, while caring little for women's rights, thought they could use it to justify laws against pornography. Attempts to pass an ordinance based on her model failed in Minneapolis (passed by the City Council, vetoed by the mayor), but succeeded on the second try in Indianapolis in 1984. In the case American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. Hudnut, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the ordinance unconstitutional on the grounds that it constituted ideology-based censorship. The Supreme Court affirmed with no further comment.

Her work got a broader audience in Canada, where in the case R v. Butler, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled, partly based on her work, that Canada's obscenity law was constitutional based on guarantees of gender equality. When the laws started to be used disproportionately against gay and lesbian materials, Dworkin was embarrassed and rapidly condemned this interpretation of her work.

Satires

Her opposition to pornography caused the pornography industry to swing into gear with a bevy of satire directed against her, including claims that she was anti-sex and misandristic. In an attempt to stop this, she sued everyone in sight, but her efforts ultimately failed; Catharine MacKinnon blamed this on the patriarchy in her eulogy to Dworkin, and called the satire libel.

Views on marriage

She had very contested, sensational views on marriage. She was a self-declared lesbian, but was married twice to men and swore herself to celibacy. Her first marriage to a Dutch anarchist did not go very well, as he clubbed her with blunt instruments and put cigarettes out on her, and she had to turn tricks for a time to get up the money to return to the U.S. from Holland. Later, she married a gay man named John Stoltenberg, author of a book entitled Refusing to Be a Man; this marriage lasted until her death in 2005.

She likened marriage to rape of women by men, arguing that in both cases the man claimed to "own" the woman and took the initiative, while the woman had to go along with him in every way:

“”Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.

Views on domestic abuse of women

She believed that "battered women have the right to kill their batterer", but did not stand up for this right during her first marriage.

Alleged misandry

On manhood, she said:

“”Only when manhood is dead — and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it — only then will we know what it is to be free.

And on men, she said:

“”Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

Most of her rhetoric follows the radical feminist line that gender is a social construct that when taken away will leave us all the same except for the dirty bits. Dworkin also went one step further and expressed opposition to men's privilege within the hierarchical structure of patriarchy.

Her writing has been interpreted as being anti-male; this is because, under the patriarchy as Dworkin perceived it, it is difficult to disentangle men from the privilege they all enjoy (whether or not they want to), which is oppressive to all women (whether or not men intend to oppress them). Other feminists have stated that Dworkin was a "scholar of great men", and had warm relationships with her father and other male relatives.

Views on sex

She was strongly opposed to sex, enough to swear herself to celibacy. In a discussion of how men in a patriarchal society view sex, she stated that "Violation is a synonym for intercourse". Due to this, she was widely reported as having said explicitly that all sex is rape, even though she never actually said those words, as Cathy Young remarked with regard to Dworkin:

“”If a male writer had written book after book arguing that women were evil creatures whose sole purpose in life is to sexually manipulate and destroy men, would we spend a lot of time quibbling over whether he actually used the phrase, "All women are whores"?

Views on childbirth

She had no children, as is made very obvious by her views on childbearing, viz.:

“”Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.

She was also strongly opposed to Caesarean sections, which fit in nicely with her opposition to childbearing:

“”They cut directly into the uterus with a knife — a surgical fuck ... the uterus of the whore entered directly by the new rapist, the surgeon, the vagina saved to serve the husband.

Effects of her work on society and feminist theory

Encyclopaedia Britannica placed her in their list of 300 Women who Changed the World.

Date rape

In 1999, Dworkin was found completely delirious on the streets of New York. She claimed that she had been fed a date-rape drug and then raped in a hotel room in Paris some days earlier, and published an article on the subject.