Andrea Dworkin: An Unabashed Radical Feminist
It’s not exactly clear what ANDREA DWORKIN meant when she said, “I’m a radical feminist — not the fun kind.” But she believed that a brutal misogyny permeates male-female relationships and she never let herself, or her readers, forget it.
She could be dismissive of “Marxist feminists” fascinated with “class conflict.” Nor did she admire a mainstream feminism which looked to “level the playing field” simply by giving women broader legal rights.
What she was trying to call out, and change, was violence-based patriarchy, which she called the oldest, most powerful and most sinister of human inventions — and the model for all other systems of bigotry.
She was also impatient with men who said proudly, ‘Don’t look at ME; I don’t subjugate women.’ Dworkin insisted that ALL men benefit from the subjugation of women, which is a massive social project that convinces half the population that they don’t deserve the better jobs, the more satisfying roles, and thus clears the way for male dominance in society.
Look at your own industry, she would challenge men. If women don’t hold 50% of the power in your industry, in your workplace, then you benefit every day from the subjugation of women.
Born in Camden, New Jersey in 1946, Dworkin wanted to put an end to male supremacy — in all of its physical, economic and social forms. She felt what calls itself love is, far too often, domination.
As a girl, she was close to her father Harry Dworkin, distant from her mother Sylvia, who was an invalid, and who told Andrea to let boys win at competitive games, as their pride required it. Like Margaret Sanger, like many of the greatest feminists, Andrea grew up seeing her mother unable to fulfill her potential.
In the late 1960’s, intrigued by what she’d read about Dutch anarchists, and their knack for shifting public opinion by staging “street happenings,” Dworkin moved to Amsterdam to interview some of these anarchists. In 1969, she married one of them, a man named Cornelius de Bruin. It was a disastrous marriage; de Bruin repeatedly brutalized her, and stalked her even after the marriage ended, in 1972.
After those awful years, she always had the feeling that mercy and apologies from men, come too late, if they come at all.
No longer wanting to be an object of male desire, she put on a lot of weight, and dressed and spoke to please herself, not others.
In 1986, she published “Ice and Fire,” a novel about a woman involved in sex and drugs and selling her body in a rat-infested apartment on the Lower East Side of New York. It’s a grim story about the intersection of poverty and sexual exploitation, the heavy cost of being bought and sold.
At a time when some feminists were saying “sex work” is a woman’s right, and should be seen without the scolding Victorian label of “prostitution,” Dworkin’s 1987 book “Intercourse” presented sex as a violation of female integrity, an abuse, and a key to the lower status of women in society.
She critiqued the idea that women should be pretty, ladylike, cheerful, sentimental, or sweet. She wanted women to be vital, aggressive, a little bit wild, to ask difficult, passionate questions — and to supply brutally honest answers.
Critics were not very kind to “Ice and Fire” or to “Intercourse.” Some of their hostility was knee-jerk sexism, but some of it was a reasonable defense of agency, the idea that, even in a rat-infested apartment, a woman always has options. Whereas, Dworkin felt these critics couldn’t grasp her experience of prostitution, domestic violence and rape and didn’t know that “options” don’t feel real to a brutalized woman.
Dworkin always insisted on being taken seriously on her own terms, but most reviewers saw her in THEIR terms.
To Dworkin, the critics were too sunny in their outlook, or too eager to be accepted by the “cool crowd” in the boy’s club of journalistic convention. She believed her critics — and some of them were women — practiced irreverence or denial when frightened by the dismal worlds she saw, and the hateful truths she called out. Dworkin felt the critics were determined to banish these things from their minds, and from the journalistic mainstream.
Some critics asked Dworkin: Why don’t you lose weight, and be more selective in your sexual partners before condemning sex as inherently abusive? Why don’t you leave New York City if the cost of getting a decent apartment there is prohibitive?
Camille Paglia, always a dangerous verbal opponent, said, “Dworkin pretends to be a daring truth-teller but never mentions her most obvious problem, food.” Others asked how much the abuse at the hands of her ex-husband was coloring her appraisal of all men.
Thoughtful critics also pointed out that the lives of women, even when they are disfigured by unfairness, are often shaped by class distinctions, by racial categories, by sexual orientation, and that Dworkin had little to say about those factors.
When the New York Times panned “Intercourse,” Dworkin replied in a letter to the Times, “I will check back in a decade to see what you all think. In the meantime, I suggest you check your ethics to see how you managed to avoid discussing anything real or even vaguely intelligent about my work and the political questions it raises.” She also called reviewers, “Overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print.”
Dworkin promoted a number of interesting ideas. She believed that women should be able to sue for damages those who make a living by marketing as entertainment the violent abuse of women.
She asked, ‘Why have abused women never had a homeland, as the Jews have had Israel?’ If there was a small territory somewhere, where only women could be citizens, wouldn’t that be a beacon to the brutalized women of the world, and a reminder to the rest of us of the scale of the problem?
She urged women not to apologize so much. She’d say, ‘Does the sun ask itself, “Am I good? Am I worthwhile?” No, it burns and it shines. Does the sun ask itself, “What does the moon think of me?”
Dworkin asked men, “Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there is a shortage of kitchen knives in this country.”
Given her antagonism toward men, people were often surprised to find that Andrea was so emotionally close to her father and her brother Mark. Also that she had a soft speaking voice, when her voice on the page was fierce. When she felt respected by an interviewer, she was polite and soft-spoken.
And she liked to point out that, on one issue anyway, she found common cause with social conservatives: the evils of pornography.
She also never said that all sex is bad, only that for sex to be a moral institution, it must be just as desired and satisfying for the woman as for the man. In 1998, she married John Stoltenberg, an openly gay man who’d become her best friend. Each took other lovers, quite openly, and there seems to have been no jealousy or abuse. The marriage lasted through the end of Dworkin’s life.
Because she’d been through so much, and was so acutely sensitive to sexism, it was hard for friends to suggest she lose weight. Of course, there are sexist expectations baked into asking a woman about her weight — but her friends were concerned about her health. Late in life, Andrea was about 5'5" and 280 pounds.
She was so intent on her writing projects, trapped by her own deadlines, that she often ignored friends, ignored social events, even ignored her own health problems until they became serious. She suffered from blood clots in her legs, bronchitis, pneumonia… At one point, she collapsed in her own neighborhood and sat on the sidewalk for many minutes, confused and unable to rise, before a passerby called an ambulance.
In 2005, in Washington, D.C., Andrea Dworkin died of acute myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle. She was just 58 years old.
She was impressively self-educated and self-supporting, never holding a paid position at any magazine or university. As an intellectual, she had bravely re-imagined what the world could be, and she wrote challenging, mind-expanding books and essays about rape, battery, sex work and pornography.
As a person, she’d found a happy second marriage that was “radical” in design yet simple and fulfilling.
She could be wise and humane, as when she said, ‘Remember the perpetrators. Remember the victims and find a way to include them in what you do, and how you think and act, and what you care about.’
Someone once asked Andrea Dworkin how SHE wanted to remembered. She replied, “In a museum, when male supremacy is dead, I’d like to be an anthropological artifact from an extinct, primitive society.”