Andrea Dworkin

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Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist and writer. She was best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued led to rape and other forms of violence against women.

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Her life and work

Dworkin was born in Camden, New Jersey. Her father was a schoolteacher and dedicated socialist whom she credited with inspiring her passion for social justice. Though she described her Jewish household as being in many ways dominated by the memory of the Holocaust, she had a generally happy and normal childhood until the age of 9, when she was molested in a movie theater. In 1965, while a student at Bennington College, she was arrested during an anti-Vietnam War protest at the United States Mission to the United Nations, and sent to the New York Women's House of Detention, where she was subjected to a internal examination by prison doctors that was so rough that she bled for days afterwards. Her testimony of the experience was reported internationally and led to the prison's closure.

After graduating, she moved to Amsterdam and married a Dutch anarchist, who physically abused her during the course of a five-year marriage. After escaping from him Dworkin found herself caught far away from home, in the Netherlands, nearly destitute and in desperate need of money; for a while she became a prostitute in order to survive. In 1971, she began working on "early pieces and fragments" of Woman Hating with her friend Ricki Abrams, and after making her way back to the United States, she completed the work on her own. Woman Hating became Dworkin's first published book in 1974.

In the United States, Dworkin became involved in the radical feminist movement, 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. 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 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. Many of Dworkin's early speeches are reprinted in her books Our Blood (1976), Letters from a War Zone (1988), and Life and Death (1997).

In 1974, she met the writer and activist John Stoltenberg when they both walked out on a poetry reading in Greenwich Village over misogynist material. They became close friends, and eventually came to live together, while also continuing to identify themselves as lesbian and gay. (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.") Dworkin and Stoltenberg were married in 1998.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Dworkin gained national notoriety for her writing and activist work on pornography and sexuality. In 1979 she published Pornography: Men Possessing Women, in which she argued (citing examples extensively from contemporary pornography and historical works such as those of the Marquis de Sade) that pornography links sex with fantasies of violence and domination, and actually incites men to sexual violence.

In 1987 Dworkin published Intercourse (ISBN 0684832399), in which she extended her analysis to heterosexual intercourse itself, and argued that sexual subordination was central to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse. She argued that depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture portrayed it in violent or invasive terms; that the cultural emphasis on heterosexual intercourse as the primary or only kind of "real" sex enforced a male-centric view of sexuality; and that the depiction of sexuality, when combined with the material conditions of women's lives in a sexist society, made intercourse itself a central part of women's subordination. (Dworkin's critics often claimed that she had argued that "All heterosexual intercourse is rape" in Intercourse; Dworkin rejected the interpretation of her work as a serious misunderstanding [1].)

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 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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 a hotel in Paris in 1999, using a drug in her drink (GHB, according to Dworkin) to disable her. Her article ignited public controversy when writers such as Catherine Bennett [2] and Julia Gracen [3] published doubts about her account, polarizing opinion between skeptics and supporters such as Catharine MacKinnon, Katharine Viner [4], and Gloria Steinem. Emotionally fragile and in failing health, Dworkin mostly withdrew from public life for two years following the articles, and did not return to Europe until 2004 [5].

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 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.

Andrea Dworkin died the morning of April 9, 2005, at her home in Washington, D.C.. She was 58 years old. The cause of death has not been established. She had been weakened and nearly crippled for several years by severe osteoarthritis (which she alleged, in her last column for the Guardian, to be the result of wounds from the rape in Paris).

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Ideas and controversy

Over the course of her life, Dworkin authored numerous books, articles and speeches, in which she was highly critical of pornography and prostitution, but also dealt with sexuality extensively. As an example of her views on the taboo of incest, from Woman Hating: "The parent-child relationship is primarily erotic because all human relationships are primarily erotic. ... 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 linked sexual issues to the larger structures in society. She wrote about the class perspective on feminism, in books such as Right-Wing Women. She denounced the tendency of middle-class and affluent "liberal feminists" to make deals with the establishment that advanced their own situation but left less fortunate women out in the cold.

Dworkin has been incorrectly attributed with the quote "all sex is rape" or "all men are rapists". She has offered this explanation: "Penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent. But I'm not saying that sex must be rape. What I think is that sex must not put women in a subordinate position. It must be reciprocal and not an act of aggression from a man looking only to satisfy himself. That's my point."

Dworkin was often attacked on a personal basis, e.g. for her physical appearance and for being a lesbian. She believed that pornography was based in male hatred of women, that it was a significant cause of rape and other sexual violence, and that women to whom sexual violence was done had every right to fight back, up to and including lethal forms of self defense. Despite her supposed misandry, she had numerous close male friends, including the writer Michael Moorcock, and her marriage with Stoltenberg. Her criticism of the gender roles, and her belief that it would have to be eliminated for society to achieve full equality, has also been adduced as a defense against charges of "hating men". Even within the context of her works, in contrast to the author Valerie Solanas, she did not call out for an abolition of men.

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Legal influence

Dworkin, together with the feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon, drafted a proposal for a law that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women, and allowed women to sue the producers and distributors of pornography in a civil court for damages. In 1983 the law was passed in Indianapolis, but was subsequently overturned as unconstitutional by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals's ruling on American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. Hudnut. This is often cited as an important decision in balancing pornography against censorship.

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 book Pornography were held for inspection by Canadian customs agents [6], 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 [7].

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Quotes

"I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind."
— Andrea Dworkin, from "Dworkin on Dworkin," an interview originally published in Off Our Backs, reprinted in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed Ed. by Renate Klein and Diane Bell.
"Q: People think you are very hostile to men.

A: I am.

Q: Doesn't that worry you?
A: From what you said, it worries them. "
— Andrea Dworkin, Nervous Interview (1979)
"I want to see this men's movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don't make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can't be self-indulgent."
— Andrea Dworkin, "I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape" (1983)
"Anti-feminism is also operating whenever any political group is ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women, some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including both extreme ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves, to the brothels or the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly anti-feminist; it is also profoundly immoral..."
— Andrea Dworkin, "Anti-feminism," Right Wing Women (1991), pp. 230-231.
"I'm going to ask you to remember the prostituted, the homeless, the battered, the raped, the tortured, the murdered, the raped-then-murdered, the murdered-then-raped; and I am going to ask you to remember the photographed, the ones that any or all of the above happened to and it was photographed and now the photographs are for sale in our free countries. I want you to think about those who have been hurt for the fun, the entertainment, the so-called speech of others; those who have been hurt for profit, for the financial benefit of pimps and entrepreneurs. I want you to remember the perpetrator and I am going to ask you to remember the victims: not just tonight but tomorrow and the next day. I want you to find a way to include them -- the perpetrators and the victims -- in what you do, how you think, how you act, what you care about, what your life means to you.

Now, I know, in this room, some of you are the women I have been talking about. I know that. People around you may not. I am going to ask you to use every single thing you can remember about what was done to you -- how it was done, where, by whom, when, and, if you know -- why -- to begin to tear male dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it, to mess it up, to get in its way, to fuck it up. I have to ask you to resist, not to comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to refuse to accept it, to abhor it and to do whatever is necessary despite its cost to you to change it."
— Andrea Dworkin, Remember, resist, do not comply (1995)
"So now we come to what Andrea Dworkin wants and it is this: she wants women to have their own country. But that's mad, I said to her. Why bother discussing it? It isn't going to happen. To which she has a reply -- didn't they say that about Israel? And didn't the world think that Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, was a crank? The Jews got a country because they had been persecuted, said that enough was enough, decided what they wanted and went out and fought for it. Women should do the same. And if you don't want to live in Womenland, so what? Not all Jews live in Israel, but it is there, a place of potential refuge if persecution comes to call. Furthermore, Dworkin says, as the Jews fought for Israel so women have the right to execute -- that's right, execute -- rapists and the state should not intervene. I couldn't really believe she was serious, but she is."
— Linda Grant interveiwing Andrea Dworkin, "Take no prisoners", The Guardian (13 May 2000)
"I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will. In the home the question will be couched in a million cruelties, some subtle, some so egregious they rival the injuries of organized war. ... It must be admitted that those who want me to account for myself are intrigued in hostile, voyeuristic ways, and their projections of me are not the usual run-of-the-mill rudeness or arrogance to which writers, especially women writers, become accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfortunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here's the deal as I see it: I am ambitious---God knows, not for money; in most respects but not all I am honorable; and I wear overalls: kill the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says, alone in a small room."
— Andrea Dworkin, "Preface," Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002)
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Bibliography

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Nonfiction

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Fiction

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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
  • ISBN B0008DT8DE (1996) A good rape. (Book Review)
  • ISBN B0008E679Q (1996) Out of the closet.(Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross-Dressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitude)(Book Review)
  • ISBN B0008IYNJS (1996) The day I was drugged and raped
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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.
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See also

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Legal documents

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External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin"
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