On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo examines the life and work of Andrea Dworkin, whose influence on modern feminism is still quite strong, twenty years after her death:
A friend wrote a couple of days ago to say that he had seen shiny new copies of works by feminist author Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) in Munro’s Books, one of Canada’s premier independent bookstores. One of the books was positioned on a shelf with the cover facing out to indicate that it was being showcased.
It is both shocking and unsurprising that Picador Books decided to reprint three of Dworkin’s texts in the past year, calling her a “prescient and visionary writer” who was “ahead of her time”. Anti-male paranoia is a sanctioned, cultivated taste more popular now, perhaps, than ever before, and Andrea Dworkin is its most notorious propagandist.
Known for her physical bulk, impassioned rhetoric, unkempt hair, and lesbian-identified overalls, Dworkin was a feminist icon in the 1980s and 90s, loved and hated in equal measure. No one did more to outline and consolidate the modern feminist understanding of sex than she, writing on the subject obsessively and with unparalleled fervor in books with titles such as Woman Hating (1974) and Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). The MeToo movement is almost unimaginable without the influence of Dworkin’s pronouncements.
Like other radical feminists, Dworkin wrote about rape, pornography, and prostitution, but her special focus was the degradation for women of sex itself: regular sex, the commonly accepted, normalized indignity that men allegedly inflict on women every day. Tempering her words in the white-heat of her revulsion, Dworkin became feminism’s anti-sex evangelist.
Sex, Dworkin believed, embodied nothing less than men’s hatred of everything female: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” (p. 175). This is the thesis of her most representative book, Intercourse, which was first published in 1987 when Dworkin was 41 years old. Dworkin’s characterization of heterosexual sex as the ultimate enactment of misogyny has had an enduring impact on North American culture.
Intercourse set out to illuminate, through select readings of literary texts, what Dworkin believed to be a constant of male culture: the “hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion” (pp. 175-76). The phrase she most often used in the book to refer to intercourse was “the fuck”, which was meant to signify the raw dehumanization that supposedly characterized it.
Dworkin nominated herself the expert on male contempt for women because she had been its victim. “Specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking?” she asked defiantly in the book’s preface, and answered, “Yes, I am […] the way anyone used knows the user” (p. xxxi).
While she also claimed in the preface that the book “does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape” (p. xxxii), she does essentially say that, if not in quite those words. As she asserted only a page after the denial, “Intercourse conveys […] what it means that men — and now boys — feel entitled to come into the privacy of a woman’s body in a context of inequality” (p. xxxiv).
In another segment, she clarified that most, even the vast majority, of men were sexually abusive. She charged that men object to feminist criticism of pornography and prostitution because “So many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid,” that “without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste” (p. 61). The implication was that men who objected to her arguments about the omnipresence of sexual exploitation were themselves sexual abusers who didn’t like the thought of their exploitation being curtailed.
This was the Dworkin who made feminists swoon with admiration: bombastic, hyperbolic, and incandescent with accusatory rage.
