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She never hated men
Andrea Dworkin was attacked as much for her
personal appearance as for her uncompromising
views. But the death at the age of 58 of 'the most
maligned feminist on the planet' has deprived
feminism of its last truly challenging voice, says
Katharine Viner
Like most, I feel a shudder of shock whenever I
read the words of Andrea Dworkin. On crime: "I
really believe a woman has the right to execute a
man who has raped her." On romance: "In seduction,
the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine."
On sexual intercourse: "Intercourse remains a
means, or the means, of physiologically making a
woman inferior: communicating to her, cell by cell,
her own inferior status ... pushing and thrusting
until she gives in." Her radicalism was always
bracing, sometimes terrifying; and, in a world
where even having Botox is claimed as some kind of
pseudo-feminist act, she was the real thing. Her
death at the age of 58 deprives us of a truly
challenging voice.
But Andrea Dworkin was always more famous for
being Andrea Dworkin than anything else. Never mind
her seminal works of radical feminism, never mind
her disturbing theorising that our culture is built
on the ability of men to rape and abuse women. For
many, Dworkin was famous for being fat. She was the
stereotype of the Millie Tant feminist made flesh -
overweight, hairy, un-made-up, wearing old denim
dungarees and DMs or bad trainers - and thus a
target for ridicule. The fact that she presented
herself as she was - no hair dyes or conditioner,
no time-consuming waxing or plucking or shaving or
slimming or fashion - was rare and deeply
threatening; in a culture where women's appearance
has become ever more defining, Dworkin came to
represent the opposite of what women want to be.
"I'm not a feminist, but ... " almost came to mean,
"I don't look like Andrea Dworkin but ... "
In 2001, the critic Elaine Showalter said: "I
wish Andrea Dworkin no harm, but I doubt that many
women will get up at 4am to watch her funeral." A
couple of years ago, in an article in this
newspaper on hairiness, Mimi Spencer wrote: "The
only visibly hairy woman at the forefront of
feminism today appears to be Andrea Dworkin, and
she looks as though she neither waxes nor washes,
nor flushes nor flosses, and thus doesn't really
count." She didn't count because of how she looked;
she only cared about rape because no man could
fancy her.
The attacks on Dworkin were not only personal;
they also applied to her work. John Berger once
called Dworkin "the most misrepresented writer in
the western world". She has always been seen as the
woman who said that all men are rapists, and that
all sex is rape. In fact, she said neither of these
things. Here's what she told me in 1997: "If you
believe that what people call normal sex is an act
of dominance, where a man desires a woman so much
that he will use force against her to express his
desire, if you believe that's romantic, that's the
truth about sexual desire, then if someone
denounces force in sex it sounds like they're
denouncing sex. If conquest is your mode of
understanding sexuality, and the man is supposed to
be a predator, and then feminists come along and
say, no, sorry, that's using force, that's rape - a
lot of male writers have drawn the conclusion that
I'm saying all sex is rape." In other words, it's
not that all sex involves force, but that all sex
which does involve force is rape.
She continued the theme in 1981 in Pornography,
possibly her most influential book. She wrote:
"Pornography is a celebration of rape and injury to
women; it's a kind of union for rapists, a way of
legitimising rape and formalising male supremacy in
our society." She said that pornography is both a
cause of male violence and an expression of male
dominance, that women who enjoy porn are harming
women, and that lesbian porn is self-hating. She
had no time for the textual analysis of porn so
beloved of academia; what she cared about was the
women performing in the films, the harm they
suffered, and what other women had to suffer as a
result of men watching porn.
While much of this was brilliant, there are few
who could agree with all of Dworkin's work. Her
exhortation to vengeance was unpalatable to many;
she said that "a semi-automatic gun is one answer"
to the problem of violence against women, and that
she supported the murder of paedophiles: "Women
have the right to avenge crimes on their children.
A woman in California shot a paedophile who abused
her son; she walked into the court and killed him
there and then. I loved that woman. It is our duty
as women to find ways of supporting her and others
like her. I have no problem with killing
paedophiles." And her 2000 book, Scapegoat: The
Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation, suggested that
women should follow the same path as Jews did in
the 20th century: they were abused and fought back,
and so should women. Her analysis of the situation
in the Middle East - an analysis which, according
to Linda Grant, "many Zionists, non-Zionists,
Palestinians, scholars of the Holocaust, pacifists,
the left, women, men, are bound to find offensive"
- concluded with a call to women to form their own
nation state.
In an interview with Grant, Dworkin described a
Jewish childhood dominated by family memories of
the Holocaust. At a time when the subject was
simply not mentioned, Dworkin says she was
obsessed: "I've been very involved in trying to
learn about the Holocaust and trying to understand
it, which is probably pointless," she said. "I have
read Holocaust material, you might say
compulsively, over a lifetime ... I have been doing
that since I was a kid." Her mother was often ill,
but her childhood in New Jersey was happy, until
the age of nine, when she was sexually abused in a
cinema.
From then on, it was a life full of horrors.
After an anti-Vietnam protest when she was 18, she
was sent to prison and was assaulted by two male
prison doctors: "They pretty much tore me up inside
with a steel speculum and had themselves a fine old
time verbally tormenting me as well." She bled for
15 days and her family doctor told her he had
"never seen a uterus so bruised or a vagina so
ripped". She married a Dutch anarchist who beat her
savagely; she managed to escape from him, she said,
"not because I knew that he would kill me but
because I thought I would kill him". She said that
she never stopped being afraid of him.
Then, in 1999, Dworkin was drugged and raped in
a hotel room in Paris. It was an attack that was to
devastate her. In 2000 she wrote an account of the
rape for the New Statesman, which ended: "I have
been tortured and drug-rape runs through it ... I
am ready to die." Her account was questioned by
some commentators, who wondered why she hadn't told
the police, how she could be so sure she was raped
since she was drugged at the time (she cited
vaginal pain, bleeding, and infection; bruising on
her breast; "huge, deep gashes" on her leg). But
the undercurrent, tapping into the myths that
Dworkin herself had so carefully undermined in her
work, was this: how could she be raped? She's old,
she's fat, she's ugly. As if anyone still thought
that rape was about sex and not about power.
This response, though, did not surprise Dworkin.
"If the Holocaust can be denied even today," she
said, "how can a woman who has been raped be
believed?" But the impact of the rape and
surrounding controversy was severe, and Dworkin
withdrew from public life for several years. Her
health was bad: she had a stomach-stapling
operation because her obesity had reached a
dangerous level, and had severe knee problems which
made it difficult to walk. She became invisible in
the US except among those for whom her name was
what she called "a curse word", and her 2002
memoir, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a
Militant Feminist, still does not have a publisher
in the UK. But she was coming to terms with her
disability; she was being taken seriously again by
newspapers, at least in this country. In September,
she told the Guardian: "I thought I was finished,
but I feel a new vitality. I want to continue to
help women." She also said: "At first [after
the rape] I wanted very much to die. Now I only
want to die a few times a day, which is damned
good."
This black wit is remarked upon by everyone who
met Dworkin. During the Clinton/ Lewinsky affair,
when Dworkin was vocally opposed to Clinton, she
said: "What needs to be asked is, was the cigar
lit?" When I asked her if her abusive ex-husband
had remarried, she said: "Oh yes, and very quickly.
After all, the house was getting dirty." I remember
being in a restaurant with her in London when she
joked that she really ought to go on a diet, and
did I know of any good ones?
People were startled by her gentleness and
vulnerability; were surprised that her friendships
included the British author Michael Moorcock and
John Berger as well as feminists Gloria Steinem and
Robin Morgan. And although she once said she was a
lesbian, she lived with the writer John Stoltenberg
for three decades, saying: "It's a very deep
relationship, a major part of my life which I never
thought possible." As Julie Bindel, feminist and
Dworkin's friend of 10 years, says: "She was the
most maligned feminist on the planet; she never
hated men."
Dworkin's feminism often came into conflict with
the more compromising theories of others, such as
Naomi Wolf. "I do think liberal feminists bear
responsibility for a lot of what's gone wrong," she
told me in 1997. "To me, what's so horrible is that
they make alliances for the benefit of middle-class
women. So it has to do with, say, having a woman in
the supreme court. And that's fine - I'd love a
woman, eight women, in the supreme court - but poor
women always lose out." She did concede, however,
that her radicalism was too much for some: "I'm not
saying that everybody should be thinking about this
in the same way. I have a really strong belief that
any movement needs both radicals and liberals. You
always need women who can walk into the room in the
right way, talk in the right tone of voice, who
have access to power. But you also need a bottom
line."
It was this bottom line that Dworkin provided.
She was a bedrock, the place to start from: even
when you disagreed with her, her arguments were
infuriating, fascinating, hard to forget. Feminism
needs those who won't compromise, even in their
appearance; perhaps I'm alone, but I find it pretty
fabulous that, as a friend told me, Dworkin would
"go to posh restaurants in Manhattan wearing those
bloody dungarees". She refused to compromise
throughout her life, and was fearless in the face
of great provocation. In a world where teenage
girls believe that breast implants will make them
happy and where rape convictions are down to a
record low of 5.6% of reported rapes; in a public
culture which has been relentlessly pornographised,
in an academic environment which has allowed
postmodernism to remove all politics from feminism,
we will miss Andrea Dworkin. She once said: "What
will women do? Is there a plan? If not, why not?"
And indeed, who is left to replace her?
Source: The Guardian, Tuesday April 12,
2005 www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,11812,1457398,00.html
Photo source:
Elsa
Dorfman
Related Topics: Autobiography
The Andrea
Dworkin Lie
Detector
- True and False clarifications about Andrea.
Non-fiction books: Letters From a
War Zone. Intercourse. Right-Wing Women.
Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Our Blood:
Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics. Woman
Hating. Life and Death. Fiction books:
Mercy. Ice and Fire. First Love.
* * *
Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their
rights and nothing less. - Susan B. Anthony
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