I completely adore Andrea Dworkin. However earlier than you dive into her writing, let me offer you slightly warning first: You’ll by no means have a look at photos of bare girls the identical manner once more. I’m not simply speaking about porn. Go to an artwork museum and, should you’re contemporary off Dworkin, you may be the least enjoyable individual there. Klimt, Collier, Modigliani, Gaugin—your potential to like their depictions of nudity may be among the many casualties of your studying. And there’ll nearly actually be others: Dworkin might compromise your enjoyment of flicks like Babygirl, your willingness to carry out sure intercourse acts, or your potential to tolerate sure sorts of individuals.
Dworkin knew her work had this energy. She described herself as “not the enjoyable type” of feminist. Throughout her lifetime, others had far much less type issues to say. Hustler printed antisemitic and homophobic cartoons of her, and she or he was well-known for being fats, frizzy-haired, unadorned, and overalled. She struggled to search out publishers; as soon as printed, her work was usually ignored by the mainstream press; she felt (and largely was) estranged from mainstream feminists. Many individuals know her greatest for claiming that each one intercourse is rape—which is one thing she by no means stated. She has, like many different second-wave feminists, been extra caricatured than learn.
However this yr, Picador took a raffle that we may be prepared to begin studying her, with the rerelease of three of her books: Pornography, Lady Hating, and Proper-Wing Girls. There’s by no means been a greater time to buck that pattern and listen to what she really stated. Proper-Wing Girls feels particularly apposite to the current second: It was written within the wake of the 1980 election of President Reagan—an actor who turned out to have shocking mass enchantment as a Republican politician. Dworkin wrote the guide to confront the query: Why do girls ally themselves with their oppressors? One well-liked reply (then and now) was that girls need to be oppressed—or maybe have been even made to be oppressed, courtesy of some huge daddy within the sky who didn’t need to share his apples.
Dworkin rejected that nonsense, and as a substitute answered the query with empathy: She noticed Republican girls as savvy, not dumb. They have been, Dworkin noticed, making a rational resolution. “Each lodging that girls make to this domination, nevertheless apparently silly, self-defeating, or harmful, is rooted within the pressing have to survive by some means on male phrases.” And the left usually seems to have little higher to supply them: “leftist males additionally need wives and whores,” Dworkin wrote. The left stresses “impersonal intercourse and promiscuity as values,” which right-wing girls fear “will make them extra weak to male sexual aggression.” These girls “are usually not fallacious,” Dworkin stated, once they concluded that conventional marriage might be “the higher deal” as a result of it meant “promoting to at least one man, not lots of.”
Dworkin’s rhetoric comes scorching and heavy, nearly like a preacher’s sermon. It carries you alongside to a spot you by no means thought you’d get to—pondering all porn is problematic, for instance, or that Republican girls aren’t easy traitors. If, like Hansel and Gretel, you then attempt to retrace your steps and work out the place you went fallacious, you could end up unable to take action. Because the feminist Ariel Levy put it in her introduction to the twentieth-anniversary version of Dworkin’s Intercourse: “Should you settle for what she’s saying, out of the blue it’s a must to query the whole lot: the way in which you costume, the way in which you write, your favourite films, your humorousness, and sure, the way in which you fuck.”
After all, Dworkin’s work isn’t excellent. She will not be a giant fan of nuance. She consists of intensive dialogue of the Nazis when discussing how porn impacts girls, which feels fairly icky to me. At one level, Lady Hating seems to mount a protection of incest—a place that Dworkin later contradicted. She had a dim view of heterosexuality usually, saying: “Intercourse with males as we all know them is more and more unimaginable. It requires an aborting of creativity and power, a refusal of accountability and freedom: a bitter private dying. It means remaining the sufferer, without end annihilating all self-respect. It means appearing out the feminine position, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity that are central to it. Unambiguous typical heterosexual habits is the worst betrayal of our frequent humanity.”
However her phrases are a battle cry for girls, and that’s precisely what we’d like proper now. Too usually, modern feminism can really feel like the other: extra of a slogan on a t-shirt than a motion, or maybe a doomed group undertaking. And there have been many latest days—watching white girls shepherd the re-election of Donald Trump, listening to Amy Coney Barrett ask questions from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Courtroom, seeing girls embrace the alt-right slogan “my physique, his alternative” on social media—when I’ve been tempted to surrender on the undertaking altogether.
However Andrea Dworkin insists that I not, and I’m lastly able to hear. (Picador presumably is betting that others are, too.) “Doing feminist work requires a surfeit of nerve and stamina,” Dworkin wrote in 1975. “At first one works on an vitality generated by sheer conviction,” however over time, “as one learns increasingly more in regards to the nature of ladies’s oppression by way of one’s work, it turns into more durable to work. One’s work on the earth meets the identical type of abuse of 1’s physique.”
That wasn’t only a informal warning: Dworkin suffered vastly for her work. Her first marriage was abusive, and when she lastly left it, she engaged in intercourse work to make ends meet. She was sexually assaulted greater than as soon as, spent her final years largely crippled, and died too early of acute myocarditis at age 58.
However to the very finish, she remained dedicated to the undertaking of feminism: After her dying, a theretofore unknown manuscript about her personal expertise of rape was discovered on her laptop. In different phrases, regardless of how dangerous issues received, Andrea Dworkin refused to whisper and say please. She didn’t accommodate. She demanded a pure ideology, or the closest factor any human can muster. She was and is the feminist we by no means deserved however all the time wanted—now greater than ever.
