Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
Andrea Dworkin
April 9, 2005 (aged 58)
- Writer
- activist
1966–2005
- Woman Hating (1974)
- Pornography (1981)
- Intercourse (1987)
-
Cornelius Dirk de Bruin(m. 1969; div. 1976)
The central objective of Dworkin's work is analyzing Western society, culture, and politics through the prism of men's sexual violence against women in a patriarchal context. She wrote on a wide range of topics including the lives of Joan of Arc,[1] Margaret Papandreou,[2] and Nicole Brown Simpson;[3] she analyzed the literature of Charlotte Brontë,[4] Jean Rhys,[5] Leo Tolstoy, Marquis de Sade, Kōbō Abe, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Isaac Bashevis Singer;[6] she brought her own radical feminist perspective to her examination of subjects historically written or described from men's point of view, including fairy tales, homosexuality,[7] lesbianism,[8] virginity,[9] antisemitism, the State of Israel,[10] the Holocaust, biological superiority,[11] and racism.[12] She interrogated premises underlying concepts such as freedom of the press[13] and civil liberties.[14] She theorized the sexual politics of intelligence,[15] fear, courage,[16] and integrity.[17] She described a male supremacist political ideology manifesting in and constituted by rape,[18] battery,[19] prostitution,[20] and pornography.[21]
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Andrea Dworkin was born on September 26, 1946, in Camden, New Jersey, to Harry Dworkin and Sylvia Spiegel. Her father was the grandson of a Russian Jew who fled Russia when he was 15 years old in order to escape military service, and her mother was the child of Jewish immigrants from Hungary.[22] She had one younger brother, Mark. Her father was a school teacher and dedicated socialist, whom she credited with inspiring her passion for social justice. Her relationship with her mother was strained, but Dworkin later wrote that her mother's belief in legal birth control and abortion, "long before these were respectable beliefs", inspired her later activism.[23]
Though she described her Jewish household as being in many ways dominated by the memory of the Holocaust, it nonetheless provided a happy childhood until she reached the age of nine, when an unknown man molested her in a movie theater. When Dworkin was ten, her family moved from the city to the suburbs of Cherry Hill, New Jersey (then known as Delaware Township), which she later wrote she "experienced as being kidnapped by aliens and taken to a penal colony".[24] In sixth grade, the administration at her new school punished her for refusing to sing "Silent Night" (as a Jew, she objected to being forced to sing Christian religious songs at school).[25] She said she "probably would have become a rabbi" if women could have while she was in high school and she "would have liked" being a Talmudic scholar.[26]
Dworkin began writing poetry and fiction in the sixth grade.[27] Around that time, she was undecided about whether to become a lawyer or a writer, because of her interest then in abortion, and chose writing because she could "do it in a room alone" and "nobody could stop me".[28] Throughout high school, she read avidly, with encouragement from her parents. She was particularly influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Che Guevara, and the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg,[27] and has included among writers she "admired most" Jean Genet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.[29] She graduated in 1964 from what is now Cherry Hill High School West.[30]
College and early activism[edit]
In 1965, while a freshman at Bennington College, Dworkin 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, known for housing renowned leftist women.[31] After writing to the Commissioner of Corrections Anna Cross, Dworkin testified that the doctors in the House of Detention gave her an internal examination which was so rough that she bled for days afterwards. She spoke in public and testified before a grand jury about her experience, and the media coverage of her testimony made national and international news.[32][33] The grand jury declined to make an indictment in the case, but Dworkin's testimony contributed to public outrage over the mistreatment of inmates. The prison was closed seven years later.[34]
Soon after testifying before the grand jury, Dworkin left Bennington College on the ocean liner Castel Felice to live in Greece and to pursue her writing.[35] She traveled from Paris to Athens on the Orient Express, and went to live and write on the island of Crete.[36] While there, she wrote a series of poems titled (Vietnam) Variations, a collection of poems and prose poems that she printed on the island in a book called Child (1965), and a novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on Burning Boyfriend—a reference to Norman Morrison, a pacifist who had burned himself to death in protest of the Vietnam War. She also wrote several poems and dialogues which she hand-printed after returning to the United States; these became the book Morning Hair (1967).[37]
It was during those years that she produced two books of poetry, Child (1965) and Morning Hair (1967). After living in Crete, Dworkin returned to Bennington College for two years, where she continued to study literature and participated in campaigns against the college's student conduct code, for contraception on campus, for the legalization of abortion, and against the Vietnam War.[38] She graduated with a Bachelor's degree in literature in 1968.[39]
Life in the Netherlands[edit]
After graduation, Dworkin moved to Amsterdam to interview Dutch anarchists in the Provo movement, which used theatrical street happenings to instigate change.[40] While there, she became involved with one of the anarchists, Cornelius (Iwan) Dirk de Bruin,[41] and they married. Soon after, she says that de Bruin began to abuse her severely, punching and kicking her, burning her with cigarettes, beating her on her legs with a wooden beam, and banging her head against the floor until he knocked her unconscious.[42]
After she left de Bruin late in 1971, Dworkin said her ex-husband attacked, persecuted, and harassed her, beating her and threatening her whenever he found where she was hiding. She found herself desperate for money, often homeless, thousands of miles from her family, later remarking that "I often lived the life of a fugitive, except that it was the more desperate life of a battered woman who had run away for the last time, whatever the outcome."[43] Due to poverty, Dworkin turned to prostitution for a period.[44] Ricki Abrams, a feminist and fellow expatriate, sheltered Dworkin in her home and helped her find places to stay on houseboats, a communal farm, and in deserted buildings.[45] Dworkin tried to work up the money to return to the United States.
Abrams introduced Dworkin to early radical feminist writing from the United States, and Dworkin was notably inspired by Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, and Robin Morgan's Sisterhood Is Powerful.[46] She and Abrams began to work together on "early pieces and fragments" of a radical feminist text on the hatred of women in culture and history,[47] including a completed draft of a chapter on the pornographic counterculture magazine Suck, which was published by a group of fellow expatriates in the Netherlands.[48]
Dworkin later wrote that she eventually agreed to help smuggle a briefcase of heroin through customs in return for $1,000 and an airplane ticket, thinking that if she was successful she could return home with the ticket and the money, and if caught she would at least escape her ex-husband's abuse by going to prison. The deal for the briefcase fell through, but the man who had promised Dworkin the money gave her the airline ticket anyway, and she returned to the United States in 1972.[49]
Before she left Amsterdam, Dworkin spoke with Abrams about her experiences in the Netherlands, the emerging feminist movement, and the book they had begun to write together. Dworkin agreed to complete the book—which she eventually titled Woman Hating—and publish it when she reached the United States.[50] In her memoirs, Dworkin relates that during that conversation, she vowed to dedicate her life to the feminist movement:
Fiction[edit]
Dworkin published three fictional works after achieving notice as a feminist author and activist. She published a collection of short stories, the new womans broken heart in 1980. Her first novel, Ice and Fire, was originally published in the United Kingdom in 1986. It is a first-person narrative, detailing violence and abuse; Susie Bright has claimed that it amounts to a modern feminist rewriting of one of the Marquis de Sade's most famous works, Juliette.[123] However, Dworkin aimed to depict men's harm to women as normalized political harm, not as eccentric eroticism. Dworkin's second novel, Mercy, reviewed by the New York Times as a Bildungsroman,[124] was first published in the United Kingdom in 1990. According to The Telegraph, the novels "were not popular".[125]
Dworkin's short fiction and novels often incorporated elements from her life and themes from her nonfiction writing, sometimes related by a first-person narrator. Critics have sometimes quoted passages spoken by characters in Ice and Fire as representations of Dworkin's own views.[126][127][119] Dworkin, however, wrote "My fiction is not autobiography. I am not an exhibitionist. I do not show myself. I am not asking for forgiveness. I do not want to confess. But I have used everything I know—my life—to show what I believe must be shown so that it can be faced. The imperative at the heart of my writing—what must be done—comes directly from my life. But I do not show my life directly, in full view; nor even look at it while others watch."[128]
Influence[edit]
Dworkin's writings were designed to assert the ubiquity and denounce the injustice of institutionalized and normalized sex-based harm against women. She became one of the most influential writers and spokeswomen of American radical feminism during the late 1970s and the 1980s.[70][73] She characterized pornography as an industry of damaging objectification and abuse, not a metaphysical fantasy realm. She discussed prostitution as a system of exploitation, and intercourse as a key site of intimate subordination in patriarchy. Her analysis and writing influenced and inspired the work of contemporary feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon,[129] Gloria Steinem,[130] John Stoltenberg,[80] Nikki Craft,[131] Susan Cole,[132] and Amy Elman.[133] Rebecca Traister stated that Dworkin's Intercourse was one of the books that inspired her 2018 book Good and Mad.[134] However, Jessa Crispin reproved contemporary feminists for abandoning Dworkin's work in her 2017 book Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto.[135]
Dworkin's uncompromising positions and forceful style of writing and speaking, described by Robert Campbell as "apocalyptic",[136] earned her frequent comparisons to other speakers such as Malcolm X (by Robin Morgan,[80] Susie Bright,[123] and others). Gloria Steinem repeatedly compared her style to that of the Biblical prophets.[137][138]
Critical of what she described as male supremacist values expressed among conservatives, liberals, and radicals,[139] she nevertheless engaged with all three groups. She came out of movements led by leftist men, such as when protesting the Vietnam War or when active in the Gay liberation Movement. She addressed liberal men on the issue of rape.[140] She spoke with and wrote about politically conservative women, resulting in the publication of Right-Wing Women. She testified at a Meese Commission hearing on pornography while Attorney General Edwin Meese was serving socially conservative President Ronald Reagan. She had a political discourse with National Review writer David Frum and their spouses arranged by Christopher Hitchens.[141][142]
Her life partner John Stoltenberg wrote that Dworkin was a trans ally who "repudiated the sex binary—and the biological essentialism upon which belief in it is based." Stoltenberg also wrote that "she is often invoked to support beliefs she actively repudiated in her work."[143]
Criticism[edit]
Dworkin's discursive style, coupled with antipathy for her views, produced sharply polarizing debate. In 1992, Melanie McFadyean wrote: "People think Andrea's a man-hater, she gets called a Fascist and a Nazi—particularly by the American left, but it's not detectable in her work."[144] While often polarizing among the left, Dworkin's views were also divisive in conservative circles, eliciting both praise and condemnation from right-wing critics. After her death, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative gay writer and political commentator,[145] stated that "[m]any on the social right liked Andrea Dworkin. Like Dworkin, their essential impulse when they see human beings living freely is to try and control or stop them—for their own good. Like Dworkin, they are horrified by male sexuality, and see men as such as a problem to be tamed. Like Dworkin, they believe in the power of the state to censor and coerce sexual freedoms. Like Dworkin, they view the enormous new freedom that women and gay people have acquired since the 1960s as a terrible development for human culture."[146] Cathy Young, an American libertarian/conservative journalist,[147] complained of a "whitewash" in feminist obituaries for Dworkin, arguing that Dworkin's positions were manifestly misandrist, stating that Dworkin was in fact insane,[148][149] criticizing what she called Dworkin's "destructive legacy", and describing Dworkin as a "sad ghost" that feminism needs to exorcise.[150]
Other feminists published sympathetic or celebratory memorials online and in print.[151][152] Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin's longtime friend and collaborator, published a column in The New York Times, celebrating what she described as Dworkin's "incandescent literary and political career", suggested that Dworkin deserved a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and complained that "lies about her views on sexuality (that she believed intercourse was rape) and her political alliances (that she was in bed with the right) were published and republished without attempts at verification, corrective letters almost always refused. Where the physical appearance of male writers is regarded as irrelevant or cherished as a charming eccentricity, Andrea's was reviled and mocked and turned into pornography. When she sued for libel, courts trivialized the pornographic lies as fantasy and dignified them as satire."[151]
Further critics, especially women who identify as feminists but sharply differ with Dworkin's positions and strategies, have offered nuanced views, suggesting that Dworkin called attention to real and important problems, but that her legacy as a whole had been destructive to the women's movement.[153] Her work and activism on pornography—especially in the form of the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance—were criticized by liberal groups such as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT).[154]
Dworkin was also met with criticism from sex-positive feminists, in what became known as the feminist sex wars of the late 1970s and 1980s. The sex wars were a series of heated debates that polarized feminist thought on a number of issues relating to sex and sexuality. Sex-positive feminist critics criticized Dworkin's legal activism as censorious, and argued that her work on pornography and sexuality promoted an essentialist, conservative, or repressive view of sexuality, which they often characterized as "anti-sex" or "sex-negative". Her criticisms of common heterosexual sexual expression, pornography, prostitution, and sadomasochism were frequently claimed to disregard women's own agency in sex or deny women's sexual choices. Dworkin countered that her critics often misrepresented her views,[155] and that under the heading of "choice" and "sex-positivity", her feminist critics were failing to question the often violent political structures that confined women's choices and shaped the meaning of sex acts.[156]
However, in the 21st century, Dworkin has garnered favor with younger generations of feminists, Lauren Oyler (b. 1991), Moira Donegan (b. 1989), Jennifer Szalai (b. 1979-80), Michelle Goldberg (b. 1975), and Joanna Fateman (b. 1974), who found liberal and sex-positive feminism lacking in depth of analysis and action.[157][158][159][160][161][162]
In 1989, Dworkin wrote an article about her life as a battered wife in the Netherlands, "What Battery Really Is", in response to Susan Brownmiller, who had argued that Hedda Nussbaum, a battered woman, should have been indicted for her failure to stop Joel Steinberg from murdering their adoptive daughter.[163] Newsweek initially accepted "What Battery Really Is" for publication, but then declined to publish the account at the request of their attorney, according to Dworkin, arguing that she needed either to publish anonymously "to protect the identity of the batterer" and remove references to specific injuries, or to provide "medical records, police records, a written statement from a doctor who had seen the injuries". Instead, Dworkin submitted the article to the Los Angeles Times, which published it on March 12, 1989.[164]
In popular culture[edit]
In Dworkin's lifetime, two volumes considered and analyzed the body of her work: Andrea Dworkin by Jeremy Mark Robinson, first published in 1994,[167] and Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin's Art and Politics by Cindy Jenefsky in 1998.[168] Dworkin's influence has continued beyond her death. The play Aftermath was produced in 2015 by John Stoltenberg, based on Dworkin's unpublished writing.[169] The Dworkin anthology Last Days at Hot Slit was published in 2019.[170] The documentary feature My Name is Andrea by Pratibha Parmar was released in 2020;[171] the biography Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary by Martin Duberman was published the same year.[172] Dworkin's book proposal for Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation was made public in mid-2022.[77]
She appears in Season 3 Episode 4 of The Deuce as a member of Women Against Pornography.