WASHINGTON — Top conservative magazine National Review published a column on Friday praising the work of the late Sex Worker Exclusionary Feminist (SWERF) icon Andrea Dworkin, and endorsing the view that porn should be seen “as decadent and exploitative,” and something that “enslaves men and women to their basest appetites.”
In what might seem unlikely only to those not paying attention to the current War on Porn and its alliances, militant right-wing Catholic William Z. Nardi used one of the most famous conservative platforms to sing the praises of a radical feminist known for her condemnation of all forms of sex work.
The War on Porn, as XBIZ has chronicled in an ongoing series of articles, is being waged by activists on all sides of the political spectrum, from religiously motivated, Republican Ohio legislators endorsing a bogus “public health crisis” around porn, to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, the U.K.-based Guardian Newspaper and other Sex Worker Exclusionary Liberals (SWELs).
“Whereas older Americans perhaps still remember a time when our society promoted mutual self-sacrifice over hedonism,” Nardi writes in his National Review column, “we live in an age when even children have access to limitless online pornography.”
After trotting out a bizarre statistic sourced from “one study” (“men who view pornography are significantly less likely to intervene as a bystander in situations leading to sexual assault and report increased behavioral intent to rape”), Nardi moves on to his embrace of Dworkin, who died in 2005, and her anti-sex-work feminism:
“The late radical feminist Andrea Dworkin was the last major intellectual of a left-wing bent to engage the public on the immorality of porn consumption and its nexus with sexual violence,” he writes.
Dworkin, Nardi claims, would be “horrified” by pro-sex work feminism. He is appalled that in the 21st century, “far from boycotting the industry, […] the more progressive corners of the feminist movement encourage watching pornography.”
One of the conservatives’ current nemeses, German scholar and journalist Madita Oeming, is pilloried for spreading “the notion of porn addiction is a fallacy invented by ‘the media, church and self-help industry’.”
After praising a “liberal” New York Times columnist for endorsing Dworkin’s anti-sex views, Nardi’s National Review piece concludes that “the next step is investigating the roots of our pornified culture, which enslaves men and women to their basest appetites.”
