Dworkin was possibly best known by members of the adult industry for her 1981 work “Pornography: Men Possessing Women.” She supported anti-porn initiatives in many states. Her most famous case was in Minneapolis, where she and teaching partner/author Catharine MacKinnon introduced a measure that would not ban porn, per se, but allow people “harmed” by it to sue pornographers. The measure was vetoed by Minneapolis’ mayor but other communities upheld it, until it and similar initiatives were ultimately deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The daughter of a labor activist, Dworkin exercised her right to dissent early. She refused to sing Christmas carols in elementary school and later was jailed for protesting the Vietnam War. It was a body cavity search by male doctors following her arrest that led to her denunciation of such tactics and the shuttering of the women’s detention center where it happened.
From her first book, 1974’s “Woman Hating,” Dworkin was branded a lightning rod for an extreme end of the modern women’s movement. Like Susan Sontag, however, Dworkin’s work was sometimes overshadowed by the zeal with which she communicated it. After 1981’s “Intercourse,” for example, she denied that sex was in fact rape, as some reviewers had accused her of hinting. She had described marriage as “mandated intercourse.”
Dworkin sought to demolish what she described as the patriarchal hegemony in the world, a rule that began in the family and ended with the state. This systematic cultural holocaust against women she called “gynocide.”
Dworkin and MacKinnon responded to “Deep Throat” actress Linda Lovelace’s denunciation of the porn industry with efforts to have pornography recognized as a violation of women’s civil rights.
Dworkin’s views on pornography never tapered but, as Camille Paglia said recently, “the whole pro-sex wing of feminism which had been ostracized since the 1960s came back with a vengeance.”
Ellen Thompson, editor of John Stagliano’s Buttman Magazine, told XBiz that “she did more to unintentionally help pornography than she ever thought she would. It's like how if you tell kids they can’t have something, or it's bad, it only makes them want it more.”
Susan Faludi further cast Dworkin’s ideas as out of touch with the contemporary women’s movement. “The average woman feels a lot more burdened by a beauty standard imposed upon her by Hollywood than she does by Andrea Dworkin,” she said.
Dworkin herself acknowledged the balancing act required to please everyone, and gave up. She derided the compromises required of politics and the prickly and contentious relations she had with other leftist thinkers in her 2002 autobiography, “Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant.”
Dworkin’s later topics tackled larger topics. 2000’s “Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women’s Liberation” advocated a homeland for women the way Israel was created for the Jews.
Dworkin is survived by her companion of 30 years, AARP Magazine managing editor John Stoltenberg.
