Andrea Dworkin Relevant Again. 50m Ago
Not the Fun Kind of Feminist
How Trump helped make Andrea Dworkin relevant again.
For decades at present, Andrea Dworkin has existed in the feminist imagination mostly as a negative example, the woman no 1 wanted to be.
An anti-porn, anti-prostitution militant in the feminist sexual practice wars of the belatedly 1970s and 1980s, she sometimes seemed similar a misogynist extravaganza of a women's rights activist, a puritanical battle ax in overalls out to smite men for their appetites. Dworkin never actually wrote that all sex is rape, a claim often attributed to her, but she did see heterosexual intercourse as almost metaphysically degrading, calling it, in her 1987 book "Intercourse," "the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women." Feminism would spend decades defining itself confronting her bleak, dogmatic vision.
So it's been striking to see that recently, feminists take started invoking Dworkin, who died in 2005, in a spirit of respect and rediscovery. The cultural critic Jessa Crispin castigated contemporary feminists for their wholesale abandonment of Dworkin's work in her 2022 book "Why I Am Non a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto." Rebecca Traister listed Dworkin's "Intercourse" equally one of the books that inspired her 2022 best seller "Good and Mad." The Fly, the network of stylish women'southward co-working spaces and social clubs, sells enameled pins of Dworkin'due south confront.
A new anthology of Dworkin's work, "Last Days at Hot Slit," is out this calendar month, edited past Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder. ("Last Days at Hot Slit" was a working title for a version of the manuscript that became Dworkin'south first book, "Woman Antisocial.") Reading Dworkin now, Fateman wrote in a contempo essay in The New York Review of Books, "across the anti-porn intransigence she's both reviled and revered for, one feels a prescient apocalyptic urgency, one perfectly calibrated, it seems, to the high stakes of our time." (Fateman, an fine art critic who used to be in a ring, Le Tigre, with Riot Grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna, is also working on an experimental nonfiction book based on Dworkin's life.)
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So what is information technology in Dworkin'due south long-neglected oeuvre that has suddenly go resonant? Perchance information technology'south simply because we're in a moment of crunch, when people seeking solutions are dusting off all sorts of radical ideas. Just I think information technology'south more than that. Dworkin was engaged, as many women today are engaged, in a pitched cultural battle over whose experiences and assumptions define our mutual reality. As she wrote of several esteemed male person writers in a 1995 preface to "Intercourse," "I love the literature these men created; but I will non alive my life as if they are real and I am not."
Dworkin was unapologetically angry, every bit and so many women today are. Fifty-fifty before 2016, you could see this acrimony building in the emergence of new words to draw maddening male behaviors that had once gone unnamed — manspreading, mansplaining. Then came the obscene insult of Donald Trump's victory. It seems like something sprung from Dworkin's cataclysmic imagination, that America's most overtly fascistic president would also be the start, as far equally we know, to accept appeared in soft-cadre porn films. I think Trump's victory marked a shift in feminism'southward relationship to sexual liberation; as long every bit he's in power, information technology'southward hard to associate libertinism with progress.
And so Dworkin, and then profoundly out of style but a few years ago, suddenly seems prophetic. "Our enemies — rapists and their defenders — non only become unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in the gild; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists, corporation executives, psychiatrists and teachers," Dworkin said in a lecture she wrote in 1975, included in "Final Days at Hot Slit." Possibly this once sounded paranoid. Later Trump's election, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and revelations of predation by men including Roger Ailes, Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, Larry Nassar and countless figures in the Catholic Church building, her words seem frighteningly perceptive.
Dworkin showed foresight in other ways. She dedicated Monica Lewinsky when the young woman was existence treated like a joke, and she was unsparing in her disgust for Beak Clinton. She was intersectional before the give-and-take was coined. The "closely interwoven fabric of oppression" in America, she wrote in "Woman Hating," meant that "wherever 1 stood, it was with at least ane foot heavy on the belly of some other homo."
Notwithstanding, the resurrection of Dworkin's piece of work and reputation is in some means quite strange, because her contemporary admirers tend to reject her central political commitments. Dworkin, who'd turned tricks as a bankrupt, bohemian immature woman, wanted to outlaw prostitution and pornography, and in the 1980s she made an alliance with the religious correct to push anti-pornography legislation. There is no sympathy for such a deal in feminist circles today, where it's by and large taboo to treat sex work as distinct from any other kind of labor.
Even so the renewed involvement in Dworkin is a sign that for many women, our libidinous civilisation feels neither pleasurable nor liberating. "Me and my peers, we believed in this sort of fairy tale, that in that location was a line of demarcation that was very clear between rape and nonconsensual acts, and consent," said Fateman. "We knew where the line was, and everything on the side of consent was great, and it was an expression of our freedom. Simply that'due south not the experience of sex activity that a lot of people are having."
Moira Donegan, the writer best known for creating an online list of declared sexual abusers and harassers in media, recently wrote an appreciative reappraisal of Dworkin occasioned by "Last Days at Hot Slit." "Information technology should non be difficult to say that heterosexuality equally it is good is a raw deal for women and that much pornography eroticizes the contempt of women," she wrote. "It should not be difficult to say whatever of this. Just it has become hard."
Seen from a certain angle, the #MeToo motility — or at to the lowest degree those offshoots of the move that question the unequal power dynamics behind seemingly consensual encounters — looks like a style of proverb those hard things. Indeed, some of Dworkin's ideas have been reincarnated in #MeToo, and not merely because she also sought to claiming oppression by going public with her ain stories of sexual abuse.
Call back of the woman who told a reporter, concluding yr, well-nigh an encounter with the actor Aziz Ansari that she'd come to understand as sexual assault, though she didn't draw force or threat. Decades earlier, Dworkin created a political framework for viewing such an experience — one most would probably write off as bad sexual practice — as a violation. In that 1975 lecture, she described "presumptive rape" as ane in which "the constraint on the victim'southward volition is in the circumstance itself; in that location has been no mutuality of choice and understanding." Consent, she insisted, had to mean more just acquiescence.
Taken literally, much of Dworkin'southward writing dead ends in despair. She insisted on being credited for her difficult-earned knowledge of the world, merely would dismiss other women'southward testimonies — specially most their enjoyment of sex — that contradicted her ideology. "The quality of the sensation or the need for a man or the desire for love: These are not answers to questions of freedom; they are diversions into complicity and ignorance," she wrote.
Even so Fateman suggests that it's precisely considering Dworkin lost the sex wars so decisively that nosotros tin now encounter beyond her most extreme rhetoric. "You don't have to be afraid that Andrea Dworkin is going to take your pornography abroad," Fateman said. That opens up space to consider the rest of her work, and the price she paid for refusing so categorically to brand herself appealing to men.
"For a adult female writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and dearest must be subtext," Dworkin wrote in the "Intercourse" preface. "No. I say no." Information technology's in function this "no" that women are celebrating when they celebrate Dworkin. To treat her writing with curiosity and respect is itself a way of demonstrating indifference to male stance. "I'm a radical feminist," she once said. "Non the fun kind." She'due south back because these aren't fun times.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/opinion/sunday/trump-feminism-andrea-dworkin.html
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