Andrea Dworkin Biography

Andrea Dworkin was born to left-wing Jewish parents. Inspired by the peace movement of the 1960’s, Dworkin participated in a number of antiwar demonstrations. It was at one of these demonstrations that she had the experience that changed her life. At eighteen she was arrested and taken to the Women’s House of Detention. Her treatment there was brutal: bullying, harsh internal examinations, and authoritarian contempt left her emotionally and physically scarred. Released after four days, Dworkin hemorrhaged vaginally for two weeks. She spoke out publicly about her trauma in an attempt to find out why any woman should be humiliated in so sexual a way. Her marriage to a Dutch anarchist awakened her to the reality of sexual violence in relationships; he beat her severely until she escaped from him with the help of feminist friends. She was an intelligent, educated woman who had been graduated from Bennington College, but she could not prevent herself from being hurt.

Dworkin described her childhood as one that taught her to defy convention. As a Jewish child, she refused to sing Christmas carols such as “Silent Night” at school. When her brush with the law and her nightmarish marriage left her horrified by the status of women, she took action.

Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, Dworkin’s first major work, echoes the pain of her personal experiences of misogyny. Later books, such as Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics and Intercourse, go further into the implications of the sexual act itself. Dworkin analyzed the historical perceptions of rape and possession and of the biology of sexual contact. She also studied pornographic magazines in an attempt to understand how women are demeaned by pornography. Since many critics, such as one reviewer from the London Review of Books, found Dworkin’s lack of makeup, her unflattering clothes, and her heaviness to be unattractive, Dworkin had to relate to a double standard of beauty that does not apply to male writers, no matter how polemic they may be. As do other feminist writers, Dworkin enlightend women about gender roles in society. Dworkin died at her home in Washington, D.C. in 2005.

Many mainstream feminists contest Andrea Dworkin’s extreme sexual politics that, in her own words, deal with “the morbid side of the women’s movement.” Dworkin may be best known for the statement, inaccurately attributed to her, that “All heterosexual sex is rape.” Her writings do reveal two controversial beliefs: first, that the prevailing bipolar conceptualization of male/female gender is based on inaccurate and destructive “fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs”; and second, that “[t]he governing reality for women is that there is no escape from male violence, because it is inside and outside, intimate and predatory.”

Much of Dworkin’s activism focused on the issue of pornography, which she saw as one of the ways in which antiwoman violence is taught and supported, through pornography’s depiction of women as sexual objects. In 1983, Dworkin and Minnesota lawyer Catharine A. MacKinnon drafted a Minneapolis ordinance that defined pornography as “a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex.” Carefully detailing those materials and actions fitting under this definition, the ordinance would outlaw pornography because it “diminish[es] opportunities for equality of rights . . . guaranteed to all citizens under the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Although the ordinance was twice vetoed by the mayor of Minneapolis, different versions resulted in court battles throughout the United States and Canada.

Dworkin’s writings included Woman Hating (1974), Intercourse (1987), Letters from the War Zone (1993), and several articles on spousal abuse “in solidarity with Nicole Brown Simpson,” whom many believed to have been abused and perhaps murdered by her former husband, football star O. J. Simpson. Dworkin died at her home in Washington, D.C. in April, 2005.