of O demonstrates that women are consistently portrayed as weak, submissive, and despised. These themes are expanded upon in Pornography and Intercourse. In Pornography, Dworkin examines the content, social context, and effects of pornography as a tool of male domination over women. Dismissing claims that pornographic writings and images fall under the protected category of free expression, Dworkin asserts that pornography is an exploitative medium of mass propaganda by which the ideology of male supremacy is transmitted. Drawing attention to the victimization of real women who perform in pornographic films, Dworkin contends that the creation of pornography is inseparable from the degradation of women it falsely portrays as fantasy; thus the production of pornography embodies its harmful effect. In Intercourse, Dworkin discusses the physical act of heterosexual intercourse as the quintessential manifestation of male hegemony and female inequality. According to Dworkin, male penetration during copulation signifies possession of the woman, rendering impossible the notion of female liberation or selfhood, as she is compelled to submit to male desire as occupation. Incorporating analysis of religious and legal strictures governing female sexuality and texts by Leo Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Gustave Flaubert, Dworkin maintains that—for women—the manipulative, demeaning experience of sexual intercourse precludes mutual respect or integrity.

Dworkin's semi-autobiographical novels, Ice and Fire and Mercy, give vivid expression to the conclusions in her nonfiction. Ice and Fire relates the experiences of an unnamed young feminist from Camden, New Jersey. She grows up in a working-class Jewish neighborhood, goes to college, marries an abusive husband, and eventually settles in New York City where she lives in squalor, prostitutes herself, and is brutalized by various men while attempting to write a book. After much difficulty locating a publisher, the protagonist finally gets her book into print, though it flounders due to its spiteful publisher and poor sales. Dworkin's alter ego in Mercy, also a young woman from Camden, is named Andrea. The first-person narrative documents a long history of horrific sexual abuse inflicted upon its protagonist, beginning with her molestation in a movie theater at age nine. Andrea is sexually assaulted by sadistic prison doctors, raped and mutilated by her husband, and repeatedly violated while living a bohemian existence in New York City. Her rage finally gives way to retributive violence, leading her to firebomb sex shops and assault homeless men while envisioning an international guerilla war on men. The narrative action is framed by a prologue and epilogue, both entitled "Not Andrea," in which Dworkin parodies her liberal feminist and academic detractors. Dworkin's views on the political, cultural, and physical subjugation of women are further elaborated in the essays, columns, and speeches collected in Our Blood (1976), Letters from a War Zone, and Life and Death. In the nonfiction work Right-Wing Women, written during the early years of the Reagan administration, Dworkin attempts to explain the appeal of the Republican Party for women, despite its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and other legislation to enhance the well-being of women. According to Dworkin, fear of male violence compels many conservative women to relinquish their autonomy for the security of traditional sex roles that demand passivity and subservience. The book was in part an attempt by Dworkin to distance herself from the anti-pornography advocacy of anti-feminist, religious, and conservative groups such as the Moral Majority.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Dworkin's compelling examination of sexual politics and pornography is the subject of divisive controversy in academic, political, and feminist circles. Though praised by some for her insightful, groundbreaking analysis of cultural misogyny and sexual exploitation, her detractors typically object to her abrasive presentation. Critics frequently complain that Dworkin's bombastic rhetoric distorts and sensationalizes the substance of her findings while alienating much of her audience. Critics also condemn Dworkin's interchangeable use of literal and metaphorical statements and her tendency to construct sweeping generalizations based on overstated or anecdotal evidence. Dworkin's vigilant condemnation of pornography has also been censured by feminist activists, especially those reluctant to challenge First Amendment rights. However, Dworkin's focus on pornography as a Fourteenth Amendment infringement—instead of an obscenity issue, a strategy formulated with MacKinnon—is considered an important legal maneuver for anti-pornography advocacy. Dworkin is less appreciated as a novelist. While some reviewers commend her visceral evocation of sexual violence, most fault her for simplistic prose, undeveloped characters, an overt feminist agenda, and graphic sexuality that some reviewers assert resembles the pornography she decries. Eschewing theoretical abstractions and the insular ideological battles of academic feminists, Dworkin has won many supporters for her willingness to address distasteful and often overlooked aspects of sexual abuse. A formidable independent thinker and activist, Dworkin is regarded as an influential contemporary feminist.

Child (poetry) 1966

Morning Hair (poetry and prose) 1968

Woman Hating (nonfiction) 1974

Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (essays and speeches) 1976

The New Woman's Broken Heart (short stories) 1980

Pornography: Men Possessing Women (nonfiction) 1981

Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (nonfiction) 1983

Ice and Fire (novel) 1986

Intercourse (nonfiction) 1987

Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality [with Catharine A. MacKinnon] (nonfiction) 1988

* Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987 (essays) 1988

Mercy (novel) 1990

Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War against Women (nonfiction) 1997

In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings [editor; with MacKinnon] (nonfiction) 1997

Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (nonfiction) 2000

Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (memoir) 2002

* Republished as Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1989 in 1989.

SOURCE: Dworkin, Andrea. "Pornography and Grief." In Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1989, pp. 19-23. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988.

In the following excerpt, originally written as a speech for a "Take Back the Night" march in 1978, Dworkin argues that pornography "functions to perpetuate male supremacy and crimes of violence against women because it conditions, trains, educates, and inspires men to despise women, to use women, to hurt women."

I searched for something to say here today quite different from what I am going to say. I wanted to come here militant and proud and angry as hell. But more and more, I find that anger is a pale shadow next to the grief I feel. If a woman has any sense of her own intrinsic worth, seeing pornography in small bits and pieces can bring her to a useful rage. Studying pornography in quantity and depth, as I have been doing for more months than I care to remember, will turn that same woman into a mourner.

The pornography itself is vile. To characterize it any other way would be to lie. No plague of male intellectualisms and sophistries can change or hide that simple fact. Georges Bataille, a philosopher of pornography (which he calls "eroticism"), puts it clearly: "In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation."¹ Mr Bataille, unlike so many of his peers, is good enough to make explicit that the whole idea is to violate the female. Using the language of grand euphemism so popular with male intellectuals who write on the subject of pornography, Bataille informs us that "[t]he passive, female side is essentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity."² To be "dissolved"—by any means necessary—is the role of women in pornography. The great male scientists and philosophers of sexuality, including Kinsey, Havelock Ellis, Wilhelm Reich, and Freud, uphold this view of our purpose and destiny. The great male writers use language more or less beautifully to create us in self-serving fragments, half-"dissolved" as it were, and then proceed to "dissolve" us all the way, by any means necessary. The biographers of the great male artists celebrate the real life atrocities those men have committed against us, as if those atrocities are central to the making of art. And in history, as men have lived it, they have "dissolved" us—by any means necessary. The slicing of our skins and the rattling of our bones are the energizing sources of male-defined art and science, as they are the essential content of pornography. The visceral experience of a hatred of women that literally knows no bounds has put me beyond anger and beyond tears; I can only speak to you from grief.

We all expected the world to be different than it is, didn't we? No matter what material or emotional deprivation we have experienced as children or as adults, no matter what we understood from history or from the testimonies of living persons about how people suffer and why, we all believed, however privately, in human possibility. Some of us believed in art, or literature, or music, or religion, or revolution; or in children, or in the redeeming potential of eroticism or affection. No matter what we knew of cruelty, we all believed in kindness; and no matter what we knew of hatred, we all believed in friendship or love. Not one of us could have imagined or would have believed the simple facts of life as we have come to know them: the rapacity of male greed for dominance; the malignancy of male supremacy; the virulent contempt for women that is the very foundation of the culture in which we live. The Women's Movement has forced us all to face the facts, but no matter how brave and clear-sighted we are, no matter how far we are willing to go or are forced to go in viewing reality without romance or illusion, we are simply overwhelmed by the male hatred of our kind, its morbidity, its compulsiveness, its obsessiveness, its celebration of itself in every detail of life and culture. We think that we have grasped this hatred once and for all, seen it in its spectacular cruelty, learned its every secret, got used to it or risen above it or organized against it so as to be protected from its worst excesses. We think that we know all there is to know about what men do to women, even if we cannot imagine why they do what they do, when something happens that simply drives us mad, out of our minds, so that we are again imprisoned like caged animals in the numbing reality of male control, male revenge against no one knows what, male hatred of our very being.

One can know everything and still not imagine snuff films. One can know everything and still be shocked and terrified when a man who attempted to make snuff films is released, despite the testimony of the women undercover agents whom he wanted to torture, murder, and, of course, film. One can know everything and still be stunned and paralyzed when one meets a child who is being continuously raped by her father or some close male relative. One can know everything and still be reduced to sputtering like an idiot when a woman is prosecuted for attempting to abort herself with knitting needles, or when a woman is imprisoned for killing a man who has raped or tortured her, or is raping or torturing her. One can know everything and still want to kill and be dead simultaneously when one sees a celebratory picture of a woman being ground up in a meat grinder on the cover of a national magazine, no matter how putrid the magazine. One can know everything and still somewhere inside refuse to believe that the personal, social, culturally sanctioned violence against women is unlimited, unpredictable, pervasive, constant, ruthless, and happily and unselfconsciously sadistic. One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibility of the other is unthinkable and impossible. One can know everything and still, at bottom, refuse to accept that the annihilation of women is the source of meaning and identity for men. One can know everything and still want desperately to know nothing because to face what we know is to question whether life is worth anything at all.

The pornographers, modern and ancient, visual and literary, vulgar and aristocratic, put forth one consistent proposition: erotic pleasure for men is derived from and predicated on the savage destruction of women. As the world's most honored pornographer, the Marquis de Sade (called by male scholars "The Divine Marquis"), wrote in one of his more restrained and civil moments: "There's not a woman on earth who'd ever have had cause to complain of my services if I'd been sure of being able to kill her afterward."³ The eroticization of murder is the essence of pornography, as it is the essence of life. The torturer may be a policeman tearing the fingernails off a victim in a prison cell or a so-called normal man engaged in the project of attempting to fuck a woman to death. The fact is that the process of killing—and both rape and battery are steps in that process—is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination. Women as a class must remain in bondage, subject to the sexual will of men, because the knowledge of an imperial right to kill, whether exercised to the fullest extent or just part way, is necessary to fuel sexual appetite and behavior. Without women as potential or actual victims, men are, in the current sanitized jargon, "sexually dysfunctional." This same motif also operates among male homosexuals, where force and/or convention designate some males as female or feminized. The plethora of leather and chains among male homosexuals, and the newly fashionable defenses of organized rings of boy prostitution by supposedly radical gay men, are testimony to the fixedness of the male compulsion to dominate and destroy that is the source of sexual pleasure for men.

The most terrible thing about pornography is that it tells male truth. The most insidious thing about pornography is that it tells male truth as if it were universal truth. Those depictions of women in chains being tortured are supposed to represent our deepest erotic aspirations. And some of us believe it, don't we? The most important thing about pornography is that the values in it are the common values of men. This is the crucial fact that both the male Right and the male Left, in their differing but mutually reinforcing ways, want to keep hidden from women. The male Right wants to hide the pornography, and the male Left wants to hide its meaning. Both want access to pornography so that men can be encouraged and energized by it. The Right wants secret access; the Left wants public access. But whether we see the pornography or not, the values expressed in it are the values expressed in the acts of rape and wife-beating, in the legal system, in religion, in art and in literature, in systematic economic discrimination against women, in the moribund academies, and by the good and wise and kind and enlightened in all of these fields and areas. Pornography is not a genre of expression separate and different from the rest of life; it is a genre of expression fully in harmony with any culture in which it flourishes. This is so whether it is legal or illegal. And, in either case, pornography functions to perpetuate male supremacy and crimes of violence against women because it conditions, trains, educates, and inspires men to despise women, to use women, to hurt women. Pornography exists because men despise women, and men despise women in part because pornography exists.

Notes

1. Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1969), p. 10.
2. Bataille, Death and Sensuality, p. 11.
3. Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1976), p. 404.

SOURCE: Jong, Erica. “Changing My Mind about Andrea Dworkin.” Ms. (June 1988): 60-4.

In the following essay, Jong discusses her reassessment of Dworkin’s work, concluding that Dworkin’s feminist writings are gripping and raise important questions.

If we judge a society’s freedom by how it treats the nonconformist, then by this rather Thoreauvian measure, America’s treatment of Andrea Dworkin has not been a credit to our sense of liberty. Since 1971 we have had in our midst a passionately committed feminist philosopher, activist, and author whose seriousness is beyond dispute. We have largely attacked her, silenced her, condemned her without reading her.

What opprobrium her books have garnered! Here is a relatively typical example, written by a woman reviewer:

Time to restock the aspirin: Andrea Dworkin, the demagogue’s ideologue, has two new books out—one a lamebrained appeal for universal chastity, the other a surprisingly pornographic fiction that’s so dreary in style and feeble in plot and character it hardly qualifies as a novel…. Dworkin has built her reputation on taking man-hating further than even the most doctrinaire lesbian separatists. Defining sex categorically as a male activity, she denies the very existence of personal freedom for women.

One would think Dworkin’s books were nuclear fallout, acid rain, germ warfare. They are— merely—books, books published (when they are published at all) in very small editions, read by few. It is a rule of thumb with me that the more outrage something generates, the more the author is likely to be on to some unacknowledged hypocrisy in our culture. We tend to like our satirists in white suits, with good party manners, like Tom Wolfe. We do not like them when they undermine the whole structure without even paying lip service to its vanities.

Andrea Dworkin is a child of the 1960s (Bennington ’68 to be exact): uncompromising, unkempt, unfashionable. She looks as if she walked off the streets of the Latin Quarter circa 1968; or Amsterdam or Greece, where she did, in fact, live. In the Age of Reagan/Thatcher yuppieism, she is an anomaly, a risk-taker in a world of bet-hedgers, impoverished in a world that only wants to read Rich Writers, a serious woman of letters in a world that has rediscovered “The New Bimbo.” Her appearance is an insult to McLuhanist medium-as-message principles—and her rare combination of brilliance, bravado, and empathy is not what the age demands. She does not wear new clothes and she reads not the times but the eternities.

I would never have gotten to know Andrea Dworkin were it not for Phil Donahue.

Last spring, in the midst of a book tour for my fifth novel, Serenissima: A Novel of Venice, I was asked if I would appear on Donahue with Andrea Dworkin, who had just published Intercourse . Knowing all too well the habit talk shows have of pitting one woman against the other in a staged cat fight, I didn’t want to play that game. I had read enough of Andrea Dworkin’s work to know that I violently disagreed with many of her positions—and that she was a serious and committed writer and champion of women’s rights. I believed (then as now) that dissent within the Women’s Movement (or any movement) was a sign of life and while I knew that I could disagree with Dworkin yet still honor her as a colleague, I wasn’t sure that the subtlety of my position would come across on Donahue—or any talk show.

The trouble with television is that, in reducing all discourse to four-and-a-half-minute “segs,” interrupted by commercials, it tends to degrade subtle philosophical argument to the level of comic strips.

POW. BANG. SPLAT. Jong and Dworkin face off about Intercourse . I did not want to attack other feminists. The Women’s Movement was in enough trouble without women attacking women. I conveyed my doubts to the producers at Donahue, who assured me that Andrea Dworkin and I would not be set up as antagonists. Reluctantly, I accepted the gig.

Then I began to prepare by reading Dworkin.

Years ago, I had tried to read Dworkin’s first (mainstream) book, Woman Hating , and had been turned off by its rhetoric, its 1960s cant, and by what I took then to be its crude overstatement of woman’s lot. But I was a lot younger and more innocent then, and as Gloria Steinem says: women are the sex that grows more radical with age.

So I read Intercourse and I was—to use a sixties locution—blown away. Here was a book that had collected the most ghastly reviews, and I was finding it thrilling in a way I had not found a book about men and women thrilling since The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir or The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer.

I do not mean to say that I agreed with every assertion in Intercourse . I only mean to say that anyone taking the argument of the book—that the act of sex itself preconditions female inferiority and male dominance—intellectually rather than personally has to acknowledge that this book raises questions that desperately need raising.

Why has the Women’s Movement arisen in every modern era—from the 17th century to the 20th—only to be pushed back by a tide of reaction? Why do women collude in their own oppression? Why do women side with their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons against their daughters, mothers, and their own self-interest? Does “sexual freedom” further oppress women or does it put them in touch with their sense of liberty? Is patriarchy innate in the human species or is it socially conditioned? Is chastity an option for women who wish to be intellectually free or is it the last refuge of female paranoia?

Reading Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse as an intellectual work rather than a battle cry, one is dazzled by the profundity of the questions it raises about men and women. The chapter on Joan of Arc (“Virginity”) is worth the price of the book. We suddenly understand why La Pucelle had to wear men’s clothes and be a militant virgin to lead her army into battle—and understand why all the male interpretations of her behavior make no sense.

Her virginity was a self-conscious and militant repudiation of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status, which, then as now, appeared to have something to do with being fucked…. Unlike the feminine virgins who accepted the social subordination while exempting themselves from the sex on which it was premised, Joan rejected the status and the sex as one thing— empirical synonyms: low civil status and being fucked as indistinguishable one from the other.

Dworkin is a real writer. She burns with a determination to change the world. She really believes books matter, that they are actions. She is not cynical about this—using a book as a steppingstone to personal power like so many. She believes that the word matters and that the word can change the world. This, after all, is the girl who started out to be a rabbi.

We met in Donahue’s green room in Rockefeller Center; our seconds were our publishers’ publicity chiefs. We exchanged books and shook hands warmly. I realized that Andrea was trembling. She was terrified.

Once on the air the show went swimmingly. Andrea stated her position passionately without for a moment offering disrespect for mine. She argued that the act of intercourse itself in patriarchal culture both defined and conditioned female inferiority. I argued that the act of intercourse can be nurturing, nourishing, loving—even as it can be intrusive and violent—and that the act itself does not have a fixed nature but reflects the feelings of the people engaging in it. Andrea continued to assert that the personal is political and that sex, for most women, is both travesty and sham.

In general, women in the audience seemed to see themselves as self-determining and free creatures whose personal experience was personal, not political. They did not really grasp the notion that their most intimate behavior was conditioned by cultural norms. Still, for television, it was as subtle a rendering as one could expect. Andrea spoke for all the oppressed, beaten, battered women of the world; I outlined a vision of a more humane and feminized society in which women’s values, women’s sexual needs, and women’s nurturance would become norms rather than exceptions in our culture. What was remarkable about the show was how supportive two women authors were of each other—even though they did not agree.

What was also remarkable was how different Andrea Dworkin and I looked on television. If the medium is both the message and the massage, then I was a masseuse and Andrea a picador. Andrea wore overalls, no makeup, frizzy hair. And I was coiffed, dressed, shod, and made up in a way that entirely reflects my pleasure in being female.

I watched the videotape before beginning this piece and again marveled at the visual impact we make together. Andrea dresses to keep men and the world at bay; I not only to attract but also for my own delight in costume and color. What does this reflect in terms of our psychologies and our ideas? Andrea Dworkin would say that any “femininity” is both an outward sign of capitulation and a clear signal indicating that I have bought into the male definition of woman: I am here to be dominated. I dispute that, finding in femininity something pleasing in itself—apart from male definition. But perhaps I am self-deluded. As Dworkin says:

“No one can bear to live a meaningless life. Women fight for meaning just as women fight for survival: by attaching themselves to men and the values honored by men.”

Most articles are written either by antagonists or proponents. This is one article being written by a respectful dissenter. The fact that women can be both respectful to each other and dissent is new to the world. I see it as one sign of the progress the Women’s Movement has wrought—despite all the other discouraging signs. It is my hope that in showing respect and tolerance for each other women are creating a new paradigm of political discourse—a paradigm that does not institutionalize conflict and dualism, but rather sees a web of relationships between people as life-sustaining, nurturing. Such a paradigm is one of the things women can bring to the world once they reject the patriarchal, male system with its dualisms, conflicts, and wars.

Andrea and I have this in common: we both began writing seriously during sojourns in Europe. I in Heidelberg, Germany—married to a Chinese-American psychiatrist (whose last name became my nom de plume); she in Greece during a leave of absence from Bennington College and later in Amsterdam, where she lived with her Dutch husband—who turned out to be a batterer and a violent man.

“Why do American writers often start writing in Europe?” I asked Dworkin.

“For me it had to do with getting away from this country which, number one, has no respect for writers; number two, has no respect for … activists…. For me also, though, it was that I was enraged with this country’s policies on Vietnam [and] the racism here was deeply distressing to me…. There was no women’s movement, so there was no support for me pretty much anywhere.”

For Andrea Dworkin, as for many other rebellious young Americans, Europe was a place to find one’s self both politically and literarily.

“What I most want is to be a great writer and to leave a legacy of real change. Books and social justice for me are inseparable. You can’t pull them apart… and of course there is nothing in this country that honors that tradition of writing, or that tradition of politics.”

I also believe that books and social justice are inseparable, but I have a different notion of the way the written word affects the general culture. There is no question that the written word still underlies every cultural phenomenon and still has the capacity to change attitudes enormously, but it does so in the way that irrigation transforms desert into arable land—under the surface of visible things. The changes wrought by books happen in a subterranean field and they extend everywhere.

Books, by their nature, work slowly. And our whole instant-media culture is beginning today to erode the power of the book in a way uncontemplated even 15 years ago. The short shelf life of serious books in bookstores is a problem, as is the short attention span of an audience that has no time to read. We have the freest country in the world intellectually, we have the greatest choice of reading material, and yet our most successful people have the least time of any to read. The very terms in which we define success—constant busyness, frantic social life, constant ego-massage by underlings—leave no time for the slow, centered, solitary pleasure of reading books and absorbing ideas. We want our information in four-and-a half-minute “segs”—as if that were more efficient.

But reading is important not only because of the ideas it imparts, but because the mental state it creates allows participation in a way that other media do not. Reading is relaxing, contemplative, nurturing; other media are often merely numbing. Reading allows space for the play of the reader’s mind.

On the subject of her love relationships, Andrea Dworkin is maddeningly general. She doesn’t want to discuss her marriage, her relationships with women, or her relationship with the friend she lives with, John Stoltenberg. “We love each other” is all she will say.

I understand and empathize with her obtuseness. Any woman who is a public figure is driven nearly insane by the scrutiny directed at her personal life and the harshness with which any deviation from the norm—whatever that is—is judged.

“In your writings, you have declared yourself
a lesbian,” I say. “How do you regard lesbianism?”

“Exactly as I regard being Jewish: as a badge of
pride.”

“A sort of proud tribal identity?” I ask.

“That’s a beautiful way to put it,” she says.

Other things one should know about Andrea Dworkin that seem important: she is a Libra, born September 26, 1946, and she regards herself as typically Libran and says most Librans are “fair, detached, promiscuous.” She tells me that Librans’ detachment drives other members of the zodiac mad. But in my extensive talks with her, I have not found her particularly detached. I would say she is driven by an intense sense of fairness, a burning outrage about injustice, and a continuing anger about the limitations of being female.

Before a recent trip to Europe to promote one of her books and enjoy a writing vacation, she shared with me her distress about being a woman alone in Europe and how limiting femaleness can still be. These are feelings I have written about, but they have not troubled me in my daily life. I know that women all over the world are often in physical danger of rape and battery, but do not personally focus on this fear. Wherever I am in the world, I feel relatively safe because I feel strong in myself.

Andrea Dworkin is concerned about rape and violence to a degree that I cannot completely understand from my talks with her. When one hears her talk about rape and battery, or reads her autobiographical fiction, it’s clear that this is a woman who has been severely abused at various times in her life and who trembles awaiting the next incidence of abuse. Talking with her, I feel I must have led the most sheltered of lives and I wonder whose experience is more typical, Andrea’s or mine?

Reading her work, I have wondered about her terror of the male world. It seems more than just empathy with the plight of oppressed women. It seems to have a dimension of paranoia to it. It certainly leaves out the experience of women who enjoy sex, have had loving lovers, have enjoyed pregnancy and their children. I count myself among these fortunate women—but that is not the point. It is irrelevant that some women seem to lead charmed lives. “If one woman were to tell the truth about her life, the world would split open,” said Muriel Rukeyser, one of Andrea Dworkin’s and my mentors, and a great and unappreciated woman poet. We are often afraid to tell the truth publicly because our view of the world has been invalidated by patriarchy and our very interpretation of our condition and the language in which to phrase it has been taken from us.

Andrea Dworkin is a lesbian. I am not. I know that women can be militantly pro-women without being lesbians but I also know it is easier for a lesbian to criticize patriarchal society because she is an outsider, owing no sexual allegiance to a man. I myself find that I am more inclined to be free in criticizing society when I am not worrying, even subliminally, about pleasing some lover or husband. Perhaps the lesbian, cut off as she already is from the world of male protection and privilege, is freer to disclose the hypocrisies of the patriarchal system. I cannot commit my sexual life to my own sex, however convenient that might be for my writing and general peace of mind. But I have enough imagination to understand the intellectual freedom that may come with lesbianism.

One of the most complicated, difficult, and challenging tasks for a woman artist is to live with and among men, and yet still retain her intellectual integrity. It necessitates a very strong center, an ego that can keep its boundaries while still allowing love to enter, to nurture, and to be returned. Our divorce rate bears witness to its difficulty, and the general unhappiness of both sexes in our culture bears witness to its frequent failure. For we are living in a time of unprecedented sexual discontent in which men and women regard each other testily at best. We are in the midst of an incomplete social revolution; women are unhappy, but men are equally perplexed and troubled. The question is what to do about it—and how?

Andrea Dworkin’s position—articulated in all her books and in the antipornography legislation she coauthored with Catharine A. MacKinnon for the city of Minneapolis—is that the whole patriarchal system must be eradicated from the ground up. And replaced with—what? This she does not say. Dworkin makes a stunning case for the harm that pornography does. She shows that far from being a “victimless crime” it does, in fact, destroy the lives of millions of women and children who are abused as participants or abused as a result of men having been inflamed by it. But as much as I share Andrea Dworkin’s outrage about the way violence against women and children is condoned in our pop-and-porno culture, I fear even more than its proliferation the hand of the state censor. I remain a strict free-speech advocate even though I know that in a materialistic culture all freedom is conditioned by economic access.

What paradigm of human interaction do Andrea Dworkin’s books participate in and create? Andrea Dworkin comes out of the old left of the sixties, and she brilliantly describes in Right-wing Women the situation of women in the old left, their outrage and despair when they realized that the rights of man did not apply to them. Out of this outraged recognition that the male paradigm had not changed in the antiwar movement, women created the so-called Second Wave of the feminist movement, which utterly transformed our culture.

Many phenomena we now take for granted were the work of this second wave—from the recognition of wife-battering as a crime, to the prominence of women in publishing, television, and film, to the new woman executive in her dress-for-success suit. The revolution is still partial, but it is a revolution compared to the world we knew in 1960—and many younger women who do not even realize it are indebted to the feminists of the sixties-turning-seventies for their jobs, their lives, their increased options.

But the second wave of the feminist movement was the sister of the old left and participated, willy-nilly, in its paradigms. It saw politics in terms of left and right, visualizing the political dialectic in a dualistic way that basically began with the French and American revolutions and has remained unchanged until this day. That was its strength in the sixties. But that also accounts for its obsolescence today—and for the deadened, despairing feeling we get reading Andrea Dworkin’s books, searching for hope and finding none.

For the next phase of movement for women and for children and all humanity cannot come out of these old paradigms, which, in their very language and concepts, institutionalize struggle and dualism. Even the phrases—“war between the sexes,” “Women’s Movement,” “feminism”—fill many people with despair because they suspect that society will not be changed by dualistic thinking. They are right.

In When Society Becomes an Addict, Anne Wilson Schaef brilliantly analyzes what has gone wrong with male patriarchal society and why it has become diseased, prone to addictions, and indeed follows an addictive model. We live in a society of materialism run riot in which people relate to things rather than to each other. Even in our love lives we objectify—and pornography institutionalizes this objectification. But a society in which parents have less and less time to relate to their children except by giving them things creates and perpetuates just such an addictive model. In the old patriarchal world men pursued things, and women took care of human relationships— including children. In the post-second-wave world, both women and children have frenziedly followed the male addictive model.

What women can bring to the world in terms of a true counterculture, a counterculture of the future, is a new paradigm for society in which relationships are more important than things and addiction as a model of behavior becomes obsolescent. It’s a tall order, but nothing less will save us.

I believe that childbirth is a profoundly radicalizing act for women, opening them up to their humanity and interdependence in ways often denied to men and giving them a new model for the web of relationships between people. If this model could permeate our society, it would have the effect of humanizing it. It is this hope that keeps me writing. I do not think it is a vain hope, though I do not underestimate the difficulty of changing institutions.

In a sense the answer lies more with men and with a new men’s movement than it does with women. Unless men give up their denial that the society they have created is deeply diseased, most women have no choice but to be either semi-slaves colluding in their own oppression, or militant separatists à la Dworkin. How to get past male denial when most men have so much to gain by denying the existence of female pain? Privileged groups seldom give up their privilege without bloody revolution. And it is unthinkable that women will take up arms against their own sons, brothers, husbands. However violent our dreams, we are tied by ties of love and loyalty. Men have always known this and abused it.

The only hope for creating a new society lies in the privileged male elite finally coming to realize that its own survival is doomed unless society begins to change. That takes insight, self-questioning, and self-criticism. Many individual men are capable of this, but men in groups usually are not. Women have been Cassandras all along—pointing to the fault lines due for slippage and warning the other sex of the damage we are doing to the planet and our own future as a species.

Another paradigm exists, and New Age philosophers are beginning to explore it. The only way to solve the male/female dilemma is to stop thinking of the sexes as discrete and opposed entities and start thinking of them as two parts of a whole organism. If man and woman begin to cultivate their oneness, their interdependence as one organism, if they reject the war paradigm, and see themselves in a new light, perhaps the planet and the race have a future after all.

I would like to propose that we have other alternatives—if only men, the sex still in control, will see them and the necessity for change. Andrea Dworkin does not believe that change is possible without militancy. I do. I believe we can change attitudes about women and what is acceptable, civilized behavior without killing each other. As Niels Bohr says, “The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”

JOANNE GLASGOW (REVIEW DATE SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1987)

SOURCE: Glasgow, Joanne. "Dworkin Critiques Relations between the Sexes." New Directions for Women (September-October 1987): 18-19.

In the following review, Glasgow praises Intercourse as a groundbreaking book, one that "should be read, discussed, argued about passionately."

For more than two months, I have been waiting to read a decent, fair discussion of Andrea Dworkin's newest book, Intercourse. I would have settled for an honest pan, provided the reviewer had been willing to wrestle with the ideas in the book.

But in review after review, and in talk show after talk show, all I have seen are distortions at best and, far more often, savage personal attacks on Dworkin. Instead of discussing the book, people have focused on her outspoken anti-pornography stand. Or they have attacked her recent novel Ice and Fire as a pornographic book. Or they have isolated a controversial line or two, as The New York Times review did. Or they have tried to pin a derogatory label on her, as Erica Jong did on The Donahue Show (In that instance, Jong simplistically reduced Dworkin's position to a discredited form of old-fashioned biological determinism.)

When, in all this shameful public wrangling, is anyone going to discuss what to me seems the most important critique of male/female bonds since Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born?

Like Rich, Dworkin has taken on one of the most "sacred" of institutions. Rich examined the institution of motherhood and concluded that the experience individual mothers have is systematically buried beneath layers of misogyny, patriarchal control and symbolic interpretation that denies the existence of women's witness. Women's truth is not even examined or disputed. It is simply erased.

That, argues Dworkin, is precisely what happens to women's witness when intercourse is institutionalized, as it has been in this country and indeed all over the world.

Although she does not refer to Rich, nor do I think she intended the parallel, Dworkin shows in chapter after harrowing chapter just what the act of intercourse has meant in men's eyes. It is the instrument of misogyny for men like Tolstoy, of patriarchal control for men like Isaac Bashevis Singer, of symbolic warfare against other men for men like James Baldwin.

And for women? Dworkin examines two responses: the no of the marriage resisters, for whom Joan of Arc is the exemplar, and the lie of the collaborators, for whom all the anonymous respondents in Shere Hite's Report are the representatives (that is, 70 percent of all women). This lie of the collaborators is perhaps the sticking point for many readers. As Dworkin says, "Intercourse is a loyalty test for women." In a man-made world intercourse has to occur, has to be central and has to be centrally valued.

Prior to modern reproductive technology, intercourse had indeed been necessary for human procreation. It is still the method of choice for most people, even in advanced technological societies like ours. But is it central? And for whom, Freud and Lacan notwithstanding, is it central? Evidently, according to Dworkin, not for women. If statistics are accurate, most women do not find intercourse centrally satisfying, despite enormous pressure to do so. But they must not say so. Their silence must be won. They must fake orgasm, pretend they want nothing more or simply (perhaps preferably) know nothing else.

I think this is the part of her book that most feminists who live with men find hardest to accept. Indeed, if Dworkin's analysis is correct, their reluctance is proof of the argument. And they may, justifiably, find the argument loaded. But that is no reason to distort Dworkin's views and certainly no justification for ignoring the argument completely in favor of cheap shots and irrelevant commentary. Instead, the book should be read, discussed, argued about passionately. Silence, too, distorts.

Sex Laws

In the final section of the book Dworkin argues for a reexamination of the ways men have erected laws to protect the centrality of intercourse. Of all her analyses, the most compelling to my mind is the manipulation of language and categories. Men have for centuries passed laws that forbid many acts of sexual intimacy. But as Dworkin says, "Folks keep getting it wrong, and wanting to put the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time." And so the powers of coercion called law step in to regulate such behavior. And these laws are justified by the label "natural." What a piece of circular reasoning it is! Dworkin's analysis should finally lay to rest the claim many antagonists have made that she is secretly in league with (some have said in bed with) the New Right. Hardly!

But whatever individual readers think about it, this is at least what the book is about—the symbolic meaning attached to intercourse in a man-made world and our individual and sometimes collective struggles with that meaning. It is a work of imaginative power. It is controversial. It is sometimes maddening. But it is truly important. It is the most important book I have read in ten years. Readers should give it a chance.

Criticism

Assiter, Alison. Pornography, Feminism, and the Individual. Winchester, Mass.: Pluto Press, 1989. 166 p.

Critical examination with bibliographical references.

Eberly, Rosa A. Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 199 p.

Contains reference material following a critical article titled "Andrea Dworkin's Mercy: Pain and Silence in the "War Zone."

Jenefsky, Cindy Ann Russo. Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin's Art and Politics. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998, 163 p.

Full-length study of Dworkin's feminist ideology.

Maitland, Sara. "Inside Out." New Statesman 113, no. 2935 (26 June 1987): 31.

Presents objections to Dworkin's assertions in Intercourse.

Mullarkey, Maureen. "Hard Cop, Soft Cop." Nation (30 May 1987): 720-26.

Negative assessment of Intercourse.

Nussbaum, Martha C. "Rage and Reason." New Republic 217, nos. 6-7 (August 11-18 1997): 36-42.

Exploration of Dworkin's feminist ideas, particularly her controversial theories on physical violence against women found in Life and Death.

Russo, Ann, and Lourdes Torres. "Beyond the 'Porn Wars': Why Feminists Should Read Andrea Dworkin." Sojourner: The Women's Forum 15, no. 10 (June 1990): 16-17.

Examination of the defining characteristics of Dworkin's feminist politics and writings.

Wolfe, Alan. "Dirt and Democracy." The New Republic (19 February 1990): 27-31.

Discusses Dworkin's objections to pornography as delineated in Pornography.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Dworkin's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 77-80; Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Vol. 21; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 16, 39, 76, 96; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 43, 123; Feminist Writers; Gay and Lesbian Literature, Ed. 1; Literature Resource Center; and Major 20th-Century Writers.