In the 1976 book Our Blood, she proclaimed, in language too blunt to be reproduced here, that the feminist transformation of sexuality requires male impotency-though how she would achieve this goal remains unclear.ĭworkin's admirers laud, and wildly exaggerate, her role in the battle against domestic violence and rape if she deserves 'credit' for anything, it's helping infect feminist activism on these important issues with anti-male bigotry and paranoia. While allowing that intercourse could survive under gender equality, Dworkin was skeptical ('intercourse itself may be immune to reform'). Yet in her 1987 book, Intercourse, Dworkin argued that penetration itself is a form of 'occupation' and 'violation of female boundaries,' however enthusiastically enjoyed by 'the occupied person.' She wrote that 'intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior' and is 'the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women.' 'All sex is rape' is fairly accurate shorthand for these ravings. Meanwhile, women who defend their right to enjoy heterosexual sex are branded 'collaborators, more base than other collaborators have ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority.'ĭworkin's defenders insist that she has been unfairly maligned as equating all heterosexual sex with rape when she merely assailed male sexual dominance. In Dworkin's world view, the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper seem to be representative of all men (though she made an exemption for some men in her own life). Her books are full of such declarations as, 'Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.' ('Patriarchy,' of course, covers contemporary Western societies.) 'Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life, but especially for women's lives, can run wild.' 'Hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right.' To put it plainly: Dworkin was a preacher of hate. Still, with Dworkin's admirers hailing her as a titan of modern feminism, obituaries describing her as a controversial but noble crusader against pornography and violence, and even some of her feminist critics paying homage to her alleged achievements, it's important to set the record straight.

Decorum requires accentuating the positive when speaking of the recently deceased here, there is little positive to accentuate, except for a badly misused talent and a badly misdirected passion. Writing about Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist author and activist who died on April 9, is no easy task.

Right wing women by andrea dworkin