[Reader-list] Andrea Dworkin and the Movement that had Room for Her

[Vivek Narayanan]

=================

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050502&s=pollitt

SUBJECT TO DEBATE by Katha Pollitt

Andrea Dworkin, 1946-2005

I first heard of Andrea Dworkin in 1968. She had been arrested in an 
antiwar demonstration and jailed at the old Women's House of Detention in 
Greenwich Village, where male doctors subjected her to brutal internal 
exams. Her name was in the news because she had gone public with her story. 
My good, kind, radical, civil libertarian parents thought this was 
ridiculous. What did she expect, this privileged white woman, this 
"Bennington girl"? It wasn't that they didn't believe her, exactly. It was 
that they didn't see why she was making such a big, princessy fuss. It was 
like getting arrested and complaining about the food.

Andrea Dworkin died on April 9 at 58--she of the denim overalls and the 
wild hair and wilder pronouncements. Although she denied ever uttering the 
most famous soundbite attributed to her, that all intercourse is rape, she 
came pretty close: "Fucking is the means by which the male colonizes the 
female"; "in seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine." 
She argued that pornography was an instruction manual for rape, that women 
had the right to "execute" rapists and pedophiles; toward the end of her 
life she declared that maybe women, like the Jews, should have their own 
country. The counsel of despair, and crazy, too--but by then Dworkin was 
ill, not much in demand as a speaker and several of her major books were 
out of print. The 1980s were long over: On campus, the militant anti-rape 
marches and speakouts of Take Back the Night had morphed into cheery V-Day, 
which marries antiviolence activism to a celebration of women's sexuality.

The antipornography feminism Dworkin did so much to promote seems 
impossibly quaint today, when Paris Hilton can parlay an embarrassing sex 
video into mainstream celebrity and the porn star Jenna Jameson rides the 
New York Times bestseller list. But even in its heyday it was a blind 
alley. Not just because porn, like pot, is here to stay, not just because 
the Bible and the Koran--to say nothing of fashion, advertising and Britney 
Spears--do far more harm to women, not even because of the difficulty of 
defining such slippery terms as "degrading to women," a phrase that surely 
did not mean the same thing to Dworkin as it did to the Christian 
conservatives who helped make the antiporn ordinance she wrote with 
Catharine MacKinnon briefly law in Indianapolis.

Like the temperance movement, antiporn activism mistook a symptom of male 
dominance for the cause. Nor did it have much to do with actually existing 
raped and abused women. "For God's sake, take away his Nina Hartley videos" 
is not a cry often heard in shelters or emergency rooms. If by magic 
pornography vanished from the land, women would still be the second 
sex--underpaid, disrespected, lacking in power over their own bodies. Rape, 
battery, torture, even murder would still be hugely titillating to both 
sexes, just as in Shakespeare's day, and women would still be blamed, by 
both sexes, for the violence men inflict on them.

What made Dworkin's obsession with pornography so bizarre is that she 
herself should have known it for a diversion. After all, she frequently 
pointed out that male dominance is entwined with our very notion of what 
sex is, with what is arousing, with what feels "right." Like Foucault (who, 
as Susan Bordo pointed out, usually gets credit for this insight), Dworkin 
showed how deeply and pervasively power relationships are encoded into our 
concepts of sexuality and in how many complex ways everyday life normalizes 
those relationships.

"Standards of beauty," she wrote in Woman-Hating (1974), "describe in 
precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own 
body. They prescribe her motility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to 
which she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her 
physical freedom. And of course, the relationship between physical freedom 
and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative 
potential is an umbilical one." Somewhere along the way, she lost interest 
in the multiplicity and the complexity of the system she did much to lay bare.

Dworkin was an oversimplifier and a demagogue. She wouldn't debate 
feminists who opposed her stance on porn, just men like Alan Dershowitz, 
thus reinforcing in the public mind the false impression that hers was the 
only feminist position and that this was a male-female debate. There is 
some truth to Laura Miller's quip in Salon that "even when she was right, 
she made the public conversation stupider." But, frankly, the public 
conversation is usually not very illuminating, and on the subject of women 
has been notably dim for some time. At least Dworkin put some important 
hidden bits of reality out there on the table. There is a lot of coercion 
embedded in normal, legal, everyday sexuality: Sometimes the seducer is a 
rapist with a bottle of wine. A whole world of sexist assumptions lay 
behind my parents' attitude back in 1968: This is what happens to women who 
take chances, male brutality is a fact of life, talking about sexual 
violence is shameful, "Bennington girls" should count their blessings. 
Polite, liberal, reasonable feminists could never have exploded that belief 
system.

Andrea Dworkin was a living visual stereotype--the feminist as fat, hairy, 
makeup-scorning, unkempt lesbian. Perhaps that was one reason she was such 
a media icon--she "proved" that feminism was for women who couldn't get a 
man. Women have wrestled with that charge for decades, at considerable 
psychic cost. These days, feminism is all sexy uplift, a cross between a 
workout and a makeover. Go for it, girls--breast implants, botox, 
face-lifts, corsets, knitting, boxing, prostitution. Whatever floats your 
self-esteem! Meanwhile, the public face of organizational feminism is 
perched atop a power suit and frozen in a deferential smile. Perhaps some 
childcare? Insurance coverage for contraception? Legal abortion, tragic 
though it surely is? Or maybe not so much legal abortion--when I ran into 
Naomi Wolf the other day, she had just finished an article calling for the 
banning of abortion after the first trimester. Cream and sugar with that 
abortion ban, sir?
I never thought I would miss unfair, infuriating, over-the-top Andrea 
Dworkin. But I do. And even more I miss the movement that had room for her.

*******************************************************