“THE WAR,” Andrea Dworkin used to say, “is men against women.” Her weapon in the war was a tough staccato prose that raked the frontline of the enemy, who was either inveighing against her as the archetypal ugly feminist or ignoring her altogether.
Now even some feminists are suggesting that her contribution did the women’s liberation movement more harm than good. If Dworkin’s ideas had been properly engaged with, feminism would be stronger and more coherent today than it is, but they were never given the attention they deserved. For years Dworkin’s work was badly published, poorly distributed and virtually unreviewed. Her survival as a writer was made possible only by the direct support of grassroots feminists, who came in droves to hear her speak and badgered booksellers to stock her books.
Part of the problem was that in following the dictum that feminist discourse must be first-person experience Dworkin had to reveal her own extraordinarily messy life experience. She first came to public notice in 1965 when newspapers all over the world ran the story of how she was so brutally examined by officials at the New York women’s correctional centre where she was taken after being arrested at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration that she bled for two weeks. She later told of how she was raped in a cinema at the age of 9, prostituted herself for a living in her twenties, was for five years married to a Dutch anarchist who abused her and was drug-raped by staff in a Paris hotel in 1999. As Camille Paglia cattily remarked, she never addressed her real problem, which was food. Her untimely death was hastened by her own morbid obesity. But out of the mayhem of her personal life Dworkin fashioned an uncompromising argument which is based in certain non-negotiable realities that even now feminists don’t want to confront.
Dworkin’s death was saluted as marking the end of old-style, hairy, dungaree-clad feminism. Man-hating has been declared dead. Unfortunately woman-hating is alive and thriving; even in mild-mannered Britain in 2005 two women every week will meet their deaths at the hands of their male partners. Dworkin’s object was always “to speak truth to power”, to bear witness against the oppression of women. What she said was often shocking; the shock was the shock of the true.
Feminism is now a galaxy of academic disciplines and Dworkin’s body-based experiential feminism is out of fashion if not downright heretical. Nevertheless it is still true that women’s oppression is enacted primarily through their bodies, and through the mechanism that Dworkin called rape. Her use of the R-word upset people of both sexes, who interpreted her basic premise to be that “all men are rapists”. What she was actually pointing to was the fact that throughout the mammalian world penetration is synonymous with domination; the penetrated individual, whether male or female, must lose status. To be feminised is to be degraded, no matter what the context.
This conundrum cannot be wished away. Dworkin’s way was to follow the dominator’s fantasy in all its ramifying and proliferating manifestations, and urge not only protest but also a shooting war against it. To be taken seriously women had to take themselves seriously and “greatly to find quarrel in a straw”. No one would dare show representations of a racial or religious minority being systematically humiliated and abused for fear of reprisals from activist extremists. Dworkin wanted women to acquire the gall that makes oppression bitter, to become enraged and dangerous because men, unless they were unmanned by mortal fear, would continue to abuse and degrade women in fantasy and in reality. At the hour of Dworkin’s death, prostitution was the fastest growing industry across the globe, with pornography, its promotional material, even faster growing.
Dworkin saw pornography as an assault on civil rights of women, enacting their dehumanisation billions of times a day; it was for her the sanctioned cultural expression of misogyny. She and Catharine MacKinnon, with whom she collaborated on an anti-pornography ordinance in 1983, are regarded as opponents of the right of free speech, the original feminazis.
More subtly Dworkin argued that all sexual fantasy is male sexual fantasy, to which women have no choice but to capitulate, playing out their pre-determined, masochistic roles. Women have no way of realising themselves because the very concept of woman has been invented, described and prescribed by men. Dworkin was wryly aware that her own way of thinking and writing had been formed by a masculinist education.
In Dworkin’s herstorical analysis, marriage, which she characterised as “living legal and social death”, was historically founded in rape, for the earliest systems involved raiding enemy tribes and carrying off their women, and then defending those women against being stolen by others. The concept of women as men’s property she saw as fundamental to the whole social system. All cultural activity was driven towards extending that ownership. In Dworkin’s unsparing logic, because a husband could not be charged with raping his own wife, marriage conferred a right of rape and was therefore institutionalised rape. The fact that rape as historically defined is the theft of a woman from the man who owns her, ie, her father or her husband, could suggest a rejection by feminists of such a male-defined concept as rape, but not for Dworkin. She saw sexual assault as catastrophically destructive of the victim, worse even than homicide. One may disagree with this view, but it cannot be discounted, partly because as a rape victim Dworkin knew whereof she wrote.
Though Dworkin’s war was waged between “the gender class men” and the “gender class women” she understood that women had internalised the rapist’s script and so warred against themselves, which is to ascribe far too much charisma and power to the thin-skinned phallus. Ultimately she found herself unable to break out of this intellectual cul-de-sac. Though there was no weaponry at the disposal of women that was not part of the masculinist arsenal, they would have to use what there was. So the struggle against pornography would have to use the weapon of censorship that had so long been used both to muzzle women and to keep them uninformed.
In 1986 Dworkin wrote that in the war of the sexes women were losing. In the intervening years no alternative system of sexual relationship has been invented; rather women have struggled to conform more exactly to the dehumanising fantasy, carving themselves into the shape of the sexist stereotype, enduring ever more ingenious forms of penetration of mind and body.
It is to be hoped that Dworkin will be commemorated in the only way she would have wanted, by republication of all 13 of her works and a serious attempt to engage with her arguments, regardless of how disturbing we find them.
