I absolutely adore Andrea Dworkin. But before you dive into her writing, let me give you a little warning first: You’ll never look at pictures of naked women the same way again. I’m not just talking about porn. Go to an art museum and, if you’re fresh off Dworkin, you might be the least fun person there. Klimt, Collier, Modigliani, Gaugin—your ability to love their depictions of nudity might be among the casualties of your reading. And there will almost certainly be others: Dworkin could compromise your enjoyment of movies like Babygirl, your willingness to perform certain sex acts, or your ability to tolerate certain types of people.
Dworkin knew her work had this power. She described herself as “not the fun kind” of feminist. During her lifetime, others had far less kind things to say. Hustler published antisemitic and homophobic cartoons of her, and she was famous for being fat, frizzy-haired, unadorned, and overalled. She struggled to find publishers; once published, her work was generally ignored by the mainstream press; she felt (and largely was) estranged from mainstream feminists. Many people know her best for claiming that all sex is rape—which is something she never said. She has, like many other second-wave feminists, been more caricatured than read.
But this year, Picador took a gamble that we might be ready to start reading her, with the rerelease of three of her books: Pornography, Woman Hating, and Right-Wing Women. There’s never been a better time to buck that trend and hear what she actually said. Right-Wing Women feels especially apposite to the present moment: It was written in the wake of the 1980 election of President Reagan—an actor who turned out to have surprising mass appeal as a Republican politician. Dworkin wrote the book to confront the question: Why do women ally themselves with their oppressors? One popular answer (then and now) was that women want to be oppressed—or perhaps were even made to be oppressed, courtesy of some big daddy in the sky who didn’t want to share his apples.
Dworkin rejected that nonsense, and instead answered the question with empathy: She saw Republican women as savvy, not dumb. They were, Dworkin observed, making a rational decision. “Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms.” And the left often appears to have little better to offer them: “leftist men also want wives and whores,” Dworkin wrote. The left stresses “impersonal sex and promiscuity as values,” which right-wing women worry “will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression.” These women “are not wrong,” Dworkin said, when they concluded that traditional marriage could be “the better deal” because it meant “selling to one man, not hundreds.”
Dworkin’s rhetoric comes hot and heavy, almost like a preacher’s sermon. It carries you along to a place you never thought you’d get to—thinking all porn is problematic, for example, or that Republican women aren’t simple traitors. If, like Hansel and Gretel, you then try to retrace your steps and figure out where you went wrong, you may find yourself unable to do so. As the feminist Ariel Levy put it in her introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition of Dworkin’s Intercourse: “If you accept what she’s saying, suddenly you have to question everything: the way you dress, the way you write, your favorite movies, your sense of humor, and yes, the way you fuck.”
Of course, Dworkin’s work isn’t perfect. She is not a big fan of nuance. She includes extensive discussion of the Nazis when discussing how porn affects women, which feels pretty icky to me. At one point, Woman Hating appears to mount a defense of incest—a position that Dworkin later contradicted. She had a dim view of heterosexuality generally, saying: “Intercourse with men as we know them is increasingly impossible. It requires an aborting of creativity and strength, a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death. It means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect. It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity which are central to it. Unambiguous conventional heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity.”
But her words are a battle cry for women, and that’s exactly what we need right now. Too often, contemporary feminism can feel like the opposite: more of a slogan on a t-shirt than a movement, or perhaps a doomed group project. And there have been many recent days—watching white women shepherd the re-election of Donald Trump, listening to Amy Coney Barrett ask questions from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, seeing women embrace the alt-right slogan “my body, his choice” on social media—when I have been tempted to give up on the project altogether.
But Andrea Dworkin insists that I not, and I am finally ready to listen. (Picador presumably is betting that others are, too.) “Doing feminist work requires a surfeit of nerve and stamina,” Dworkin wrote in 1975. “At first one works on an energy generated by sheer conviction,” but over time, “as one learns more and more about the nature of women’s oppression through one’s work, it becomes harder to work. One’s work in the world meets the same kind of abuse of one’s body.”
That wasn’t just a casual warning: Dworkin suffered greatly for her work. Her first marriage was abusive, and when she finally left it, she engaged in sex work to make ends meet. She was sexually assaulted more than once, spent her last years largely crippled, and died too early of acute myocarditis at age 58.
But to the very end, she remained committed to the project of feminism: After her death, a theretofore unknown manuscript about her own experience of rape was found on her computer. In other words, no matter how bad things got, Andrea Dworkin refused to whisper and say please. She did not accommodate. She demanded a pure ideology, or the closest thing any human can muster. She was and is the feminist we never deserved but always needed—now more than ever.
