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.
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