http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1457408,00.html

'She never hated men'

Andrea Dworkin was attacked as much for her personal appearance as for her
uncompromising views. But the death at the age of 58 of 'the most maligned
feminist on the planet' has deprived feminism of its last truly challenging
voice, says Katharine Viner

Tuesday April 12, 2005
The Guardian

Like most, I feel a shudder of shock whenever I read the words of Andrea
Dworkin. On crime: "I really believe a woman has the right to execute a man
who has raped her." On romance: "In seduction, the rapist often bothers to
buy a bottle of wine." On sexual intercourse: "Intercourse remains a means,
or the means, of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to
her, cell by cell, her own inferior status ... pushing and thrusting until
she gives in." Her radicalism was always bracing, sometimes terrifying; and,
in a world where even having Botox is claimed as some kind of
pseudo-feminist act, she was the real thing. Her death at the age of 58
deprives us of a truly challenging voice.

But Andrea Dworkin was always more famous for being Andrea Dworkin than
anything else. Never mind her seminal works of radical feminism, never mind
her disturbing theorising that our culture is built on the ability of men to
rape and abuse women. For many, Dworkin was famous for being fat. She was
the stereotype of the Millie Tant feminist made flesh - overweight, hairy,
un-made-up, wearing old denim dungarees and DMs or bad trainers - and thus a
target for ridicule. The fact that she presented herself as she was - no
hair dyes or conditioner, no time-consuming waxing or plucking or shaving or
slimming or fashion - was rare and deeply threatening; in a culture where
women's appearance has become ever more defining, Dworkin came to represent
the opposite of what women want to be. "I'm not a feminist, but ... " almost
came to mean, "I don't look like Andrea Dworkin but ... "

In 2001, the critic Elaine Showalter said: "I wish Andrea Dworkin no harm,
but I doubt that many women will get up at 4am to watch her funeral." A
couple of years ago, in an article in this newspaper on hairiness, Mimi
Spencer wrote: "The only visibly hairy woman at the forefront of feminism
today appears to be Andrea Dworkin, and she looks as though she neither
waxes nor washes, nor flushes nor flosses, and thus doesn't really count."
She didn't count because of how she looked; she only cared about rape
because no man could fancy her.

The attacks on Dworkin were not only personal; they also applied to her
work. John Berger once called Dworkin "the most misrepresented writer in the
western world". She has always been seen as the woman who said that all men
are rapists, and that all sex is rape. In fact, she said neither of these
things. Here's what she told me in 1997: "If you believe that what people
call normal sex is an act of dominance, where a man desires a woman so much
that he will use force against her to express his desire, if you believe
that's romantic, that's the truth about sexual desire, then if someone
denounces force in sex it sounds like they're denouncing sex. If conquest is
your mode of understanding sexuality, and the man is supposed to be a
predator, and then feminists come along and say, no, sorry, that's using
force, that's rape - a lot of male writers have drawn the conclusion that
I'm saying all sex is rape." In other words, it's not that all sex involves
force, but that all sex which does involve force is rape.

She continued the theme in 1981 in Pornography, possibly her most
influential book. She wrote: "Pornography is a celebration of rape and
injury to women; it's a kind of union for rapists, a way of legitimising
rape and formalising male supremacy in our society." She said that
pornography is both a cause of male violence and an expression of male
dominance, that women who enjoy porn are harming women, and that lesbian
porn is self-hating. She had no time for the textual analysis of porn so
beloved of academia; what she cared about was the women performing in the
films, the harm they suffered, and what other women had to suffer as a
result of men watching porn.

While much of this was brilliant, there are few who could agree with all of
Dworkin's work. Her exhortation to vengeance was unpalatable to many; she
said that "a semi-automatic gun is one answer" to the problem of violence
against women, and that she supported the murder of paedophiles: "Women have
the right to avenge crimes on their children. A woman in California shot a
paedophile who abused her son; she walked into the court and killed him
there and then. I loved that woman. It is our duty as women to find ways of
supporting her and others like her. I have no problem with killing
paedophiles." And her 2000 book, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women's
Liberation, suggested that women should follow the same path as Jews did in
the 20th century: they were abused and fought back, and so should women. Her
analysis of the situation in the Middle East - an analysis which, according
to Linda Grant, "many Zionists, non-Zionists, Palestinians, scholars of the
Holocaust, pacifists, the left, women, men, are bound to find offensive" -
concluded with a call to women to form their own nation state.

In an interview with Grant, Dworkin described a Jewish childhood dominated
by family memories of the Holocaust. At a time when the subject was simply
not mentioned, Dworkin says she was obsessed: "I've been very involved in
trying to learn about the Holocaust and trying to understand it, which is
probably pointless," she said. "I have read Holocaust material, you might
say compulsively, over a lifetime ... I have been doing that since I was a
kid." Her mother was often ill, but her childhood in New Jersey was happy,
until the age of nine, when she was sexually abused in a cinema.

From then on, it was a life full of horrors. After an anti-Vietnam protest
when she was 18, she was sent to prison and was assaulted by two male prison
doctors: "They pretty much tore me up inside with a steel speculum and had
themselves a fine old time verbally tormenting me as well." She bled for 15
days and her family doctor told her he had "never seen a uterus so bruised
or a vagina so ripped". She married a Dutch anarchist who beat her savagely;
she managed to escape from him, she said, "not because I knew that he would
kill me but because I thought I would kill him". She said that she never
stopped being afraid of him.

Then, in 1999, Dworkin was drugged and raped in a hotel room in Paris. It
was an attack that was to devastate her. In 2000 she wrote an account of the
rape for the New Statesman, which ended: "I have been tortured and drug-rape
runs through it ... I am ready to die." Her account was questioned by some
commentators, who wondered why she hadn't told the police, how she could be
so sure she was raped since she was drugged at the time (she cited vaginal
pain, bleeding, and infection; bruising on her breast; "huge, deep gashes"
on her leg). But the undercurrent, tapping into the myths that Dworkin
herself had so carefully undermined in her work, was this: how could she be
raped? She's old, she's fat, she's ugly. As if anyone still thought that
rape was about sex and not about power.

This response, though, did not surprise Dworkin. "If the Holocaust can be
denied even today," she said, "how can a woman who has been raped be
believed?" But the impact of the rape and surrounding controversy was
severe, and Dworkin withdrew from public life for several years. Her health
was bad: she had a stomach-stapling operation because her obesity had
reached a dangerous level, and had severe knee problems which made it
difficult to walk. She became invisible in the US except among those for
whom her name was what she called "a curse word", and her 2002 memoir,
Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Militant Feminist, still does not have
a publisher in the UK. But she was coming to terms with her disability; she
was being taken seriously again by newspapers, at least in this country. In
September, she told the Guardian: "I thought I was finished, but I feel a
new vitality. I want to continue to help women." She also said: "At first
[after the rape] I wanted very much to die. Now I only want to die a few
times a day, which is damned good."

This black wit is remarked upon by everyone who met Dworkin. During the
Clinton/ Lewinsky affair, when Dworkin was vocally opposed to Clinton, she
said: "What needs to be asked is, was the cigar lit?" When I asked her if
her abusive ex-husband had remarried, she said: "Oh yes, and very quickly.
After all, the house was getting dirty." I remember being in a restaurant
with her in London when she joked that she really ought to go on a diet, and
did I know of any good ones?

People were startled by her gentleness and vulnerability; were surprised
that her friendships included the British author Michael Moorcock and John
Berger as well as feminists Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan. And although
she once said she was a lesbian, she lived with the writer John Stoltenberg
for three decades, saying: "It's a very deep relationship, a major part of
my life which I never thought possible." As Julie Bindel, feminist and
Dworkin's friend of 10 years, says: "She was the most maligned feminist on
the planet; she never hated men."

Dworkin's feminism often came into conflict with the more compromising
theories of others, such as Naomi Wolf. "I do think liberal feminists bear
responsibility for a lot of what's gone wrong," she told me in 1997. "To me,
what's so horrible is that they make alliances for the benefit of
middle-class women. So it has to do with, say, having a woman in the supreme
court. And that's fine - I'd love a woman, eight women, in the supreme court
- but poor women always lose out." She did concede, however, that her
radicalism was too much for some: "I'm not saying that everybody should be
thinking about this in the same way. I have a really strong belief that any
movement needs both radicals and liberals. You always need women who can
walk into the room in the right way, talk in the right tone of voice, who
have access to power. But you also need a bottom line."

It was this bottom line that Dworkin provided. She was a bedrock, the place
to start from: even when you disagreed with her, her arguments were
infuriating, fascinating, hard to forget. Feminism needs those who won't
compromise, even in their appearance; perhaps I'm alone, but I find it
pretty fabulous that, as a friend told me, Dworkin would "go to posh
restaurants in Manhattan wearing those bloody dungarees". She refused to
compromise throughout her life, and was fearless in the face of great
provocation. In a world where teenage girls believe that breast implants
will make them happy and where rape convictions are down to a record low of
5.6% of reported rapes; in a public culture which has been relentlessly
pornographised, in an academic environment which has allowed postmodernism
to remove all politics from feminism, we will miss Andrea Dworkin. She once
said: "What will women do? Is there a plan? If not, why not?" And indeed,
who is left to replace her?





Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com