Is it twisted that her first name means “manhood”? Andrea Dworkin, the legendary feminist, said she believed in men’s “humanity, against all the evidence.” And I believe her; it’s just that I think the imperatives of “war” took priority for her over humanism.
While her early-eighties cultural-feminist milieu was full of sincere hopes that men would “kill themselves off” like the genetic “mutations” they are (Mary Daly), and serious proposals to enact measures such as reducing the proportion of men to “10% of the human race” (Sally Gearhart), Dworkin was never blithe about androcide. The one man, that I know of, whom she said she wanted dead—on account of his advocacy of “man-boy love”—was Allen Ginsberg, a person she had “wanted to be” as a teenager more than anything, and had loved (in her words) “with a wholly passionate and sensual love.” Her lifelong “kinship with male, not female writers” was pointed out after her death by her ex-friend Phyllis Chesler. Dworkin wanted to be buried with the review that compared her to Miller, Mailer, Fanon, Baldwin, Whitman, Kerouac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Ginsberg. When she told the National Organization for Changing Men that, notwithstanding womankind’s unassailable right to avenge itself, she refrains from “armed combat against you” simply because rape is “your tragedy too,” her men’s liberationism was deadly serious.
Conversely, thirty years later in 2013, when the hashtag #killallmen first trended on social media, the ubiquitous feminist defense was that it was “a joke.” Misandry “doesn’t exist,” everyone insisted. It’s not a thing, people said, because it isn’t a world system. I reckon it was around this time in grad school that I wrote an androcidal screed for an anarcha-feminist zine about all the men who had ever treated me badly (in bed, or afterward): 2 fucked, 2 furious. I had read most of Dworkin’s Pornography (1981) and was certainly channeling her when committing to paper my rage at all the waste—of female sexual trust, like mine, and utopian self-gifting—wasted by women on men. I don’t remember details. I’m sure I concertina’d a dozen ex-lovers into the footprint of the guy I loved, aged thirteen, with a wholly passionate and sensual love, and who made me feel—in Dworkin’s immortal phrase—like “a breachable, breakable thing any stranger can wipe his dick on.”
Dworkin’s hunch was that “objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy.” She speculates this in her book Intercourse, whose twentieth-anniversary edition was published just a couple of years before my zine contribution. Likewise, in Right-Wing Women (1983), she explains that women of the countercultural left were “objectified, turned into the hot stuff of pornography”—the two things being synonymous. Porn, recall, in Dworkin’s definition, is female subordination. She provides diagrams, labeled “The Condition of Women” or “Pornography as the Underlying Ideology.” In one diagram, “Pornography” sits at the base of an inverted layer cake; in another at the heart of three concentric circles, while “Economic Exploitation” and “Reproductive Exploitation” are allocated more peripheral significance. Over the course of my twenties, my diametrically opposed intuition—that it isn’t pornography so much as the gender division of labor that is the most salient evil we as feminists face—propelled me toward the Marxist feminists on and off my university campus, some of them sex workers, many of them even more committed than any neo-Dworkinite RadFem to their local rape crisis shelters.
Even at that time I recoiled, though, from Dworkin’s apocalyptic style and blunt insistence on the capacity of representation to determine reality absolutely. Notwithstanding my own feminist ultra-radicalism and the overlaps between her personal experience of gender and my own, her state of emergency about the “terrorism” of porn left me cold. Rereading her in my mid-thirties has been, then, a semi-desperate attempt to relate to the current resurgence of enthusiasm for her thought. Part of me has wanted to have my mind changed, if only so I could stop feeling so crazy.
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Suddenly, Dworkin was everywhere. #Resistance liberals like Nancy Pelosi embraced her coinage—whether wittingly or not—to claim a “war on women” was underway. In 2022, the feminist scholar Claire Potter assured the world that “#MeToo activism has opened the door to a long-overdue recognition of Dworkin’s contributions,” and added that “her prose seizes even a hostile reader by the throat and refuses to let go”—as if this were a good thing. If her recommendations sound cruel, no matter: as Jennifer Szalai explained in her Dworkin encomium in the New York Times, “in wartime, no strategy is off the table.” A person might protest: Surely it matters most during war, that strategies are off the table? But for those who would say that “our” sex was literally under siege during Trump’s presidency, the effect is to justify any and all countermeasures. From inside the war room, those of us who persist in “seeking ecstasy on the battlefield” (as sex radicals Ellen DuBois and Linda Gordon put it in ’83) begin to look a bit like traitors to womankind. The riot grrl icon Johanna Fateman paraphrases in her introduction to the 2019 Dworkin anthology Last Days at Hot Slit: “there’s no honor in squeezing pleasure from the status quo.” Translation: it’s wrong to imagine that one can taste any joyful, disalienated ways of embodying gender now, before the revolution. Or at least: even if feminist heterosex is tastable, there’s no excuse for putting political focus there while the corpses of women are piling up.
Dworkin is back, and you know what? I’ve done the reading. After all, the gay liberation veteran Martin Duberman was publishing her biography in 2020, and the Marxist John Berger speculated once that Dworkin might be “the most misrepresented writer in the western world.” Not only have I done the reading, but I’ve done what all these peremptory Dworkin experts told me to—the ones who always bark that we whorephilic queers have simply misunderstood—and read with an open mind. Fateman strongly implies that all feminist critiques of Dworkin are simply symptoms of “the feminine/feminist race to perfection which renders our movement’s dialectics shameful,” and just out to “castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition.” I certainly wouldn’t want to commit sexism, or overlook the value of one (dialectical) motor of women’s liberation. The charge intimidates me; I don’t want to be that kind of idiot. You may have encountered another refrain too: that, wherever one stands on the anti-porn ordinance Catharine MacKinnon and Dworkin almost managed to enter into U.S. law in 1984, empowering women to bring civil lawsuits for injury by (or in) pornography, one is honor-bound to credit them as radicals who did real, serious feminism. Clearly I missed something valuable. The writer Moira Donegan similarly rehearses the idea that Andrea is “ridiculed” because she “requires us to know more than we can stand to know.” Handily, of course, this theory is unfalsifiable. This is a rhetorical cudgel Dworkin wielded well: “We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week … We are very close to death. All women are.” So unanswerable is this charge that, until now, it never occurred to me to reject both its premise (that Dworkin was and is unpopular—hardly) and its explanation (that her truths are indigestible—au contraire). What if I don’t have to hand it to her?
I freely grant: Dworkin did not say that all heterosexual intercourse is rape. (Though she gets close enough: once, in Intercourse, among her characteristic litany of orphic pronunciations comes the claim that men are “supposed to slice us up the middle, leaving us in parts on the bed.”) A more interesting question for me is whether she thinks all criticism is. “I use them; I cut and slice into them in order to exhibit them,” she promises sadistically in the preface to Intercourse, explaining her use of male authors: Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Flaubert et al. Must we use or abuse with the same ruthlessness in order to read Dworkin aright? When a text itself asserts the impossibility of nonviolence, a nonviolent interpretative strategy may not exist; I’d certainly argue that flat-footed readings referencing wartime strategy are violent in their own way. For my money, the method that gets us closest to Dworkin—all of Dworkin—requires that we dethrone the “war on women” axiom, and bring the battlefield ecstasies—and yes, even men—back.
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It’s not that the horrors don’t deserve to sit center stage. As a child, Dworkin was molested in a movie theater; then, later in life, an acquaintance raped her, as did the prison guards at the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village where she was briefly incarcerated as a war resister in 1965. (Aged just eighteen, with Grace Paley’s support, she went public about her treatment, and helped get the infamous jail shut down.) Worst of all, for several months in Amsterdam in 1971, her husband, the Dutch “Provo” anarchist Cornelius Dirk “Iwan” de Bruin, beat and battered her to within an inch of her life while her neighbors, local doctors and parents looked on. The anguish that Dworkin registers especially from the latter betrayal—this pain of not being stood up for, not being cared for, not being believed—is what resonates for me most viscerally as someone who, as a thirteen-year-old, also pleaded endlessly with her parents to believe her, stand up for her, care for her. What I relate to the least in Dworkin’s soul, on the other hand, is the degree of horror and shame she clearly feels regarding her enjoyment—her past enjoyment—of being fucked hard.
Sexual slicing, it turns out, is something she actively praises her erstwhile girlfriend Ricki Abrams for doing in Ice and Fire, an undeservedly obscure novel, published almost two decades after the real-life Amsterdam experiences it chronicles. As far as I can tell, specialist Dworkin scholars basically agree: Ice and Fire is autobiographical. Lauded by a few perceptive contemporaries but thereafter largely forgotten, many Dworkin fans haven’t even heard of it. Little wonder: Ice and Fire overflows with kinky pleasures that would seem to collide confusingly with the tenor of, well, almost all Dworkinian nonfiction.
Shortly after taking a leave of absence from Bennington College in Vermont, the real Andrea arrived in the Netherlands in ’68. Already living in the Dutch capital, Ricki Abrams was a fellow U.S. expatriate who introduced our girl to feminism, no less, by giving her Sexual Politics and Sisterhood Is Powerful to read. The “comradely” and sexual relationship that ensued outlived the catastrophic 1969-1971 marriage to de Bruin. (“A feminist named Ricki Abrams helped me: gave me asylum,” Dworkin later recalled, “a dangerous kindness in the face of a battering man.”) Abrams and Dworkin dreamed up movies together, planning, too, a co-authored book, Woman Hating, that ended up, as we know, Dworkin’s baby alone. Ice and Fire’s protagonist likewise dreams up a movie with “N” in a city “somewhere in the middle of Europe” that has “Rembrandt” and “Breughel.” The movie depicts a woman, “jailed over Vietnam,” “endlessly strip-searched and then mangled inside by jail doctors.” N/Ricki is “easy to love, devotedly,” specifically because “she fucks like a gang of boys.” Yes, this comrade is “a rough fuck,” gushes the narrator. “She pushes her fingers in. She tears around inside. … She thrusts her hips so hard you can’t remember who she is or how many of her there are. The first time she tore me apart. I bled and bled.”
Until meeting her spouse and batterer, the narrator carries on a mostly cheerful, sex-addled as well as sex-working stretch of existence alongside N (“We fuck for capsules of mescaline. We fuck for loose change. We fuck for fun. We fuck for adventure. … We sleep and fuck [each other] at the same time, not letting go.”) It is impossible to miss that the narrator is awestruck, smitten with her initiator: N “dresses like a glittering boy, a tough, gorgeous boy. She is Garbo … but run-down and dirty … untouched underneath by any human lust not her own.” Watching this beloved butch fuck men, the narrator marvels: “She is always them fucking her, no matter how intensely they ride. Me I get fucked but she is different.” On the next page, however, she effuses generously about the “lush,” “dissolved” way that women like her—bottoming—look “when they’ve been fucked hard and long, coming and coming,” women “fucked out, creamy and swollen.”
Yet compare all this to Dworkin’s austere contention, in “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’” (1974): a “transformation of the male sexual model under which we now all labor and ‘love’ begins … in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together.” Which women are those? Ricki didn’t need an erection to slice her up in the best possible way and leave her in parts on the bed. How did Dworkin come to the conclusion that something inherently violent can be imputed to nervous erectile tissue?
Martin Duberman avers that “the real-life Andrea, ironically, never found S&M practices erotic.” Never? Here is her narrator describing early days with the nameless man she marries:
I teach him disrespect, systematically. … I invent sex therapy in this one room somewhere in the middle of Europe. … I teach him not to worry about erection. … I teach him not to be afraid of causing pain. Not to be afraid of hurting me.
As Duberman notes, Dworkin told a friend, “I released a sadistic monster” in Iwan—a man whom Dutch police charged with 38 offenses viz. “grievous bodily harm” and “malicious wounding” in the Eighties alone. When he suddenly becomes a tyrant in that bedroom, and fails to switch back to his former self, Ice and Fire’s protagonist feels the cause is straightforwardly her “invention” of S/M “sex therapy.” It’s she who has made this anarchist virgin, her comrade, into a husband unafraid of hurting women. Isn’t this, in the end, rather self-flattering? Make no mistake: I can only imagine how grimly self-loathing and culpable one might feel after initiating someone into erotic bondage, domination and sadomasochism, only for them to then let rip femicidal (Dworkin would say: “gynocidal”) and abusive behaviors—on you, then on other human beings. But therein lies her power and fault. Ice and Fire’s narrator reports how, after the successful “therapy,” the husband “beat me until I was a heap of collapsed bone” for the sole reason that “I” had taught him how. An unbearable assertion of culpability, but a solipsistic and fantastical one all the same. “Reader, I saved him: my husband,” she confesses. “He can fuck now. He can pulverize human bones. I got away. How it will end, I don’t know.”
By 1975 she knew that everything she enjoyed in Amsterdam was wrong: “female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.” Women will never be free until the “delusion of sexual polarity”—in other words, the idea of tops and bottoms—is “eradicated entirely from human society and from human memory.” What female masochism leads to, after all, she has discovered firsthand: marriage; annihilation.
He needs some act, some gesture, some event to give him the final confidence: to get really hard. Reader, I married him.
I thought I could always leave if I didn’t like it. I had the ultimate belief in my own ability to walk away. I thought it would show him I believed in him. It did. Reader, he got hard.
He became a husband, like anyone else, normal. He got hard, he fucked, it spilled over, it was frenzy, I ended up cowering, caged, catatonic.
The passage is awful, nihilistic. For all that, it reminds me of the envious description of N fucking men (“she is always them fucking her”). There is a controlling fantasy here: the hope that the harm was self-harm. That she is not just its victim, but its perpetrator. Reading Ice and Fire for the first time, the feminist kinkster and sex-industry writer Susie Bright was shocked to find in it a mirror image of none other than Sade: “My god,” she said, “this is the complete retelling of Justine.”
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Some years after Amsterdam, Dworkin wrote: “I had been a hopeful radical. Now I am not. … Once I was a child and I dreamed of freedom. Now I am an adult and I see what my dreams have come to: pornography.” Where might this political pessimism and despair—I hesitate to call it self-indulgent—have come from? I will venture some interpretive speculation. As a young “radical,” Dworkin pursued gruesome and gothic limit experiences—sex that tears you up inside, affording existential insights into the human condition glimpsable only at rock bottom. I further hypothesize that, having almost died by the hand of what she took to be her very own Frankensteinian creation—this batterer she made, this human being she turned into a man—she could no longer tolerate or countenance any remotely kinky forms of enjoyment. She’d learned, had she not, that S/M was fatally and evilly perverse. So she set out to kill S/M, not just in herself—in the whole world.
Diabolically, killing S/M ended up nearly indistinguishable from reproducing it. Consider: the political imperative to expose S/M (thereby freeing sex!) is, for Dworkin, absolute. “Women are tortured, whipped, and chained,” she writes, more or less, in book after book after book.
Women are bound and gagged, branded and burned, cut with knives and wires; women are pissed on and shit on; red-hot needles are driven into breasts, bones are broken, rectums are torn, mouths are ravaged, cunts are savagely bludgeoned by penis after penis, dildo after dildo.
On it goes, round and round like a GIF, grinding the obliterating, total power of ontological slicing into the mind. A book like Pornography (1981) “is difficult to excerpt,” reflects Fateman, delicately, “and difficult to read—because much of its power is derived from what it asks you to weather as a reader … a punishing, cumulative process of rhetorical extremes and unsparing descriptions of cruelty.” (Sidebar: Did anyone ever look at more extreme pornography than Dworkin did, for research purposes?) As literary critic Leah Claire Allen wrote, the problem wasn’t that pornography distorted reality. On the contrary, for Dworkin, “an honest depiction of sex necessarily both portrayed and encouraged violence against women.” So depicting sexual reality honestly was the paramount feminist consciousness-raising duty; simultaneously, it was guaranteed to put more pornography into the world. If to expose porn is to author it, is it even possible to tell the truth without reproducing reality? If representing “use” is itself abuse, speaking effectively of rape is also rape. A catch-22.
One arrives at this kind of conclusion, I think, by attempting to cast violence out, out, out of the self, and vesting it, wholly, in an other. One arrives here, in other words, via a radical refusal of responsibility. In the meantime, the truth was probably more complicated than either interpretative position Dworkin inhabited: she was no more wholly responsible than she was totally blameless for Iwan de Bruin’s sadistic awakening.
No wonder there was hardly any time or space left over, in her work, for “dishonest” depictions of sex: futuristic visions, positive imaginings of the kind of (non-erect) eroticism that Women and their Movement are fighting for. But luckily, Andrea had children—in a sense. Bright really means it when she calls herself a “Dworkin-inspired feminist.” Short-circuited as the pleasure of the “porno horror loop” was, the underlying imagination inspired millions. “Every single woman who pioneered the sexual revolution, every erotic-feminist-bad-girl-and-proud-of-it-stiletto-shitkicker,” reflects Bright, softly, “was once a fan of Andrea Dworkin. Until 1984, we all were.” Feminist porn studies, porn criticism and queer porn practitioners themselves are all, in this sense, Dworkin-inspired: “She was the one who got us looking at porn with a critical eye.” I belong to a later generation of disloyal daughters of Dworkin, yet now, thanks to Bright, feel intermittent waves of affection for this particular pornophobe that have enabled me to explore her oeuvre. Susie is right: Andrea is our bad kin. We must claim her.
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By 1983, Dworkin had had enough. In “Goodbye to All This,” an open letter forming a section of her unpublished novel Ruins, Dworkin bid sarcastic farewells to her many—supposedly victorious—enemies on the frankly bananas premise that, in the heyday of the Moral Majority, sex-radical socialist anti-antiporn feminism was winning the day. “It’s a girls’ movement now,” Dworkin spits. “Goodbye to all you feminists who go to bars and concerts but won’t buy books.”
Actually, much as she struggled to admit it, people always did buy her books, and nowadays even more so. Misandry lures us, and simultaneously so does the idea that Dworkin’s analysis has had no influence on the culture—that she was silenced. And it is this desperate desire to believe that she was right—about men, their evil and violent nature, irredeemable—that she was shunned and misunderstood, that guides us ineluctably away from out-of-print texts like Ice and Fire, and away, therefore, from any chance of understanding (let alone vindicating, or learning from) her voracious, thwarted bisexuality.
This is off the mark, and bears comparison to the wishfully “canceled” self-understanding of those who ride the grievance gravy-train today. In truth, Dworkin influenced us all, on the left and the right. There were times when I’d have said that Dworkin absolutely speaks for me when she writes: “The anger of the survivor is murderous.” Trust me when I say it took years for me to reach a trickier conclusion: that Dworkin lets me down, and herself down, and all survivors down, when she implies that no critique should ever be ventured of PTSD-related murderousness.
“While there were legions who would charge her with hyperbole,” Fateman wrote, “there was also a growing feminist army who found, in her electrifying indictments of male supremacy, the truth at last.” At last. But as a critical concept misandry makes as much sense as so-called anti-white racism. The idea that all the self-doubt women feel—never themselves implicated in machismo or misogyny—stems from trauma, which is to say, from the enemy, and as such, that the only task for feminists is to cast it aside is as false as it is irresistible. In his biography, Duberman records Dworkin’s paranoid tendency to torch friendships and catastrophize (oof, familiar terrain). “A 2 year old,” he quotes Jane Gapen passing her verdict on Andrea, after she and Barbara Deming hosted her for a year in Florida: “with murder in her heart.” I fear that I, in my #killallmen era, may also have deserved that assessment. Andrea, I’m claiming you: you deserved friends brave enough to tell you you were full of it. I should know. I’m trying to be that kind of comrade to you, now.
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I know well that it feels good to codify, as reality, an insight forged in apocalyptic rage or self-pity. When I was writing about men, in my early twenties, I felt sure that the hopes we femmes invest in them—the beautiful invitations we extend to them—are destined to be disappointed. I will never, I felt, be cared for by these guys. Never. They don’t actually want to have sex (meaning: melt, open, mutate…), they just want to scratch a genital itch inside a “chick.” My indignation and humiliation as a girl badly used calcified briefly as female-nationalist pseudo-separatism, and could easily have stayed that way. I became, in this period, more interested in proving that gender fatally compromises everything than in figuring out how and why gender might generate joy even in the present.
Before we talk about the priority of pleasure, however, we might need to talk about better pleasure. Dworkin boasted about believing—despite evidence to the contrary—in men’s humanity. Nowhere can I find the self-criticality, the reflexivity, that would tell me she believed in her own.
I’m in my mid-thirties now, and I can see that some, though not all, of the men I fucked in my teens and twenties did not actually abuse me, as I believed in my #killallmen era, so much as contribute to a mutual failure of communication—resulting in terrible sex—that took place on, yes, power-asymmetric ground. Human genitalia is all of a piece, variously spongy and erectile (as Dworkin used to know), and done right, intimate contact between distinct bits of this “junk,” as we unfathomably call it, can peel back the amniotic, sheer post-gender bliss of embodiment.
Bad sex, an epidemic, is human tragedy enough, I’ve realized. Not to differentiate it from rape is plain disrespectful. But how? Sometimes all we need is a shift of theoretical perspective. In 2016, translating a text by the German feminist Bini Adamczak, I discovered “circlusion,” a term used to denote the “antonym of penetration”—i.e., the same process, defined from the opposite standpoint. Circlusional acts include cock-encircling, nipple-kissing, fist-engulfing, finger-sucking, and dildo-swallowing. In this way, we can recognize the labor of the fuckee, of circlusion, alongside the labor of the fucker, the penetrator; to restore its role to cisheterosexuality’s history—and its present. Nowadays I circlude, if I may say so, like a goddamn champ. My boyfriend is the world’s most skillful circluder of my silicone, and a deep appreciator of circlusional skill generally.
In a furious 1987 letter to the New York Times, Dworkin writes that her work, which has been “contemptuous[ly]” misunderstood, is about the use of sex to make women accept inferiority, and the “impact of sexual intercourse on women’s will toward political freedom.” But when I think about where my will toward political freedom comes from, intercourse, both bad and (especially) good, is what comes to mind. Sorry, Andrea, but all of us, all of us who have loved men, who have harmed ourselves via men, and whom men have harmed and been harmed by, are just as much on the hook as anyone else to eschew misandry. We owe it to the world to become undespairing partisans of pleasureful danger, trauma-informed designers of lush promiscuities, and weavers of safer toeholds in the matrix of the present, whence we might glimpse the freak-friendly society of the future.
Photo credit: Stephen Parker, Andrea Dworkin photographed in London, 1988. Alamy Stock Photo.
Is it twisted that her first name means “manhood”? Andrea Dworkin, the legendary feminist, said she believed in men’s “humanity, against all the evidence.” And I believe her; it’s just that I think the imperatives of “war” took priority for her over humanism.
While her early-eighties cultural-feminist milieu was full of sincere hopes that men would “kill themselves off” like the genetic “mutations” they are (Mary Daly), and serious proposals to enact measures such as reducing the proportion of men to “10% of the human race” (Sally Gearhart), Dworkin was never blithe about androcide. The one man, that I know of, whom she said she wanted dead—on account of his advocacy of “man-boy love”—was Allen Ginsberg, a person she had “wanted to be” as a teenager more than anything, and had loved (in her words) “with a wholly passionate and sensual love.” Her lifelong “kinship with male, not female writers” was pointed out after her death by her ex-friend Phyllis Chesler. Dworkin wanted to be buried with the review that compared her to Miller, Mailer, Fanon, Baldwin, Whitman, Kerouac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Ginsberg. When she told the National Organization for Changing Men that, notwithstanding womankind’s unassailable right to avenge itself, she refrains from “armed combat against you” simply because rape is “your tragedy too,” her men’s liberationism was deadly serious.
Conversely, thirty years later in 2013, when the hashtag #killallmen first trended on social media, the ubiquitous feminist defense was that it was “a joke.” Misandry “doesn’t exist,” everyone insisted. It’s not a thing, people said, because it isn’t a world system. I reckon it was around this time in grad school that I wrote an androcidal screed for an anarcha-feminist zine about all the men who had ever treated me badly (in bed, or afterward): 2 fucked, 2 furious. I had read most of Dworkin’s Pornography (1981) and was certainly channeling her when committing to paper my rage at all the waste—of female sexual trust, like mine, and utopian self-gifting—wasted by women on men. I don’t remember details. I’m sure I concertina’d a dozen ex-lovers into the footprint of the guy I loved, aged thirteen, with a wholly passionate and sensual love, and who made me feel—in Dworkin’s immortal phrase—like “a breachable, breakable thing any stranger can wipe his dick on.”
Dworkin’s hunch was that “objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy.” She speculates this in her book Intercourse, whose twentieth-anniversary edition was published just a couple of years before my zine contribution. Likewise, in Right-Wing Women (1983), she explains that women of the countercultural left were “objectified, turned into the hot stuff of pornography”—the two things being synonymous. Porn, recall, in Dworkin’s definition, is female subordination. She provides diagrams, labeled “The Condition of Women” or “Pornography as the Underlying Ideology.” In one diagram, “Pornography” sits at the base of an inverted layer cake; in another at the heart of three concentric circles, while “Economic Exploitation” and “Reproductive Exploitation” are allocated more peripheral significance. Over the course of my twenties, my diametrically opposed intuition—that it isn’t pornography so much as the gender division of labor that is the most salient evil we as feminists face—propelled me toward the Marxist feminists on and off my university campus, some of them sex workers, many of them even more committed than any neo-Dworkinite RadFem to their local rape crisis shelters.
Even at that time I recoiled, though, from Dworkin’s apocalyptic style and blunt insistence on the capacity of representation to determine reality absolutely. Notwithstanding my own feminist ultra-radicalism and the overlaps between her personal experience of gender and my own, her state of emergency about the “terrorism” of porn left me cold. Rereading her in my mid-thirties has been, then, a semi-desperate attempt to relate to the current resurgence of enthusiasm for her thought. Part of me has wanted to have my mind changed, if only so I could stop feeling so crazy.
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Suddenly, Dworkin was everywhere. #Resistance liberals like Nancy Pelosi embraced her coinage—whether wittingly or not—to claim a “war on women” was underway. In 2022, the feminist scholar Claire Potter assured the world that “#MeToo activism has opened the door to a long-overdue recognition of Dworkin’s contributions,” and added that “her prose seizes even a hostile reader by the throat and refuses to let go”—as if this were a good thing. If her recommendations sound cruel, no matter: as Jennifer Szalai explained in her Dworkin encomium in the New York Times, “in wartime, no strategy is off the table.” A person might protest: Surely it matters most during war, that strategies are off the table? But for those who would say that “our” sex was literally under siege during Trump’s presidency, the effect is to justify any and all countermeasures. From inside the war room, those of us who persist in “seeking ecstasy on the battlefield” (as sex radicals Ellen DuBois and Linda Gordon put it in ’83) begin to look a bit like traitors to womankind. The riot grrl icon Johanna Fateman paraphrases in her introduction to the 2019 Dworkin anthology Last Days at Hot Slit: “there’s no honor in squeezing pleasure from the status quo.” Translation: it’s wrong to imagine that one can taste any joyful, disalienated ways of embodying gender now, before the revolution. Or at least: even if feminist heterosex is tastable, there’s no excuse for putting political focus there while the corpses of women are piling up.
Dworkin is back, and you know what? I’ve done the reading. After all, the gay liberation veteran Martin Duberman was publishing her biography in 2020, and the Marxist John Berger speculated once that Dworkin might be “the most misrepresented writer in the western world.” Not only have I done the reading, but I’ve done what all these peremptory Dworkin experts told me to—the ones who always bark that we whorephilic queers have simply misunderstood—and read with an open mind. Fateman strongly implies that all feminist critiques of Dworkin are simply symptoms of “the feminine/feminist race to perfection which renders our movement’s dialectics shameful,” and just out to “castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition.” I certainly wouldn’t want to commit sexism, or overlook the value of one (dialectical) motor of women’s liberation. The charge intimidates me; I don’t want to be that kind of idiot. You may have encountered another refrain too: that, wherever one stands on the anti-porn ordinance Catharine MacKinnon and Dworkin almost managed to enter into U.S. law in 1984, empowering women to bring civil lawsuits for injury by (or in) pornography, one is honor-bound to credit them as radicals who did real, serious feminism. Clearly I missed something valuable. The writer Moira Donegan similarly rehearses the idea that Andrea is “ridiculed” because she “requires us to know more than we can stand to know.” Handily, of course, this theory is unfalsifiable. This is a rhetorical cudgel Dworkin wielded well: “We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week … We are very close to death. All women are.” So unanswerable is this charge that, until now, it never occurred to me to reject both its premise (that Dworkin was and is unpopular—hardly) and its explanation (that her truths are indigestible—au contraire). What if I don’t have to hand it to her?
I freely grant: Dworkin did not say that all heterosexual intercourse is rape. (Though she gets close enough: once, in Intercourse, among her characteristic litany of orphic pronunciations comes the claim that men are “supposed to slice us up the middle, leaving us in parts on the bed.”) A more interesting question for me is whether she thinks all criticism is. “I use them; I cut and slice into them in order to exhibit them,” she promises sadistically in the preface to Intercourse, explaining her use of male authors: Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Flaubert et al. Must we use or abuse with the same ruthlessness in order to read Dworkin aright? When a text itself asserts the impossibility of nonviolence, a nonviolent interpretative strategy may not exist; I’d certainly argue that flat-footed readings referencing wartime strategy are violent in their own way. For my money, the method that gets us closest to Dworkin—all of Dworkin—requires that we dethrone the “war on women” axiom, and bring the battlefield ecstasies—and yes, even men—back.
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It’s not that the horrors don’t deserve to sit center stage. As a child, Dworkin was molested in a movie theater; then, later in life, an acquaintance raped her, as did the prison guards at the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village where she was briefly incarcerated as a war resister in 1965. (Aged just eighteen, with Grace Paley’s support, she went public about her treatment, and helped get the infamous jail shut down.) Worst of all, for several months in Amsterdam in 1971, her husband, the Dutch “Provo” anarchist Cornelius Dirk “Iwan” de Bruin, beat and battered her to within an inch of her life while her neighbors, local doctors and parents looked on. The anguish that Dworkin registers especially from the latter betrayal—this pain of not being stood up for, not being cared for, not being believed—is what resonates for me most viscerally as someone who, as a thirteen-year-old, also pleaded endlessly with her parents to believe her, stand up for her, care for her. What I relate to the least in Dworkin’s soul, on the other hand, is the degree of horror and shame she clearly feels regarding her enjoyment—her past enjoyment—of being fucked hard.
Sexual slicing, it turns out, is something she actively praises her erstwhile girlfriend Ricki Abrams for doing in Ice and Fire, an undeservedly obscure novel, published almost two decades after the real-life Amsterdam experiences it chronicles. As far as I can tell, specialist Dworkin scholars basically agree: Ice and Fire is autobiographical. Lauded by a few perceptive contemporaries but thereafter largely forgotten, many Dworkin fans haven’t even heard of it. Little wonder: Ice and Fire overflows with kinky pleasures that would seem to collide confusingly with the tenor of, well, almost all Dworkinian nonfiction.
Shortly after taking a leave of absence from Bennington College in Vermont, the real Andrea arrived in the Netherlands in ’68. Already living in the Dutch capital, Ricki Abrams was a fellow U.S. expatriate who introduced our girl to feminism, no less, by giving her Sexual Politics and Sisterhood Is Powerful to read. The “comradely” and sexual relationship that ensued outlived the catastrophic 1969-1971 marriage to de Bruin. (“A feminist named Ricki Abrams helped me: gave me asylum,” Dworkin later recalled, “a dangerous kindness in the face of a battering man.”) Abrams and Dworkin dreamed up movies together, planning, too, a co-authored book, Woman Hating, that ended up, as we know, Dworkin’s baby alone. Ice and Fire’s protagonist likewise dreams up a movie with “N” in a city “somewhere in the middle of Europe” that has “Rembrandt” and “Breughel.” The movie depicts a woman, “jailed over Vietnam,” “endlessly strip-searched and then mangled inside by jail doctors.” N/Ricki is “easy to love, devotedly,” specifically because “she fucks like a gang of boys.” Yes, this comrade is “a rough fuck,” gushes the narrator. “She pushes her fingers in. She tears around inside. … She thrusts her hips so hard you can’t remember who she is or how many of her there are. The first time she tore me apart. I bled and bled.”
Until meeting her spouse and batterer, the narrator carries on a mostly cheerful, sex-addled as well as sex-working stretch of existence alongside N (“We fuck for capsules of mescaline. We fuck for loose change. We fuck for fun. We fuck for adventure. … We sleep and fuck [each other] at the same time, not letting go.”) It is impossible to miss that the narrator is awestruck, smitten with her initiator: N “dresses like a glittering boy, a tough, gorgeous boy. She is Garbo … but run-down and dirty … untouched underneath by any human lust not her own.” Watching this beloved butch fuck men, the narrator marvels: “She is always them fucking her, no matter how intensely they ride. Me I get fucked but she is different.” On the next page, however, she effuses generously about the “lush,” “dissolved” way that women like her—bottoming—look “when they’ve been fucked hard and long, coming and coming,” women “fucked out, creamy and swollen.”
Yet compare all this to Dworkin’s austere contention, in “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’” (1974): a “transformation of the male sexual model under which we now all labor and ‘love’ begins … in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together.” Which women are those? Ricki didn’t need an erection to slice her up in the best possible way and leave her in parts on the bed. How did Dworkin come to the conclusion that something inherently violent can be imputed to nervous erectile tissue?
Martin Duberman avers that “the real-life Andrea, ironically, never found S&M practices erotic.” Never? Here is her narrator describing early days with the nameless man she marries:
As Duberman notes, Dworkin told a friend, “I released a sadistic monster” in Iwan—a man whom Dutch police charged with 38 offenses viz. “grievous bodily harm” and “malicious wounding” in the Eighties alone. When he suddenly becomes a tyrant in that bedroom, and fails to switch back to his former self, Ice and Fire’s protagonist feels the cause is straightforwardly her “invention” of S/M “sex therapy.” It’s she who has made this anarchist virgin, her comrade, into a husband unafraid of hurting women. Isn’t this, in the end, rather self-flattering? Make no mistake: I can only imagine how grimly self-loathing and culpable one might feel after initiating someone into erotic bondage, domination and sadomasochism, only for them to then let rip femicidal (Dworkin would say: “gynocidal”) and abusive behaviors—on you, then on other human beings. But therein lies her power and fault. Ice and Fire’s narrator reports how, after the successful “therapy,” the husband “beat me until I was a heap of collapsed bone” for the sole reason that “I” had taught him how. An unbearable assertion of culpability, but a solipsistic and fantastical one all the same. “Reader, I saved him: my husband,” she confesses. “He can fuck now. He can pulverize human bones. I got away. How it will end, I don’t know.”
By 1975 she knew that everything she enjoyed in Amsterdam was wrong: “female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.” Women will never be free until the “delusion of sexual polarity”—in other words, the idea of tops and bottoms—is “eradicated entirely from human society and from human memory.” What female masochism leads to, after all, she has discovered firsthand: marriage; annihilation.
The passage is awful, nihilistic. For all that, it reminds me of the envious description of N fucking men (“she is always them fucking her”). There is a controlling fantasy here: the hope that the harm was self-harm. That she is not just its victim, but its perpetrator. Reading Ice and Fire for the first time, the feminist kinkster and sex-industry writer Susie Bright was shocked to find in it a mirror image of none other than Sade: “My god,” she said, “this is the complete retelling of Justine.”
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Some years after Amsterdam, Dworkin wrote: “I had been a hopeful radical. Now I am not. … Once I was a child and I dreamed of freedom. Now I am an adult and I see what my dreams have come to: pornography.” Where might this political pessimism and despair—I hesitate to call it self-indulgent—have come from? I will venture some interpretive speculation. As a young “radical,” Dworkin pursued gruesome and gothic limit experiences—sex that tears you up inside, affording existential insights into the human condition glimpsable only at rock bottom. I further hypothesize that, having almost died by the hand of what she took to be her very own Frankensteinian creation—this batterer she made, this human being she turned into a man—she could no longer tolerate or countenance any remotely kinky forms of enjoyment. She’d learned, had she not, that S/M was fatally and evilly perverse. So she set out to kill S/M, not just in herself—in the whole world.
Diabolically, killing S/M ended up nearly indistinguishable from reproducing it. Consider: the political imperative to expose S/M (thereby freeing sex!) is, for Dworkin, absolute. “Women are tortured, whipped, and chained,” she writes, more or less, in book after book after book.
On it goes, round and round like a GIF, grinding the obliterating, total power of ontological slicing into the mind. A book like Pornography (1981) “is difficult to excerpt,” reflects Fateman, delicately, “and difficult to read—because much of its power is derived from what it asks you to weather as a reader … a punishing, cumulative process of rhetorical extremes and unsparing descriptions of cruelty.” (Sidebar: Did anyone ever look at more extreme pornography than Dworkin did, for research purposes?) As literary critic Leah Claire Allen wrote, the problem wasn’t that pornography distorted reality. On the contrary, for Dworkin, “an honest depiction of sex necessarily both portrayed and encouraged violence against women.” So depicting sexual reality honestly was the paramount feminist consciousness-raising duty; simultaneously, it was guaranteed to put more pornography into the world. If to expose porn is to author it, is it even possible to tell the truth without reproducing reality? If representing “use” is itself abuse, speaking effectively of rape is also rape. A catch-22.
One arrives at this kind of conclusion, I think, by attempting to cast violence out, out, out of the self, and vesting it, wholly, in an other. One arrives here, in other words, via a radical refusal of responsibility. In the meantime, the truth was probably more complicated than either interpretative position Dworkin inhabited: she was no more wholly responsible than she was totally blameless for Iwan de Bruin’s sadistic awakening.
No wonder there was hardly any time or space left over, in her work, for “dishonest” depictions of sex: futuristic visions, positive imaginings of the kind of (non-erect) eroticism that Women and their Movement are fighting for. But luckily, Andrea had children—in a sense. Bright really means it when she calls herself a “Dworkin-inspired feminist.” Short-circuited as the pleasure of the “porno horror loop” was, the underlying imagination inspired millions. “Every single woman who pioneered the sexual revolution, every erotic-feminist-bad-girl-and-proud-of-it-stiletto-shitkicker,” reflects Bright, softly, “was once a fan of Andrea Dworkin. Until 1984, we all were.” Feminist porn studies, porn criticism and queer porn practitioners themselves are all, in this sense, Dworkin-inspired: “She was the one who got us looking at porn with a critical eye.” I belong to a later generation of disloyal daughters of Dworkin, yet now, thanks to Bright, feel intermittent waves of affection for this particular pornophobe that have enabled me to explore her oeuvre. Susie is right: Andrea is our bad kin. We must claim her.
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By 1983, Dworkin had had enough. In “Goodbye to All This,” an open letter forming a section of her unpublished novel Ruins, Dworkin bid sarcastic farewells to her many—supposedly victorious—enemies on the frankly bananas premise that, in the heyday of the Moral Majority, sex-radical socialist anti-antiporn feminism was winning the day. “It’s a girls’ movement now,” Dworkin spits. “Goodbye to all you feminists who go to bars and concerts but won’t buy books.”
Actually, much as she struggled to admit it, people always did buy her books, and nowadays even more so. Misandry lures us, and simultaneously so does the idea that Dworkin’s analysis has had no influence on the culture—that she was silenced. And it is this desperate desire to believe that she was right—about men, their evil and violent nature, irredeemable—that she was shunned and misunderstood, that guides us ineluctably away from out-of-print texts like Ice and Fire, and away, therefore, from any chance of understanding (let alone vindicating, or learning from) her voracious, thwarted bisexuality.
This is off the mark, and bears comparison to the wishfully “canceled” self-understanding of those who ride the grievance gravy-train today. In truth, Dworkin influenced us all, on the left and the right. There were times when I’d have said that Dworkin absolutely speaks for me when she writes: “The anger of the survivor is murderous.” Trust me when I say it took years for me to reach a trickier conclusion: that Dworkin lets me down, and herself down, and all survivors down, when she implies that no critique should ever be ventured of PTSD-related murderousness.
“While there were legions who would charge her with hyperbole,” Fateman wrote, “there was also a growing feminist army who found, in her electrifying indictments of male supremacy, the truth at last.” At last. But as a critical concept misandry makes as much sense as so-called anti-white racism. The idea that all the self-doubt women feel—never themselves implicated in machismo or misogyny—stems from trauma, which is to say, from the enemy, and as such, that the only task for feminists is to cast it aside is as false as it is irresistible. In his biography, Duberman records Dworkin’s paranoid tendency to torch friendships and catastrophize (oof, familiar terrain). “A 2 year old,” he quotes Jane Gapen passing her verdict on Andrea, after she and Barbara Deming hosted her for a year in Florida: “with murder in her heart.” I fear that I, in my #killallmen era, may also have deserved that assessment. Andrea, I’m claiming you: you deserved friends brave enough to tell you you were full of it. I should know. I’m trying to be that kind of comrade to you, now.
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I know well that it feels good to codify, as reality, an insight forged in apocalyptic rage or self-pity. When I was writing about men, in my early twenties, I felt sure that the hopes we femmes invest in them—the beautiful invitations we extend to them—are destined to be disappointed. I will never, I felt, be cared for by these guys. Never. They don’t actually want to have sex (meaning: melt, open, mutate…), they just want to scratch a genital itch inside a “chick.” My indignation and humiliation as a girl badly used calcified briefly as female-nationalist pseudo-separatism, and could easily have stayed that way. I became, in this period, more interested in proving that gender fatally compromises everything than in figuring out how and why gender might generate joy even in the present.
Before we talk about the priority of pleasure, however, we might need to talk about better pleasure. Dworkin boasted about believing—despite evidence to the contrary—in men’s humanity. Nowhere can I find the self-criticality, the reflexivity, that would tell me she believed in her own.
I’m in my mid-thirties now, and I can see that some, though not all, of the men I fucked in my teens and twenties did not actually abuse me, as I believed in my #killallmen era, so much as contribute to a mutual failure of communication—resulting in terrible sex—that took place on, yes, power-asymmetric ground. Human genitalia is all of a piece, variously spongy and erectile (as Dworkin used to know), and done right, intimate contact between distinct bits of this “junk,” as we unfathomably call it, can peel back the amniotic, sheer post-gender bliss of embodiment.
Bad sex, an epidemic, is human tragedy enough, I’ve realized. Not to differentiate it from rape is plain disrespectful. But how? Sometimes all we need is a shift of theoretical perspective. In 2016, translating a text by the German feminist Bini Adamczak, I discovered “circlusion,” a term used to denote the “antonym of penetration”—i.e., the same process, defined from the opposite standpoint. Circlusional acts include cock-encircling, nipple-kissing, fist-engulfing, finger-sucking, and dildo-swallowing. In this way, we can recognize the labor of the fuckee, of circlusion, alongside the labor of the fucker, the penetrator; to restore its role to cisheterosexuality’s history—and its present. Nowadays I circlude, if I may say so, like a goddamn champ. My boyfriend is the world’s most skillful circluder of my silicone, and a deep appreciator of circlusional skill generally.
In a furious 1987 letter to the New York Times, Dworkin writes that her work, which has been “contemptuous[ly]” misunderstood, is about the use of sex to make women accept inferiority, and the “impact of sexual intercourse on women’s will toward political freedom.” But when I think about where my will toward political freedom comes from, intercourse, both bad and (especially) good, is what comes to mind. Sorry, Andrea, but all of us, all of us who have loved men, who have harmed ourselves via men, and whom men have harmed and been harmed by, are just as much on the hook as anyone else to eschew misandry. We owe it to the world to become undespairing partisans of pleasureful danger, trauma-informed designers of lush promiscuities, and weavers of safer toeholds in the matrix of the present, whence we might glimpse the freak-friendly society of the future.
Photo credit: Stephen Parker, Andrea Dworkin photographed in London, 1988. Alamy Stock Photo.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.