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.” 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 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, unmade-up, wearing old denim dungarees and bad trainers — and thus a target for ridicule. The fact that she presented herself as she was was rare and deeply threatening; in a culture where a woman’s appearance has become ever more defining, Dworkin came to represent the opposite of what women want to be.
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 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 that does involve force is rape.
While much of it 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.
Dworkin had a Jewish childhood dominated by family memories of the Holocaust. 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 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”.
Then, in 1999, Dworkin was drugged and raped in a hotel room in Paris. Last September, she told The Guardian: ”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.”
Dworkin’s feminism often came into conflict with the more compromising theories of others, such as Naomi Wolf. She did concede 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. 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 that has been relentlessly pornographised, in an academic environment that has allowed postmodernism to remove all politics from feminism, we will miss Dworkin. And indeed, who is left to replace her? — Â