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Monday, April 11, 2005
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DWORKIN "Thanks to Madonna," Camille Paglia says in a recent interview, "the whole pro-sex wing of feminism which had been ostracized since the '60s came back with a vengeance. And we won. We won massively. Now, Catherine McKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, you hardly see their names anywhere." Indeed Andrea Dworkin, after a period of notoriety as the author of a series of angry books about pornography as murder and sex as rape, had, like Kate Millett, pretty much vanished from the scene; and now she’s gone for good. She has died, at the age of 58, of undisclosed causes. Dworkin resurfaced a few years ago and claimed to have been raped. Her story was widely disbelieved: “Dworkin was particularly upset,“ reports the Guardian in its obituary , “by the disbelief that greeted her claims in 2000 that she'd been raped and drugged by two men in a Paris hotel room in 1999. Seizing upon inconsistencies in her two essays about the incident, which were published in the Guardian and the New Statesman, and her failure to contact hotel security or police, many feminist critics suggested the rape did not happen.” Dworkin “was called the ‘eloquent feminist’ by the syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman,” reports The Independent. She was anything but. Her writing was crude, confused, and imbued with the violence that haunted her, it seems, every moment of her life. Dworkin’s own imagination, UD always thought, was far more sadistic than the imaginations of most of the schlubs downloading pornography. ******************************************** UPDATE, Dworkin: “The gulf between what she really said and what her critics heard was wider than it was for any other public figure of whom I can think,” writes Hugo Schwyzer of Dworkin. He praises her prose and will “give my students something of hers to read soon.” The critics heard right. The gulf existed because Dworkin was a bad writer with bad ideas. Dworkin was unable to make the most elementary moral distinctions. No one heard it wrong when she defined pornography as “Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated.” [This is on page 69 of Pornography: Men Possessing Women.] She believed and wrote that looking at photographs of women’s breasts was ethically equivalent to dancing over the ashes of Jews. Dworkin published prolifically, in heat and in haste. She padded out her books with long paraphrases and descriptions of the most violent pornography she could find. When people began to intuit the desperation of her worldview, she and her supporters had to stammer and back up so that her rage calmed down into something anyone else could share. Why then did so many people read her? Because it’s rousing in a voyeuristic way to read an absolute fanatic. Because Dworkin, as I say, paraphrased very extensively -- page after page of it -- from the most violent of pornography. UD believes that Dworkin’s books probably brought more people to pornography -- and to an unusually violent level of pornography -- than took them away from it. Put aside the quality of her ideas -- to give undergraduate women prose like Dworkin’s is… it’s not irresponsible, since none of them will be taken in by it. But if you care about the integrity of students’ thought and writing, it’s another bad idea. ************************************************** ANOTHER UPDATE: "I'm not surprised that so many on the social right liked Andrea Dworkin. Like Dworkin, their essential impulse when they see human beings living freely is to try and control or stop them - for their own good. Like Dworkin, they are horrified by male sexuality, and see men as such as a problem to be tamed. Like Dworkin, they believe in the power of the state to censor and coerce sexual feedom. Like Dworkin, they view the enormous new freedom that women and gay people have acquired since the 1960s as a terrible development for human culture. ... Dworkin, of course, was somewhat too frank in her hatred of sexual freedom to achieve any real political power. But the theocons ... well, they're helping frame big government conservatism as we speak." Andrew Sullivan |