The Baffling Case of Andrea Dworkin
by Susie Bright
A couple of weeks ago, Andrea Dworkin published the most extraordinary story in The Guardian (UK) in which she says she was raped last year in a Parisian hotel. She gives a delirious account of the events that followed--- her devoted partner John Stoltenberg disbelieving her, her father dying, a hospital stay that cost the use of her legs, physical disfigurement, and more.
Her description opens in a hotel garden, at age 52, where she sat drinking Kir Royales and reading a text on French Fascism. The next thing she knew, the bartender and his serving boy had drugged her champagne, and brutally, brutally raped her.
By the time you finish reading it, you know she has finally completely lost her mind.
If anyone had predicted such a story to me, I might have shook my head, without a drop of sympathy, and dropped a couple choice words about karma. But instead, as I read Andrea's confession, tears came to my eyes.
This is a woman who called for my "assassination" on previous occasions-- because of my association with what she regards as the grrl-cabal of neo-femme-pornographers. But my personal image in her eyes is insignificant. She's had a much bigger effect on me, and on my generation of women, than I've ever had on her.
Plenty of my peers would say that they are utterly cold to any misfortune that might befall her." Just think of all the lives she's threatened, warped, and terrified," they remind me. "Canada is still reeling, " my partner interjects.
Yes, it's true, a whole body of Canadian law--- North American is more like it--- is still spinning from her inspirations, which defined pornography as "rape culture" and made it grounds for a genuine civil complaint- a tool that women could use to address abuse and exploitation. AnyWoman could come forward to say, "That picture is hurting me, these words are not protected if they shame me. I can get you in trouble for being dirty, because it's anti-woman."
Not so surprisingly, Dworkin's rhetoric was hijacked by every politician and pundit who ever recognized a good black leather menace when they saw one. From Tipper Gore to Jerry Falwell, both liberals and the right wing found solace in her rhetoric, suggesting that women were righteous (sexless) and men were savage (sex-full) .
The contradictions between Dworkin's brilliance and her lunacy have always gotten under my skin. How can she have inspired such remarkable sensitivity about gender-directed violence, and at the same time, generated such double-standard conclusions? I'm not the least bit surprised that she devotes her web site to insisting that she's been misunderstood- that she doesn't really hate men or sex, or free speech. I don't think she does, either... but I have been exasperated with her naivetZ about why these smoky clouds of 'misunderstanding" keep puffing up from her little bonfire. Her latest missive from London not only portrays the male character as evil and incomprehensible, it indeed projects a disintegrating paranoia about every single person in her milieu.
For many people, the whole anti-porn campaign waged by Dworkin ( and Catherine MacKinnon) is ancient history--- just another boring, boomer, feminist harp. Since 1994, the students I meet on my college lecture tours often say they don't know her, which would have been unthinkable in any classroom during the two previous decades.v
Yet their ignorance provides no pardon from the Dworkin legacy. Anyone who's ever been bitten by the statement "Pornography is degrading to women"-- or "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice"-- is someone who has been touched by Dworkin's imprint. They should be curious about her. As much as personalities have always been suppressed in the culture of the women's movement, it's essential to understand who, exactly, made this rhetoric the coin of the land.
Dworkin, as veteran observers know, is usually depicted as a shrill fatty. It's painful to read mainstream media coverage of her, because they insist that her entire reputation can be distilled to a lack of fashion sense, a fatal lack of "femininity." I don't think there's a female public figure alive who's been more castigated for their looks. It's frightening to consider that, if she was slim and blonde ( like MacKinnon) she would actually be treated in the diminutive; her views would be considered with at least a modicum of respect. But I don't care how loud or fat she is, in fact those are probably two of my favorite things about her, because they express her defiance.
Andrea Dworkin is someone who, as an individual, defied and consequently changed the world with her ideas. She's an original, and an unapologetic revolutionary. For all those reasons, I have been deeply attracted to her.
There was just one problem: Every time I put down one of her books, I was impressed by her passion, and by the risks she could take with her imagination--- and yet I was also convinced that she was cracked. The more she attacked sexism, the more I felt imprisoned by her concept of sex itself. Her arguments for liberation folded in on themselves, in a victimized dervish dance; they became just another bar and stripe in the code of the double standard.
Here is a social radical who s ruthlessly analyzed sex and society, but until this latest health crisis, she had refused ever to talk to a therapist, or even entertain a discussion of psychological motivation. She doesn't believe in such stuff; she ridicules it, which is remarkable, considering her effect on so many others' psychology! In all her morality plays, she has studiously avoided the unconscious. For her, the "shadow" life is always literal.
My greatest and most ironic debt to Dworkin, is that she was the first intellectual to critique pornography--- at all. Much to her vexation, I imagine, she inspired a whole new generation of critics like me, who have looked at sex with a thoughtful and aesthetic eye which would have been considered just absurd in previous times.
When academic puritans wring their hands and wonder why "pornography" is being "taught" in universities, they need to look no further than Dworkin's seminal work: Pornography; Men Possessing Women. For countless women's studies students, this text was both our orgasmic introduction to pornography and our first deconstruction of it. Fine then- If she was going open Pandora's box, there was going to be a hundred after her who would revel in their own interpretations.
Disagreeing with Dworkin on sex---vehemently--- practically defines the wave of feminists that came after her. You can't even discuss feminism without arguing Freud, Marx, and Andrea Dworkin. When she pinpointed "intercourse" itself as the structural root of gender dominance, she dared make an argument --- and man, can she make an argument--- that took all the cultural feminist sob-sister victimology, and tied it down to a post. Although it blew people's minds that she would wage a theoretical battle against the very concept of "fucking", it was thrilling that she could push the liberal "womyn's" movement aside and draw such a line in the sand. Again, even though Dworkin's sex-positive critics blew a gasket over her book Intercourse, it did promote, in its subversive way, the notion that penis/vagina sex was an overrated paradigm that needed to be downsized.
Everything about Dworkin results in these contradictions and unexpected interpretations. She sues Hustler magazine ... but not for degrading her with their pornography, but rather for calling her a lesbian. Yes, the average Joe thinks she's a lesbian, but she's lived with her man, John Stoltenberg , for 20+ years. Andrew and John give no explanations. Maybe they're as sick of identity labels as everyone else.
Dworkin doesn't give masculinity one inch of breathing room in her arguments, but the most important person in her life was her father. Losing him, to my mind, is the catalyst for this entire unraveling in The Guardian. Men have always been mentors to Andrea intellectually, and that is how she first defines herself, as a revolutionary scholar. She finds most women to be hopeless inferiors to herself, academically-and frankly, by her standards, they are. She was trained to be a Jewish scholar of the most rigorous school, with all the attendant masculine platforms. When she has looked to other cultures for a new mental challenge, she has gone to the French, and to the haute couture of misogyny.
The male focus of much of Dworkin's study and theoretical critique has been none other than that froggy macho brain-iac, the Marquis de Sade. As much as she rips De Sade, she has been absolutely mesmerized by him, and she is probably the most expert historian of his work alive today. She is indeed a Francophile, a woman who is reviled for her "ugliness" and yet places the highest aesthetic standard on everything she looks at, writes, and reads. Look at where her latest attack takes place: she is reading French, in a protected garden, and she is taking in champagne with a sweet berry liqueur.
Dworkin's sex and violence-laden novel, Ice and Fire, is in fact the exact modern replica-- although completely unattributed--- of De Sade's "Juliette. " If I believed in past lives, I would say that the Marquis and his notorious rigor live on in Ms. Andrea.
While I am fascinated by the details of her story's setting, I find Dworkin's description of her rape incredible. It would be too cruel to tear it apart point by point, but suffice it to say there are too many odd bits and contradictions to fit any rape pattern I've ever known. Andrea Dworkin has made so many aware of how rape happens, and what its detailed circumstances are, that now when she cries "wolf", all her students such as myself are bound to look askance at her account.
I could easily believe she had a black-out, and nasty injuries, from an unexpected dose of alcohol and sunburn. I would rather have sympathy for that version of events than to believe she is maliciously making the whole thing up- as some Guardian readers have charged in the subsequent Letters to the Editor. But as anyone can tell from the second half of her story, the rape episode is just the lead to a series of assertions that everyone from her gynecologist to her dearest companion have betrayed her.
Let's put the rape story aside--- I don't have to ascertain whether Dworkin has been assaulted on this occasion or not. She is hurting, and something is wrong. I don't need her polemics on the subject to raise my consciousness about women's condition. As Andrea has always said, virtually every woman has been overwhelmed and intimidated by non-consensual sex at some time in her life...not always brutal, but always damaging.
Dworkin-inspired feminists like myself learned to identify rape as a way that women are controlled as a group, in fear and submission. But as these same activists grew to understand their sexuality, we saw that such a fear was not only keeping us "down on the farm" politically, but it was also robbing us of our sexual expression and our most explosive erotic identities.
In order to be a "cunt who roared," I not only had to repudiate the sexist rhetoric of " She asked for it" - I also had to ask what we wanted in sex, after all. Instead of relying on "No means no," I had to discover what it meant to choose "Yes-without duress! " It meant taking the world by the balls, and having the confidence that we had a big enough clit to carry it off.
So now, in her scholar's tradition, I have questions. Why is Dworkin reading about French Fascism, instead of the voices of the contemporary American sexual revolution? Why won't she drink with us, after all this time? Is her mind going to go before her body has a chance to speak its own sexual truth? I don't know what we're going to see from Andrea Dworkin next, but this time, she seems to be heading down the garden path alone.