http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/frum-diary.asp
APR. 12, 2005: ANDREA DWORKIN RIP
Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist and antipornography crusader, died Sunday in Washington. She was 58. I met her once, through the kindness of my friend Christopher Hitchens, who invited my wife and me to meet Dworkin and her husband, John Stoltenberg, over dinner. It was an audacious pairing, and I went to the dinner with some trepidation.
I can¹t say I was charmed. As Dworkin herself acknowledged, the feminist movement was made up of difficult women, and she was no exception to the rule. (Click here for an uneuphemistic obituary in the New York Sun). But despite myself, I was impressed. Dworkin was a woman of deep and broad reading. When I met her she was increasingly immobilized by illness, but her mind ranged free.
We did not discuss her long history of angry denunciation of her ideological opponents. (A quick posthumous Google search even turned up one of me.)
Instead, we talked about her respect for the Christian conservatives who fought against forced prostitution and sex trafficking and her revulsion against Bill Clinton¹s abuse of women. Politically she belonged to the far, far, far left, but she had little use for an antiwar movement that made excuses for Saddam Hussein or Islamic extremism. And in one respect at least, she shared a deep and true perception with the political and cultural right: She understood that the sexual revolution had inflicted serious harm on the interests of women and children and (ultimately) of men as well. She understood that all-pervasive pornography is not a harmless amusement, but a powerful teaching device that changed the way men thought about women. She rejected the idea that sex is just another commodity to be exchanged in a marketplace, that strippers and prostitutes should be thought of as just another form of service worker: She recognized and dared to name the reality of brutality and exploitation where many liberals insist on perceiving personal liberation.
Dworkin was grimly entertained by the opportunism of Bill Clinton¹s feminist supporters. Her radicalism left no room for even the slightest trimming of the ideological sails. Part fanatic, part prophet, she had not a pragmatic bone in her body. And since she was never one to waste words or bandy false compliments herself, I won¹t offend her memory by lavishing suspect praises on her or invoking a God in Whom she did not believe. I¹ll just say that although I would never, ever have expected to think so: She'll be missed.