>Dworkin was a one-dimensional public persona, but she was a nuanced
>writer, with a gift for conveying abstract concepts through acute,
>unusual metaphors. "It's not as if there's an empty patch that one
>can see and so one can say, 'There's my ignorance; it's about ten by
>ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty
>patch," she wrote in Heartbreak. (She was talking about male
>writers.) She could be lyrical in her descriptions; Bessie Smith's
>voice "tramped through your three-dimensional body but gracefully, a
>spartan, bearlike ballet." And she could be funny. Of a grade-school
>teacher who gave her trouble, Dworkin says, "I knew I'd get her
>someday and this is it: eat shit, bitch. No one said that sisterhood
>was easy."
>
>Another surprise about Dworkin, given her reputation as an anti-sex
>man-hater, is how frequently and passionately she wrote about
>men-male writers, male lovers, male family members (her father in
>particular, whom she frequently referred to in conversation as
>"thatdearsweetwonderfulman," as if it were his title). And she wrote
>about sex constantly. To say that she was anti-sex misses the point:
>She was obsessed with sex. Book after book, page after page of
>"cunt," "fucking," "penetration," "penis," "sucking," "balls," and
>so on. Often, Dworkin was offering lurid, excruciatingly precise
>accounts of something sexually hideous, as in this description of
>her uncle: "He stuck his penis down the throats of at least two of
>his children when they were infants-I assume to elicit the
>involuntary sucking response." Another writer might simply have
>called him a child molester.
>
>Dworkin's treatment of sex was frequently garish and grim, but
>sometimes-whether or not she intended it to be-her writing on the
>subject was much more ambiguous. The writer and sex radical Susie
>Bright has pointed out that Dworkin's first novel, Ice and Fire, is
>an undeniable retelling of the Marquis de Sade's Juliette. Dworkin
>hated De Sade; she devoted an entire chapter to his personal and
>literary crimes in one of her most famous books, Pornography: Men
>Possessing Women (in which she asserted, "He both embodies and
>defines male sexual values"). In that same book, Dworkin described
>in painstaking detail the goings-on in various examples of smut,
>including the book Whip Chick: "Pete fucks Cora. She has the bum
>suck her ass, then her cunt while Pete fucks her in the ass. After
>all have come, Cora orders the bum to clean Pete's genitals." This
>goes on for pages. Sometimes, when you're reading Dworkin, it can be
>difficult to determine whether you are supposed to be offended or
>masturbating.
Doug