Andrea Dworkin

[One Eyed Cat]

Never knew what to make of this one. Still don't - OEC



NEW YORK - Andrea Dworkin wrote openly about the experiences as a prostitute, **** victim and battered wife that led her to become a crusader against pornography and violence against women — and a lightning rod for the feminist movement.


AP Photo


Dworkin died Saturday at her home in Washington, said her husband, John Stoltenberg. She and Stoltenberg, who were openly gay, began living together in 1974 and married in 1998.



Dworkin was 58 and had been ill for several years from ailments including osteoarthritis.



"In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve," fellow feminist Gloria Steinem said in a statement. "Andrea is one of them."



Dworkin's radical-lesbian brand of feminism brought both attention and discord to the women's rights movement. Some women objected to her crusade against pornography as an infringement on women's choice of how to use their bodies, and civil libertarians opposed it as an assault on the First Amendment.



Once described as the Malcolm X of the women's movement, Dworkin devoted her work and more than a dozen books to fighting what she considered the subordination of women, notably in marriage and pornography.



"She really committed her life to giving voice to the women at the bottom, the women who were battered, *****, who were prostituted, who were made into pornography," Stoltenberg said.



Her first book, "Woman Hating," published when she was 27, launched her lifelong advocacy on the ways pornography harms women.



She campaigned frequently on the subject and teamed with legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon to draft an ordinance defining pornography as a violation of women's civil rights, allowing women to sue for damages. The ordinance was inspired by the situation of Linda Marchiano, who as Linda Lovelace appeared in the pornographic film "Deep Throat" and later said she had been coerced.



The anti-porn ordinance was originally drafted for Minneapolis but vetoed by the mayor there. It was adopted by other communities, but later ruled unconstitutional.



"Pornography is used in **** — to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act," Dworkin testified before the U.S. Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in 1986, according to a transcript on her Web site.



She was well known as a firebrand for her views on pornography and her 1987 book "Intercourse," in which some reviewers said she labeled all sex as ****. She denied that, but wrote about marriage laws that she felt "mandated intercourse."



She was often lampooned as a prude or man hater and criticized by other feminists for making women out to be the victims of sex. She filed a $150 million libel lawsuit against Hustler magazine in the 1980s for running sexually explicit caricatures using her name, but courts ruled the cartoons were protected by the Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected her appeal without comment in 1989.



Dworkin said repeatedly that she did not hate men, just the subjugation of women.



Originally from Camden, N.J., Dworkin graduated from Bennington College in Vermont in 1968 with a degree in literature.



She was arrested at a protest against the Vietnam War when she was 18 and sent to prison, where she said she was subjected to a body cavity search by prison doctors. She also said she married a man who beat her, was ***** and at one point became a prostitute.



Her many books included "Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation," which in 2001 won an American Book Award, given to honor cultural diversity in American writing. She was writing a book with the working title "Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation," when she died, Stoltenberg said.





A public memorial will be held in New York, said Stoltenberg. Arrangements were incomplete.

[Ichigo]

Well she seems like she was an admirable woman. My friend has probably heard of her since she's all into feminism.

[One Eyed Cat]

She definitely had a lot of guts. I just always wondered about some of her stances regarding marriage and pornography. I generally prefer Camille Paglia to Dworkin/Mackinnon in terms of true feminism.

OEC

[curiositykilledthecat]

I agree. She did have a lot of guts. I am sure that it was no picnic to be where she was, I mean she probably could not count the number of death threats she got.

I don't think it matters what we think so much as that we DO think. Personally, I don't necessarily agree with her positions, but I do agree that there is dangerous porn out there. There are the very situations she's talking about happening everyday--people objectifying others via various media and then acting out the deeds on actual people. There are men that loathe women, that think that women are useful only as an orifice. But I don't think that means that no one should be allowed to watch porn.

I guess it all really boils down to personal responsibility. We all have to decide for ourselves where we want to be in this world and how we want to live. Personally, I think porn is as boring as football or baseball. Why watch when you could be doing?

It seems like there are genuine victims though--people that are too vulnerable to prevent others from exploiting them, and what about them? I know that there's plenty of pimps and hos in West Oakland and plenty of other places. Do we really all choose our places? It seems hard to believe that people would choose that. But at some level, doing nothing is a choice too.

I don't have any brilliant answers or solutions, just more questions.

[One Eyed Cat]

I agree. She did have a lot of guts. I am sure that it was no picnic to be where she was, I mean she probably could not count the number of death threats she got.

I don't think it matters what we think so much as that we DO think. Personally, I don't necessarily agree with her positions, but I do agree that there is dangerous porn out there. There are the very situations she's talking about happening everyday--people objectifying others via various media and then acting out the deeds on actual people. There are men that loathe women, that think that women are useful only as an orifice. But I don't think that means that no one should be allowed to watch porn.

I guess it all really boils down to personal responsibility. We all have to decide for ourselves where we want to be in this world and how we want to live. Personally, I think porn is as boring as football or baseball. Why watch when you could be doing?

It seems like there are genuine victims though--people that are too vulnerable to prevent others from exploiting them, and what about them? I know that there's plenty of pimps and hos in West Oakland and plenty of other places. Do we really all choose our places? It seems hard to believe that people would choose that. But at some level, doing nothing is a choice too.

I don't have any brilliant answers or solutions, just more questions.

Well said. She gets you to crawl outside your skin and see another perspective. I never liked porn much either.

OEC

[devil13]

I remember seeing stories on her before. Its my opinion that she was a man hater and blamed men for her own shortcomings. I think that its great that she did allot for women in need but she took things to the major extreme.

[Ellis]

She had balls, but that doesnt make her a cool person. She was a sexist bitch, and Im glad shes dead. I abhore people who push their veiws on the people theyre trying to "save" or "liberate".
With any luck, she choked to death on a turkey sandwich. I swear to god, it's the ninja of the food world.

[One Eyed Cat]

Her views on men were ridiculous. She saw sex as **** basically.

OEC

[grebo]

her "advice" with censorship laws got her own books stopped at the border because they broke the new laws...... basically shes a bitter twisted woman who uses the excuse of abuse earlier in her life to spend the rest of her life fighting others but not dealing with her abuse. she was pretty fucked up, she classified all penetration as sexual assualt. she was a true femi-nazi. her and the pope can fight it out in hell

[One Eyed Cat]

yeah she and Catherine MacKinnon preached a type of censorship never seen in a free country. Their anger towards men seemed to color their works. I know a worthy adversary when I see one, though. She was one.

OEC

[curiositykilledthecat]

'Tis true, 'tis true. It seems that every movement has to have a major asshole at it's core. I can't think of any movement that didn't. I was reading about the Black Panthers--remember them? They were radical at the core too, but they did make some real changes for real people. And even the people that didn't change had to change on some level because they were forced to think.

Did you know that prior to 1976 there were no agencies in the USA to help women and children who were victims of sexual assault? It's true. The very first **** crisis center was started in 1976. Maybe women and children weren't sexually assaulted before that? Yeah, right... Things were so bad that one of the things that victims advocates did was to remind emergency room personnell (sp?) to wash their hands before examining the victim and not just afterward--because the victims were "so dirty" it didn't matter.

It was not uncommon at that time for judges to throw out the rare cases that did go to trial on account of the way the victim was dressed. Apparently, miniskirts evoked an irrepressible violent sexual urge in men that cannot be denied...

I know all these things because I was sexually abused when I was 4 years old until I was 9. Mine was a rare case. My stepfather, under pressure from my biological father and the police, turned himself in and made a full confession. Otherwise, there probably would not have been a case at all. Not to mention that I might have had to testify--a very scary thing at that time. The important thing is that it was one of several cases that set a precedent and changed the way that people saw things.

I know that it can be hard to take extremists, but I still think they have their place. Whatever we think of them, their work is important.