Andrea Dworkin is having a moment—finally. This was the sense critics shared in the first slate of reviews of Last Days at Hot Slit, a 2019 anthology edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder that collects excerpts of Dworkin’s major critical works alongside extracts of novels, lesser-known talks, and previously unpublished essays and letters. Until this moment, Dworkin, who died in 2005, had always been famous primarily for her infamy. She was a radical feminist who published her first book, Woman Hating, in 1974, four years after the Second Wave’s bright- and quick-burning radical feminist movement had published its major works—Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, and Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful. It was as if Dworkin’s feminist career had been pitched right into the backlash. Three years after that first book she began work on her second major work, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, from which her reputation has not yet recovered. Dworkin was primarily known for three things: her leadership in anti-porn activism alongside feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, which split the feminist movement into bitterly opposed “sex-positive” and “anti-porn” factions; her 1996 book, Intercourse, which has notoriously been read as arguing that all sex is rape; and being fat, frizzy-haired, and uniformed in baggy overalls—the look that symbolically confirmed her as the man-hating fever dream whom right-wing reactionaries loved to hate and feminists furiously disowned.
Now there’s a growing sense among some critics and feminists that this may be the moment we’re ready for Dworkin; or actually, that it’s been Dworkin’s world all along and the rest of us are only just realizing it. Her insistence that sexual violence was both widespread and catastrophic, that it was hidden in plain sight, was read in her lifetime as hyperbolic, attention-seeking, and deluded. For example, on a college speaking tour in 1975, in the talk “The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door,” she told women that rape was the reality, in fact the very basis, of institutions like marriage, otherwise designed to “mystify and mislead” women into believing the crimes against them were “trivial, comic, irrelevant.” It has lately become much harder to interpret such claims as hyperbolic and deluded: after the testimony of millions of women on Twitter and Facebook during the #MeToo movement, after the Harvey Weinsteins, Larry Nassars, and Jeffrey Epsteins we’ve all been shocked to discover in plain sight. Returning to Dworkin’s work in light of the #MeToo moment is a way of at least having the grace to be ashamed of that shock: women were telling her, and she was telling us all along, and all she got for it, even from feminists, was grief.
But if this moment, whatever it is or maybe already was, seems to mandate a rediscovery of Dworkin’s work, that rediscovery is decidedly ambivalent. In a review of Last Days at Hot Slit in the New Yorker, Lauren Oyler wrote: “In the reconsiderations of Dworkin that have proliferated in the past couple of years, since Donald Trump was elected and #MeToo made it fashionable to express skepticism or hatred of men, a positive, if qualified, consensus has coalesced around [Dworkin’s] work.” And Jennifer Szalai similarly observed in the New York Times: “A new generation of feminists has reclaimed her, seeing in Dworkin’s incandescent rage a source of illumination, even as they bristle at some of her specific views.” As if to reconcile readers’ contradictory desires— to reparatively appreciate a disavowed feminist foremother while disavowing some “specific views”—Dworkin’s reviewers urge us to read her in a new way. They share the sense that Dworkin is best read expressively, that what she offers us is a chance to connect with the “incandescent rage” conveyed in the rhythms of her writing and her story as an embattled figure. So, for example, Szalai writes that although Dworkin was famous for “issuing categorical edicts,” like her declaration in the introduction to Pornography that porn was “Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated,” such provocations were the “least interesting” aspect of her work. Szalai celebrates the “hallmarks of [her] writing,” “the confident strut, the incantatory repetition, the startling, belligerent language,” and in the process, she recovers Dworkin as someone who “thought deeply and read widely and was preoccupied with questions not only of justice but also of style.”
The same approach to Dworkin leads reviewers to dwell on her biography. Szalai notes that Dworkin “composed her work from a personal place” and wrote “as a woman, as a child who was molested by a stranger, as a battered wife.” Almost every review following the publication of Last Days recounts these biographical facts from Johanna Fateman’s introduction: Dworkin’s first brush with sexual violence occurred when she was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War and subjected to a brutal gynecological exam in jail. She had her second when she moved to Amsterdam and married a member of the anarchist group Provo, who subjected her to brutal domestic abuse. She wrote her first book, which she originally wanted to title Last Days at Hot Slit, in hiding and on the run in the Netherlands, in order to “find out what had happened to me and why,” as she recalled in a later essay “My Life as a Writer.” The critical motif suggests that her style mirrors her biography, and these both offer today’s reader a (rare) chance for identification and catharsis. “She wrote with a passion and anger still uncommon in women,” Moira Donegan wrote in Bookforum and, a few paragraphs later, “Dworkin had reason to be angry: Her life was marked by the kind of male violence that is disturbingly common yet consistently goes unacknowledged.” Reading Dworkin this way is like appreciating her as a magnificent tragic character: part Cassandra, part Medea, doomed to be ignored when she was right, led by rage to be militantly committed to error. If she was wrong, this reading implies, at least she was authentically wrong, wrong by virtue of a steadfast loyalty to her own lived experience—and if we have to put on our rational faces and agree that she was wrong, aren’t so many of us, really, that mad, and isn’t it a bit thrilling, a bit necessary, to see a woman unleash it as if impervious to the consequences?
This is not yet the reconsideration Dworkin deserves. Appreciating Dworkin “as a writer” and “as a person” seem to be ways to avoid her “as a thinker.” Although eloquent on Dworkin’s style, on her bravery and prescience in insistently trying to expose sexual assault, many of her reviewers found it surprisingly easy to dismiss the more controversial moments of Dworkin’s rhetoric as dramatic effect, her contradictions as mistakes, and to believe that her theorizing, as Elaine Blair puts it in the New York Review of Books, “gets the better of her.” To take one example: on the comparison that Dworkin draws between porn and the Holocaust, which Szalai dismisses as a “categorical edict,” Donegan writes, “When she was most fervently campaigning against porn, Dworkin expressed the hope that it would one day be banned, eradicated; she compared the anti-woman ‘propaganda’ of pornography to the anti-Jewish propaganda of Goebbels. It’s overly simplistic, and it’s naïve.” Oyler writes: “She compares violence against women to the Holocaust, with women who value heterosexuality being ‘collaborators’ and pornography akin to Goebbels’s anti-Jewish propaganda,” performing a “sort of childish qualification to imply that, actually, one of these [sexual violence] is worse.”
Last Days offers plenty of evidence to suggest that Dworkin’s work should be approached with a basic presumption of her intelligence. One such compelling attestation in the anthology is Fateman’s introduction, which offers a thoughtful reflection on why Dworkin was so thoroughly plagued by the kind of “glib” readings Fateman takes to be symptomatic of “the cultural forces working against Dworkin’s legibility as a thinker.” About one less than subtle New York Times review of Dworkin’s novel Mercy, in which the reviewer concludes, “Ms. Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men,” Fateman writes: “in a misreading that echoes so many reactions to Dworkin, [Mercy’s reviewer] takes the novel’s shocking collapse of the metaphorical and the literal, of fantasy and confession, as a sign that its plot is actually a plan.” This strikes me as a revelatory insight into Dworkin’s reception. What makes her difficult to read is precisely what many think makes her easy to read: the assumption of her literalness. It’s as if the astute and almost universal characterizations of her style as “uncompromising,” “stark,” and “blunt” quickly slide into assumptions that she is “straightforward,” “un-nuanced,” and “reductive.”
This is why, for example, so many reviewers find her comparison of porn to Holocaust propaganda so objectionable—they read it, at worst, as a facile rhetorical move trading on the horrors of the Holocaust for cheap shock value and, at best, as blundering over the important distinctions between different kinds of oppression. Either way, they understand her to be drawing a straightforward equivalence between porn and the Holocaust. But Dworkin understood her style to be anything but straightforward. In “My Life as a Writer,” included at the end of Last Days, Dworkin writes: “I’d like to take what I know and just hand it over. But there is always a problem for a woman: being believed. How can I think I know something? How can I think that what I know might matter?… My only chance to be believed is to find a way of writing bolder and stronger than woman hating itself….” Everywhere in that essay Dworkin figures her own writing as calculated and covert, designed to convey her knowledge to the right audience, under the nose of a society that would distort or disbelieve it: “I would have to think strategically, with a militarist’s heart: as if my books were complex explosives, mine fields set down in the culture to blow up the status quo.” I would argue, with Dworkin, that there is really nothing straightforward at all about language like this: “There were no photographs—real or simulated—[of the Jews] getting on the trains with their hands happily fingering their exposed genitals.” This image does indeed represent a crass and unnuanced collapse of porn-into-Holocaust, but it’s actually so literal, and so vividly crass, that it’s difficult to imagine it as some kind of sincere assertion that porn is really “as bad as” the Holocaust.
What the comparison does actually assert can only be understood if we stop taking her to be issuing some kind of categorical edict and instead read the comparison as part of a passage that constitutes a sustained train of thought. That passage begins with a discussion of the limits of Holocaust propaganda: toward the end of the war, Dworkin writes, Goebbels exhibited a “rare lapse” by making a film of supposedly traitorous Nazi generals being hung to death by meat hooks. The film made audiences physically sick. It didn’t “work.” Dworkin ends this passage not by asserting that we should now react to porn as if it were Nazi propaganda, but by suggesting that “the questions now really are: why is pornography credible in our society? How can anyone believe it? And then: how subhuman would women have to be for the pornography to be true?”
Dworkin’s comparison doesn’t take place along the “childish” axis of relative badness. She suggests that porn, like propaganda, faces representational limits. Even for Goebbels, propaganda was not simply favorable representations of actions that served power; propaganda had to fit itself and operate with societal beliefs that produced or allowed the violence it sought to validate and use. Jews fingering themselves on the way to Auschwitz doesn’t “work” for us; we immediately feel it to be tasteless, wrong, some sort of category violation. But women being held down, strung up, cut, burned, shaved, forcefully penetrated, Dworkin writes, does work—we see it as sex, and every day it makes us come. The force of this distinction is not to say that we should recognize the disparity and chalk it up as one more indignity women have to suffer over and above what the Holocaust victims suffered. The distinction shows us that the strength of our feeling that the image of Jews fingering themselves represents some kind of violation, on the one hand, and the strength of our feeling that porn is a healthy exercise of free speech, on the other, evidences that there are rules shaping what we accept as valid representation. In other words, Dworkin doesn’t stumble, in her righteous outrage over the horrors of sexual violence, into an inept metaphor; she intentionally provokes the reader’s sense that comparing porn to the Holocaust is outrageous, in order to show the reader that our sense of what is sex, and what is violence, is complexly, inversely, but also inseparably related to its representation.
To read Dworkin as her critics do, as “childishly” saying that we should see porn as being like propaganda because sexual violence is really as bad as genocide, is to be in thrall to an understanding of representation she’s explicitly writing against, one in which sex can “really” be anything at all “underneath” its representation. Representation in this reading is arbitrary, something that overlays and obscures the reality of sex. To be committed to this picture of representation is to find yourself ill-equipped to understand Dworkin’s project. If you do not understand that what “works” as a representation of sex is bound up in and therefore crucially revealing of its reality in ways that need to be explained, Pornography will always seem to you like a kind of dour project, weirdly and unnecessarily “fixated” on porn amid the wide world of “real” injustices like unequal pay and actual domestic violence. In other words, there’s a direct through line from appreciating Dworkin’s style as straightforward and strident to devaluing her intellectual project.
Insisting on taking Dworkin seriously as a thinker is not to say that it isn’t worthwhile to consider her as an artist and figure. But better than appreciating how steadfastly she was committed to her ideas, even if they were wrong, would be to appreciate the way her personal acts represented expressions of her ideas themselves. What was more shocking to me about Last Days at Hot Slit than, say, “categorical edicts” about the Holocaust was the evolution it traces in her relationship to her family, culminating in Dworkin’s explanation in the essay “My Life as a Writer” that she learned to stop loving her mother. She writes, “I loved her madly when I was a child, which she never believed.” In a 1978 letter to her parents, published for the first time in Last Days, Dworkin warns them that she’s publishing an essay (“A Battered Wife Survives”) that she thinks will embarrass them; she writes, “I also hope so much that this will not lead to another period of no communication, anger, and hurt. I would like it so much if you could appreciate me for having had the courage to write this piece, and the talent to write it so well.” Twenty years later, Dworkin coolly sums up her relationship with her mother thus: “She often told me that she loved me but did not like me. I came to believe that whatever she meant by love was too remote, too cold, too abstract or formulaic to have anything to do with me as an individual, as I was.”
This arc gives the reader the material for a biographical reading that appreciates Dworkin for being uncompromising in her commitment, if we see it as evoking a woman who holds her politics so close, understands them to be so immediate and personal, that there’s no agreeing to disagree: to dislike them is to erase her. To read her that way wouldn’t be wrong, exactly: the figure of Dworkin that emerges from Last Days can be formidable, especially to the feminist reader. It’s easy to feel like an impostor in one’s political ideals next to someone who endured homelessness, had almost all of her work subject to intellectual contempt, became the near-universal object of hatred for misogynists and feminists alike, and refused the love of her own mother in order to keep insisting her own ideals were right. But appreciating Dworkin along those lines doesn’t really constitute a recovery of her work. Readers have always tended to read Dworkin as puritanical, as if her life was the model response to her writing and each book mandated a litany of sacrifices to you and me personally: give up your books, your porn, your sex, your family. It sponsors, in other words, a narrow vision of what to take away from Dworkin.
But if instead of understanding her life as a kind of formal model for political commitment bled of its content, we understand her personal decisions to express thought, and her thought to bear on the deepest parts of personal life, we will really be reading her in a new way. Reading the distance between the 1978 letter to her parents and the 1995 dismissal of her mother as mapping a trajectory no less theoretical than the one between Pornography and Intercourse—in fact, the one illuminates the other—allows us to see a positive dimension of her work. That positive dimension is perhaps never clearer than in her decision to cut her mother out. What her mother offered was not legible to her as love; only an emotion that beheld her as real, as an individual, could be deemed love. If what she wrote in Pornography was that “sex” is violence, and what she wrote in Intercourse is that “love” is contempt, then what she also implicitly meant was that if “sex” is violence then it is not sex, if “love” is contempt, it is not love. It’s not that women should stop desiring; it’s that women should insist on the real thing, even if the real thing doesn’t exist, even if there’s no available language to describe it. What’s formidable about Dworkin is not the scope of her sacrifice or anger but of her ambition.