Feminist author Andrea Dworkin dead at 58
Activist campaigned against pornography, its effects on women
The Associated Press
Updated: 9:04 p.m. ET April 11, 2005
NEW YORK - Andrea Dworkin, a feminist who viewed pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights and a direct cause of rape and violence, has died, her agent and family said Monday. She was 58.
Dworkin died Saturday at her home in Washington, D.C., said John Stoltenberg, who married Dworkin in 1998 after living with her for three decades. She had been ill several years, and suffered from ailments including osteoarthritis.
“Pornography is used in rape — to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act,” Dworkin testified before the New York Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography in 1986, according to a transcript posted on her Web site.
Dworkin’s 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, helping to draft a 1983 law that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women, her agent, Elaine Markson, said in a statement.
The law was inspired by the case of Linda Marchiano, who as Linda Lovelace appeared in the pornographic film “Deep Throat,” the statement noted.
‘Writers who help the human race evolve’
“In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve,” said fellow feminist Gloria Steinem. “Andrea is one of them.”
Dworkin, originally from Camden, N.J., wrote more than a dozen books, including “Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation,” which won the American Book Award in 2001. She was working on a book with the working title “Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation,” when she died, Stoltenberg said.
international |
rights, freedoms and repression |
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Tuesday April 12, 2005 10:28
by Cate
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26"Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free. "
"A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. "
"Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. "
"Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership. "
".......Pornography is central in creating and maintaining the civil inequality of the sexes. Pornography is a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex which differentially harms women. . . ."
Andrea Dworkin, feminist and writer,
born September 26 1946; died April 9 2005
".......Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized."
"I love books the way I love nature.
I can imagine now that someday there will be no nature, at least not as we knew it together on Crete, no mysterious ocean, no luminous sky, no stark and unsettled mountains. I can imagine now that a time will come, that it is almost upon us, when no one will love books, that there will be no people who need them the way some of us need them now--like food and air, sunshine and warmth. It is no accident, I think, that books and nature (as we know it) may disappear simultaneously from human experience. There is no mind-body split. I never think of you without remembering the ocean. It is an emblem for me of that time in my life, of the depth and tumult of my feelings, of how my life broke out of my skin and beyond itself into an unknown, primal realm. The ocean does not signify anything whimsical, cheap, romantic, or self-indulgent. It signifies the true mysteries, not the mystifying ones. It signifies the light years between galaxies, as well as ones tie to everything on earth. It signifies ones tie to the enormity of being, to the mystery of this universe--stars, moon, sun, black holes, rings around Saturn. It makes one aware that this universe is a tapestry of the most awesome magnificence. It does compel awe. It has always been to me, the ocean, overwhelming, monstrous, deep, dark, green and black, so foreign that it requires respect, silence, humility. It is boundless and deep, no human sense of time can circumscribe it, it rumbles with cavernous sounds, it is filled with grotesque forms, luminous colors, shapes that defy imagination. All of the life in it is
menacing, compelling, exquisite, with nothing consoling. I love books too in the same way."
sites of interest :-
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/
Dworkin Online :-
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/OnlineLibrary.html
Obituary Guardian :-
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1457417,00.html
on Pornography :-
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/other/ordinance/newday/TOC.htm
She is survived by her partner John Stoltenberg, here's a piece he wrote "living with Andrea".
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/LivingWithAndrea.html
an overview of her work :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin
An age and crop of the ©opyright Authors and intellectuals are being taken now to where-ever it is they go, "may they rest".
I last read Dworkin's words on the death of Susan Sontag, and for many of us, she was on the shelf with her american contemporaries of the patriarchy and the struggle against it sitting uncomfortably yet naturally in well produced published and bound volumes next to Hunter S Thompson and yet more.
But in her quotations she will live on :-
"A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered".
Andrea Dworkin
"By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it. Instead of "I am afraid," we say, "I don't want to," or "I don't know how," or "I can't.""
Andrea Dworkin
"Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer."
Andrea Dworkin
"Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership."
Andrea Dworkin
"Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name."
Andrea Dworkin
"Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are."
Andrea Dworkin
"Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice."
Andrea Dworkin
"Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free."
Andrea Dworkin
"Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination."
Andrea Dworkin
"The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity."
Andrea Dworkin
"While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact."
Andrea Dworkin
"Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do."
Andrea Dworkin
""Women's fashion" is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women."
Andrea Dworkin
read comment one -
http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=68118
& consider the cultural role it therefore plays in undermining western security.
with more quotes and links to her online works.
The U$ Porn industry accounts for 50+% of the income generated in Hollywood.
a debate in the neighbouring UK :- (which has more porn than Ireland but still not as much mainland Europe where every week you see on public telly east europeans take it up the ass in double sexual economic slave fests which surely delight the masses and encourage newly integrating migrants from muslim cultures to wank like €uropeans).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1986869.stm
extract from "Porno" one of his follow-up novels to Trainspotting, in which Renton and Sick Boy return to Edinburgh to make a porn movie with pals.
"you edited it so it looked like I gave him a blowjob after he'd been up my arse!"
:- Niki, the lead actress in the book's plot line.
That is a disgusting book. How could any decent person enjoy reading about the debasement of the female form and beauty in such an ugly and violent way?
doesn't mean people enjoyed reading it.
& as much as I don't think "Trainspotting" was meant to encourage people to become smack-heads, I don't think Mr Welsh thought to encourage a growth in the backroom pub porn industry. Rather I hope he wished to present the moral and other issues in a way which would challenge more readers than much of Dworkin's work, which from your article posted this morning never really seems to get past the "best of - quote collection".
To be quite honest, I believe I shall go on missing the presence of Kathy Acker more than any other of that generation. And I know that very few men or indeed women of the wider "literate" socio-class will read either Dworkin or Acker. So in a way Welsh contributed what he could, based on his experience of living in Amsterdam. & I commend him for it. He perhaps has seen more of what you rail against and for that is more sincere in his objections, and as a male writer, perhaps you should re-consider his contribution to the debate which is central to cultural development, post-feminism, gender politics and freedom of culture industrial practise.
"we are eurotrash, and wash up in the ports of the continent like flotsam".
Write him a letter & ask him why he wrote it.
he's contactable through his publisher, and will reply. He's a nice bloke and serves a valued didactic function on the modern culture / political stage. Which is something too many "intellectuals" tend to forget because they miss is completely, thinking that culture is shaped by writers such as Dworkin or Derrida.
{We are the media, from here "internet" to "newspapers" to Bookshop shelves - symbolic covers and all.}
I'd like to see your thoughts on why Dworkin was important rather than just C/P of her quotes or an AP report of her death. & if you haven't read her look above the links are there. Carry on her work.
Best way to honour her memory.
I'm a long time prostitute and sex workers' rights activist. The news of Andrea Dworkin's death is to me a cause for great celebration. This individual created a theoretical framework that has been used by radical anti-prostitution feminists worldwide to make it impossible for us, as prostitutes, to gain basic human rights or do anything to improve our working conditions and life circumstances. Her legacy? Having theorized while straddling the dead bodies of prostitutes, having appropriated our experiences of violence to further her own anti-prostitution political agenda... Her legacy? Having ignored the political directives and pleas of working prostitutes, having silenced the voices of women working in the sex trade. Andrea Dworkin was a twisted, manipulative, evil despot who has continuously lied about the reality of our work and lives and who has hurt us tremendously as sex workers. The negative, tragic impact that her writings and activism have had --and will continue to have-- on our ability as sex working women to work and live with dignity, on our ability to organize, empower ourselves and achieve basic human rights, has yet to be fully realized. If there such a thing as Hell, I hope her reactionary ass lands right on top of the burning coals! After 15 years in the prostitutes' rights movement, that's 15 years having to face the condescension, venom, and violence of anti-prostitution feminists, my feelings tonight --having learned of Dworkin's death-- are devoid of any compassion. My heart is rather filled with relief and my spirit burning with joy and hope for prostitutes everywhere! May all the other old 70's anti-prostitution feminist bitches who keep on ignoring us, silencing us, lobbying against us, lying about us and contributing to making our lives sometimes so unbearable, be consumed from the inside. May they all finally start to feel the sickness and violence of their filthy politics and actions within their own bodies. And may they all meet an early end --like Dworkin who was only 59 ...
Mirha-Soleil Ross,
Une pute qui pèse toujours très bien ses mots et qui ne revient donc jamais sur ses paroles!
12 avril 2005
and so were the headcases who believed her evil nonsense. According to her , all our parents grandparents , loved ones marriages were actually legalised rape ??
Wasnt she the one who said sex is basically rape , and that all men are essentially mysoginist, would be rapists, whether they know it or not ?
What a pile of shite.
And surprise, surprise she was seriously overweight and unattractive.
Dont need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out !
of Fem nazism is dead.The Fuhrer of radical fem nazisim has finally perished from the world.This is indeed a cause to crack open the bubbly.Now as soon as Rosie O Donnell drops dead as well the world of feminism will be much better off.
all heterosexual intercourse is rape." It was Catherine McKinnon who said this, and it is true even today.
Andrea Dworkin
(Filed: 13/04/2005)
Andrea Dworkin, the American radical feminist who has died aged 58, campaigned ferociously against pornography and the abuse of women for almost 40 years; the author of several controversial feminist texts, she dismissed men as moral cretins, said that seduction was hard to distinguish from rape, and regarded pornography as akin to terrorism.
Although she was lauded by some of her fellow feminists, many felt that her inflammatory writing (and possibly her appearance) did little for the cause; to Dworkin, men were, at best, oafish misogynists, while most were rapists for whom the primary sexual motive was killing.
Her own experiences - as a rape victim, a prostitute and a battered wife - only added to the trenchancy of her views, but she reacted with fury to suggestions that such traumas had made it difficult for her to be objective.
"I've never heard Solzhenitsyn asked if he can be objective about the gulag," she snarled. "As if not paying attention to rape and wife battery were some kind of objectivity."
In America, it was her battle with pornographers that earned her respect from other radicals and the contempt of the multi-million dollar porn industry. To some she was a heroine, but she was demonised not only by pornographers but by many liberals, whom she held in almost equal contempt.
Andrea Dworkin's most public attack on pornography began in 1980 when she was approached by the ex-porn actress Linda Lovelace, who said that she had been forced to make the film Deep Throat.
With the help of the feminist academic, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin drafted an ordinance for Minneapolis recognising pornography as sex discrimination and a violation of women's civil rights. Women involved in pornography were called to testify from all over America.
The porn industry reacted with fury, and Hustler magazine published a sexually explicit cartoon featuring Andrea Dworkin. She sued, but lost, and found herself portrayed as a national hate figure. Playboy appealed to the American Civil Liberties Union, claiming that her attempt to censor porn ran counter to the constitutional right of every American to a free press.
So thorough was her demonisation that the more sympathetic elements of her campaign were overshadowed. The ordinance was eventually overturned by a federal appeals court in 1985, but later upheld by the US Supreme Court.
Yet even those who espoused her causes were somewhat perturbed by the fierceness of her enthusiasm for vengeance. When it came to punishment, Andrea Dworkin favoured that most phallic symbol of male oppression, the gun.
"I have no problem with killing paedophiles," she once said; and stuck above the desk in the study of her New York home was a picture of an alleged rapist with a rifle at his head and the words: DEAD MEN DON'T RAPE.
But while she was irritated by liberal feminists such as Naomi Wolf, she accepted that her views were not palatable to everyone. "I have a really strong belief that any movement needs both radicals and liberals," she explained. "You always need women who can walk into the room in the right way, talk in the right tone of voice, who have access to power. But you also need a bottom line."
Andrea Dworkin was born into a Jewish family on September 26 1946 at Camden, New Jersey, where she attended a progressive school. Her father, a teacher and a committed socialist, inspired her political leanings. "It would be hard to overstate," she wrote, "how much he taught me about human rights and human dignity, how to talk and how to think."
She later said that her childhood was overshadowed by being raped in a cinema when she was nine.
She won a place to read Literature at Bennington College, Vermont, but while still a student there she was arrested outside the US mission to the United Nations during a protest against the Vietnam war. Sent to the Women's House of Detention at Greenwich, New York, she was subjected to several brutal internal examinations.
Her graphic description of her ordeal was then reported in newspapers across the world; the "downtown Bastille" was subsequently closed down.
Her parents, humiliated by the public scandal, turned against her and in 1968, after graduating from Bennington, Andrea Dworkin moved to Amsterdam and married a Dutch anarchist. Beaten and abused by her husband, after five years she left him, to live, as she put it, "as a fugitive, sleeping on people's floors and having to prostitute for money to live."
In 1974, at the age of 27, she published Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality. Uncompromising and furious, it set the tone for her later work which included Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981).
In 2000 she described in the New Statesman how the previous year she had been drugged and raped in a hotel room in Paris. Traumatised by the experience (and by the suggestion by some that her account may not have been true), she withdrew from public life.
Recently, however, she had returned to the public eye, announcing: "I thought I was finished, but I feel a new vitality. I want to continue to help women."
Andrea Dworkin published 13 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She suspected that her fiction was rejected by publishers who feared the power of Playboy, but her novels were not popular even when published; the Literary Review described one book about sex as "grossly disgusting". Her memoir, Heartbreak: the Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, was published in 2002.
Surprisingly softly spoken, she would beguile interviewers with her engaging smile. But she was contemptuous of reactions to her appearance. "When women write about me," she said, "they always talk about how they think I must feel about the way I look. I find all of this close to absurd."
Nevertheless, her refusal to make any concessions to feminine beauty was bound up in her philosophy, not least because while some women regarded it as an act of bravery, others saw it as a symptom of her problems. "Dworkin pretends to be a daring truth-teller," wrote the feminist Camille Paglia, "but never mentions her most obvious problem, food."
Although regularly referred to as a man-hater, she was particularly close to three men: her father, her brother - whose death in 1992 devastated her - and John Stoltenberg, the civil rights activist, author of Refusing to Be a Man, and her companion for 30 years.
She once claimed to be a lesbian, but she described their relationship as "very deep" and they were married in 1998. "I don't hate men," she once said. "Not that they don't deserve it. It's just not in my nature."
Andrea Dworkin, who died on April 9, was increasingly frail in recent years. She had undergone several painful operations on her knees which were worn down by years of obesity.
She is survived by her husband.
And people still think Feminism is about equality and fairness.
People like Andrea gave the womens movement a bad name. Look at the above quotes. Talk about misandry.
Neither McKinnon nor Dworkin (as far as I know), ever said that all heteorsexual sex is rape. This is a common misrepresentation of what they were really saying; that all FORCED sex in marriage is rape which has a completely different meaning and is much more reasonable. Dworkin was ahead of her time in recognising that forced sex in marriage is rape, only in recent years has the law here caught up with her.
It has been used to undermine the rightful authority of the state and the church.
In more recent times it was used by the counterculture during the 60s to undermine support in the USA for the Vietnam war which the west lost. it is interesting to note that Hugh Heffner is a liberal who has opposed the Republican party and presidents in the US and so has the other infamous porn publisher whose name I cant recall and who was the subject of a recent film. All in all it is well time to ban this type of dangerous material before it is too late and succeeds in undermining all our Christian values.
Larry Flynt he publishes HUSTLER,which makes Playboy look like a mag you could let your maiden aunt read.Anyway,Larry isnt too intrested in being liberal or conservative,he slags both off in equal measures.He was shot and paralysed by a right wing christian wacko in the 70s and won a sucessful supreme court case on personal expression against one of the PREY TV evangalists.
Basically it is about what you want to read or do in your bedroom .Not being botherd by govt or religious or femnazi nutcakes.
An exellent film BTW The People Vs Larry Flynt.Somthing younfg FG should watch,maybe they might learn somthing about how true democracy works.But it might offend their "weltanshaung"[worldview for the less literate in modern european langauges]
All heterosexual is rape?
Therefore all men are rapists. Your father, your brother, your uncle, everyone of them.
You can hate the entire male population for the crimes of less than 1% of them.
You can never have a proper, close, loving, relationship with a man.
And I sincerely hope you never have sex with anyone because the poor guy might be thrown in jail as he obviously would have "raped" you.
Teenage girls seem to lap this nonsense up, but isn't very mature or healthy for that matter.
Hope you grow out of it.
I find the majority of the comments above pretty disturbing and an indication that she might have been onto something. All the hatred centered on her physical appearance...... If you read the bio posted above you get an idea of why she may have got so much wrong: she was raped when she was 9 and later beaten by her husband. I think that'd tend to distort my view of men, especially when it's combined with a society that legalizes the possession of women by men in marriage, denies the right to control fertilitly, doesn't recognise rape in marriage, the right to divorce, etc. etc. Feminism has achieved much over the last century and over the last decades. Part of that has been spurred by the realisation that extremists like Dworkin helped to cast a harsh light on some of the nastier aspects of our "traditions".
"I think that'd tend to distort my view of men, especially when it's combined with a society that legalizes the possession of women by men in marriage, denies the right to control fertilitly, doesn't recognise rape in marriage, the right to divorce, etc. etc."
'Possession of women by men in marriage'? Surely the opposite was the case. Women 'owned' men just as much as 'men' owned women. Frank Santra was nearly thrown in jail when a women accused him of renegaing on his promise to marry her.
Today a woman can kick a man out of his own home. Deny him access to his children. Accuse him of abuse and get a restraining order no questions asked. Have him thrown in prison.
And feminists still have some women fooled that society is setup for men's benefit.
Men in general worked tirelessly to support their women and children. They earned most of the money while women spent most of it.
When is wasn't economically feasable for women to work, men supported them. They developed technology that allowed women to control fertility which is WHY women joined the work force in the first place. NOT because of feminism. And for all that, what thanks did they get? A distorted view of history making out that men kept women in place for their own benefit.
The early women rights groups in the 1800s campaigned for the right not to work. They were forced to work in factories under terriibel conditions. They considered being able to stay at home and look after their family properly a luxury.
Andrea Dworkin is to Patriarchy what Karl Marx was to Capitalism
http://www.fatherhoodcoalition.org/cpf/newreadings/2001/JAsher_Ottawa_Citizen_Dec01.htm
as much as we all vehemently disagree with and fight against Mary Harneys neo liberal economic policies etc...
I find it sickening, when still today she and other women eg. Mary Lou McDonald get constant harassment from men of both the left and the right about their physical appearance, no male politicians are subjected to this type of degrading shallow humiliation, shame on you BOMS,
I have encountered many male Irish activists who have come out with such sexist remarks completely oblivious to the insulting sexist nature of their comments,
yes we still live in an era in which men see women as their public visual property, the recent publication of harneys "beauty" practices or lack thereof was dispicable, and all you men who read and sniggered are as guilty as the author,
Ladies let yourselves "GO"
Young women have seen through this kind of nonsense, especially the nuttier stuff that was in vogue in the USA in the recent past. Ms Dworkin was a product of her time but is now consigned to the dustbin of history. Conservatives such as FG and Dworkin
are always going to be be concerned by porn etc. So what.
Dworkin has left a poisoned legacy. Her primary interest was to present her own life through a distorted prism of persecution and pain, and to reduce all politics to power relations extrapolated from her own persecution complex. Her never-substantiated allegations of rape in a French hotel are an example where events were very probably stretched to the breaking point to fit a preconceived narrative.
The problem with all this is that it leads to wrong conclusions. Her reductionist view of relationships between men and women washes out many interesting shades of gray, not to mention concealing the ambivalence that characterizes so many real relationships. In fact, I find very little awareness of other people in Dworkin's writings-- they are very near solipsism.
In addition, her lack of understanding of the variety of relations that are possible leads not only to oversimplification but also to alliance with some of the most repressive forces in society. Perhaps the self-styled victim identified too closely with the oppressor?
I dislike the porn industry because it commodifies yet more aspects of relations that should be outside the economy. And one would have to be lind to be unaware of the continuing legacy of unequal power relations between men and women. But caricature is a poor foundation on which to build a solution, and "the personal is the political" is not meant to imply that one's perceptions of outrage can be uncritically extrapolated into a political system. That way lies Mein Kampf.
I'm an 18 year old women and i like many others love sex. We have reached a stage now where in modern society the women are actually the ones trying to seduce the men and are as desperate and into sex as males have always been depicted. This topic being discussed is out of date and needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course she had individual brutal issues but how many of the femal population are raped at 9 years old and then beaten by their husbands. This makes men out to be sex maniacs and women haters which i think is unfair.