Andrea Dworkin Has Died

 
I received word Sunday morning— from Doug Henwood, Amber Hollibaugh, Carol Queen, and Rachel Kramer Bussel— that Andrea Dworkin has died. She was 59. Her partner John Stoltenberg found her near death on Friday, and she passed away peacefully, according to his report, in the evening.

There is nothing about Dworkin's death in the news yet but I am sure we will hear a lot more details by the morning. I knew she had  been ill for some time, but she was notoriously private about her health problems. I don't know how bad or incapacitating her condition was. Most of us who’ve seen her in person in the past couple years saw her move about in obvious pain and disability.  It wasn’t just physical, either. After her father died seven years ago, she had what could only be described as a nervous breakdown.

Andrea Dworkin was...

I can’t do this alone.

Let’s go to Googlism, that site of randomly-selected found poetry, in which you can inject anyone’s name in the “search” box and come up with something like this:

Andrea Dworkin is hell
Andrea Dworkin is a hardcore
Andrea Dworkin is the author of "Scapegoat”
Andrea Dworkin is what I have committed my life to now
Andrea Dworkin is antisex
Andrea Dworkin is a hysterical and puritanical castrator
Andrea Dworkin is internationally renowned as a radical feminist activist and author who
  helped break the silence around violence against
Andrea Dworkin is probably the loudest self
Andrea Dworkin is just another Zionist
Andrea Dworkin is "angry”
Andrea Dworkin is known as a relentless scourge of men
Andrea Dworkin is the feminist whose supple mind gave birth to the assertion that all sexual
intercourse between man and woman is rape
Andrea Dworkin is a former prostitute
Andrea Dworkin is making sense
Andrea Dworkin is one of them
Andrea Dworkin is most definitely a militant feminist and beautifully
Andrea Dworkin is quoted as saying
Andrea Dworkin is part of the feminist camp
Andrea Dworkin is a writer
Andrea Dworkin is a self
Andrea Dworkin is probably the best
Andrea Dworkin is a very outspoken individual
Andrea Dworkin is the greatest mind of all time
Andrea Dworkin is one who does
Andrea Dworkin is a lousy writer
Andrea Dworkin is a rapist
Andrea Dworkin is the Malcolm X of feminism
Andrea Dworkin is a saint
Andrea Dworkin is
Andrea Dworkin is a great pornographer
Andrea Dworkin is served a thick
Andrea Dworkin is famous for her uncompromising feminism
Andrea Dworkin is a maniac
Andrea Dworkin is in a committed
Andrea Dworkin is analyzing Pauline Reage's literary style in The Story of O
Andrea Dworkin is such an "extremist”
Andrea Dworkin is one glaring example and there are several more
Andrea Dworkin is trying to say
Andrea Dworkin is funny
Andrea Dworkin is particularly vocal about the "male problem”
Andrea Dworkin is trying to ban lap dancing
Andrea Dworkin is a sexist pig
Andrea Dworkin is one of the weirdest femi-nazis since Solanas
Andrea Dworkin is typically held up as the most fanatical of the fanatics
Andrea Dworkin is perhaps the sex trade's most ferocious antagonist
Andrea Dworkin is? — Should I know her, or have heard of her?
Andrea Dworkin is the reincarnation of the Marquis de Sade
Andrea Dworkin is hardly without direct resonance
Andrea Dworkin is one of the most dreadful things men do
Andrea Dworkin is someone who
Andrea Dworkin is hurting

You know what?  I recognize my words in a couple of those lines. I was the one who said Dworkin was a great pornographer, if what that means is using explicit sex in her art to cause a tremendous sensation.

Along with Kate Millet in Sexual Politics, Andrea Dworkin used her considerable intellectual powers to analyze pornography, which was something that no one had done before. No one. The men who made porn didn’t. Porn was like a low culture joke before  the feminist revolution kicked its ass. It was beneath discussion. Not so anymore!

Here’s the irony... every single woman who pioneered the sexual revolution, every erotic-feminist-bad-girl-and-proud-of-it-stiletto-shitkicker, was once a fan of Andrea Dworkin. Until 1984, we all were. She was the one who got us looking at porn with a critical eye, she made you feel like you could just stomp into the adult bookstore and seize everything for inspection and a bonfire.

The funny thing that happened on the way to the X-Rated Sex Palace was that some of us came to different conclusions than Ms. Dworkin. We saw the sexism of the porn business... but we also saw some intriguing possibilities and amazing maverick spirit. We said, “What if we made something that reflected our politics and values, but was just as sexually bold?”

Andrea did not like this one little bit. Honestly, when I started On Our Backs and Herotica , I thought all the girls were going to jump on the bandwagon.  I had no idea how bad the animosity would get. I mean, I have tape recordings from colleges where I would go listen to Andrea lecture in rapt attention and turn my little cassette over to capture every word. I never dreamed that I would one day become one of the people she vilified. 

I wondered if she had any close girlfriends or women she considered her intellectual peers. The people she admired most in life were her father, her brother, and partner John Stoltenberg. She was a scholar of great men, and the one she studied the most, the Marquis de Sade, was someone she could quote up one side and down the other. I'm the one who said she was his feminist reincarnation. She rewrote his Juliette when she wrote her novel Ice and Fire. So much for man-hating.

It was Andrea’s take-no-prisoners attitude toward patriarchy that I always liked the best. Bourgeois feminists were so BORING. They wanted to keep their maiden name and have it listed in the white pages; they wanted to get a nice corner office in the skyscraper. When I was a teenager in the 70s I couldn't relate to those concerns. It was Dworkin's heyday.

Andrea presented herself as a street fighter intellectual, a bohemian freedom fighter, and someone who wanted to get to the bottom of things. That quote about Malcolm X is apt. Malcolm pointed out  “The problem is WHITE PEOPLE.”  Dworkin said, “The problem is MEN.”  And for all the  holes that can be poked in that cloth, there is something about that grain that is absolutely true, when you are the short end of the bolt.

I loved that she dared attack the very notion of intercourse. It was the pie aimed right in the crotch of Mr. Big Stuff. It was an impossible theory, but it wasn’t absurd. There is something about literally being fucked that colors your world, pretty or ugly, and it was about time someone said so.

I know it’s strange that I have such a tragic affection for her, when she apparently only had loathing for my kind. I’ve had women come at me with knives who felt they had to do me in, in Dworkin’s name. Her passion and activism was classic Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She was a dangerous lady, with no class analysis, no psychological insight-- a scary combination. Her loaded warped pistol  was neatly picked up by right wing creeps who took all the femme bullets out of it and never looked back..

Every time you hear some preacher/politician talk about “violence against women” or how something is “degrading to women” tell them to to send a royalty check to Andrea and ask them what they’ve done lately to empower female sexual authority.  I never understood why she didn’t attack them the way she attacked feminist pornographers.

I could feel the great loss in the messages I read this morning, from the old guard of feminist activists. Her death is going to be a horrible reminder to many that women’s place in society today is a cruel rebuttal to many of our dreams of women’s liberation. The media image of women today is pathetic; it’s Barbie on Steroids. “I Am Bimbo, Hear Me Roar!  Tee-hee!”

I like the comparison to Valerie Solanas that came up in the Googlism list. The brilliance of a woman who has "HAD IT" is a rock'n'roll beauty to behold:

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”

Maybe it’s just My-My-My Generation, but those words still make the hair on my arms stand on end.

I’m sorry Andrea Dworkin started a sexual revolution that she ended up repudiating. She never got to see people like me, Carol, and the rest of us little protégées who took her inspiration and flew to a new dimension. She got stuck, and then she got sick, and when you’re famous for one thing, no one wants to see you change unless you reject it all, like a pathetic sinner seeking redemption. She was too stubborn and too old-fashioned for that. Andrea Dworkin never would have admitted that she was a SuperStar.  She was the animator of the ultimate porno horror loop, where the Final Girl never gets a chance to slay the monster, she only dies, dies, dies, with the cries of the angry mourners to remember her.

[Since I wrote this eulogy, I compiled a digital collection of all the stories/essays I ever wrote in reaction to Dworkin-- I call it "Inspired by Andrea." You can read more about them, or order at the link.]

Comments

[Bianca]

This was interesting for me to read because I think you did a good job of giving a balanced perspective on her role in the feminist movement...I think for feminists born in the eighties the role models were sex radicals like you and Carol so there's a kind of knee-jerk resistance to Dworkin, but then I realize I've never even read her... hmmm. The porno-horror analogy is very fitting, though.

[Jesurgislac]

Well said. Thank you for saying it. I hadn't heard that she had died.

[L.A.]

I'm glad I got to read your eulogy of Andrea Dworkin first, before I read anyone else's. I didn't know she'd been ill; that would explain why I hadn't heard much about her lately. I came to this entry by chance, after following a link about Spain Rodriguez (what an amazing story!). Thank you for conveying so much of Dworkin's incisive passion, and your long, fraught relationship with her.

For what it's worth, I've assumed for years that the cause of the porn culture wars was that so much needed to be spoken about sex, especially the intensely good and the intensely bad, that it's been nearly impossible for people who've focused their efforts on one end of that long spectrum to really hear anyone toiling on the other end. The banquet table stretches too far. Everyone's pistol is warped.

And it's not everyone's job to play both sides. For instance, I'm recalling the documentary Live Nude Girls Unite, where Julia Query is doing one kind of feminist work as a stripper union-organizer documentarist, and her mother Joyce Wallace is doing another kind of feminist work as a physician who works with street prostitutes. Query's work stems partly from Wallace's efforts; Wallace's efforts aren't diminished by Query.

I personally wouldn't expect anyone whose purpose is radical scrutiny of how sexuality has been turned against women at bone level to see eye to eye with someone whose life work revolves around radical reclaiming of and enumerating varieties of sexual pleasure, or vice versa. Not until we learn to partition our brains like hard drives. Misunderstandings and dislike are unavoidable on both sides. Maybe they're even required: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Your comments that she lacked psychological insight or class analysis puzzle me, since throughout this piece you're kinda describing how she had both of those (in Right-Wing Women alone).

My own Dworkin experience: The first time I really began thinking about the class analysis of porn was at a panel discussion at SF State on the Minneapolis porn ordinance, with Dworkin and the local ACLU chair as two of the speakers. That was quite an evening. I'd come as a reporter, and this was my first experience at an event where the tensions ran so high. Nearly everyone in the audience had brought a baggage cart, and audience members frequently stood up to shout at the stage. What particularly impressed me were two things -- the clutches of middle-aged men in suits scattered throughout the crowd who'd loudly mutter, or outright yell, that nobody was going to take their porn away, and the following exchange: during a discussion about censorship, one of the panelists (possibly the ACLU chair, this was maybe 20 years ago, so bear with me) began explaining that censorship was too dull-edged a tool to be used on "questionable content," when other solutions would usually suffice. Why, she said, when she heard about a textbook with some particularly misogynistic passages, she just called up her mother, who knew the publisher, and they were able to work something out so that future editions weren't so offensive. At this point, other audience members (mostly young women with cropped hair, shockingly enough) leapt up to yell in disgust, "Yeah, me too!" and "Sure, just like *my* momma!" Dworkin, way ahead of the hecklers, then gently reminded the speaker that those class privileges probably weren't available to most women. That evening definitely put me on the road to pondering porn consumers, porn producers, sex, and class.

...And now I'm looking for an ending for what's turned from a comment into a novella. How's this: thanks for all the work *you've* done. I consider both you and Dworkin pioneers.

[Jennifer B]

Thank you so much for this piece.

[Mandy]

Thank you. Last night, thinking about her death and struggling with how I feel about her, and feeling so annoyed at how the only news I could google on her were the obnoxious quotes of the irrelevant Ms. Paglia, I realized that I most wanted to know what you would have to say about her. Thank you.

[Trish Lynch]

While I certainly feel something when anyone dies, and I do think that Andrea played a big part in the history of feminism, I also feel as if she's done damage to so many people along the way that may have been different women.

Hey, thats a good way of putting it "different"... trans-women, women who were assigned the sex "male" at birth, due to whatever combination of chemicals, were born with a brain and thought patterns of women, and the bodies of men. That in and of itself, with today's societal binary gender system, being hell. While yes, we may have been born with male privilege, we've given it up and then some, time and time again. Men would seek to kill us, and so would the militant separatists, such as Andrea Dworkin was.

I know its not polite to speak ill of the dead, but as a transwoman who is also extremely feminist, and speaks on trans issues and feminism pretty often at conferences, group meetings, etc. Andrea Dworkin was the equivalent of Satan to transwomen, and while I don't take that side of the issue, as I support separatist space, I do believe she had so much hate to spread around, that it may have finally eaten her alive.

Rest In Peace, Andrea Dworkin, and may the gods have mercy on you in the afterlife.

[Paul Gowder]

Why is everyone dying right now?? Pope, HST, Dworkin, Derrida...

[boxster]

Glorious obit, Susie.

May I reprint, or link, your obit to Nina Hartley's board?

Boxster

[Boxster]

And Paul, we've forgotten other giants in art and criticism, such as Johnny, Philip Johnson, Susan Sontag, and Saul Bellow.

An era is just leaving us, and I am afraid that no one can replace any of those persons.

Boxster

[Anthony Kennerson]

Even though I am on the absolute opposite ideological pole of Andrea Dworkin on so many subjects concerning sex and feminism, I do find myself deeply saddened at the news of her passing. For all of her antisex myopia, and her complete and total lack of empathy towards men and their suffering, she still was and remains an icon and a significant figure in the name of feminism.

After all that she has suffered, I do hope that she is now finally at peace with herself.

Otherwise, Susie, that was a wonderful and totally objective tribute to her legacy..both positive and negative.

Anthony

[Susie]

Good morning, everyone... I just had the weirdest dream ever. I dreamed that if I didn't write my name down on a piece of paper I would find myself without an identity in the morning, not knowing who I was, or having the slightest clue where I belonged.

My lucky piece of paper with my signature on it was lying on my nightstand when I woke up this morning.

I do think that I am in for a prolonged period of mourning, as all my legends come up to the last plate. It's so odd that my mother should die, and ever since, it seems like I've lived in the obituary pages. I never dreamed I'd be spending so much time on my blog talking about the ones that got away.

Thanks for fixing my link! It's a link to a story I wrote called "The Baffling Case of Andrea Dworkin," after her very strange rape accusation and postscript appeared in a London newspaper a few years ago.

When I say that Dworkin eschewed class analysis or psychological insight, I don't mean that she didn't toy with those things for effect. You're right, she was always zinging people with the politically correct method: "Oh, you're middle class so you're an idiot."

What I mean is that she saw the world fundamentally divided by gender, and it was as she'd be some happy capitalist camper if only women ruled the world— i.e., the elite p.c. women who know how everyone should behave.

She couldn't discuss eroticism, desire, fantasy, or human sexuality with any clarity because she firmly rejected the notion of the unconscious, and she didn't think that therapy or personal insights were worth a damn. In her view, the world is fucked, and everyone's difficulties with it are because of THAT— all craziness and pathology can be understood in terms of patriarchal crimes against humanity.

It's almost refreshing to hear now, when everyone's problems with the world are supposed to be vanquished with a pill, but she took the polar opposite position.

[Susie]

I'd appreciate it if you want to show others my thoughts, just excerpt a little bit, with a link, or link to it here, but don't reprint the whole thing. That's my policy about everything I write here. Fair use!

[rosewood]

Susie, you are an exemplar of so many proper ways to live, and my favorite is your ability to so respectfully disagree, especially disagree with other women.

Thank you for turning to googlism to remind us of all who Dworkin was.

I, too, am sorry she "started a sexual revolution that she ended up repudiating" but I hadn't realized that that was why I stopped following her work. Another great memorial. Now, I hope you can stop writing them for a while.

[Marie B]

Wonderful piece. I think you very eloquently expressed the contradictions so many of us feel when thinking about Dworkin. May she now be able to rest in peace.

[Cherie Priest]

I was going to write up a bit myself, but now I don't think I can.
I'll never top this.

Excellent piece of work, thanks.

[Q]

I too am glad that yours was my first reading of Ms. Dworkin's death; even though you have a really hard history with her, and disagree intensely with some of her hypotheses, you have been kind to her in death, as well as life... and that's a helluva generous thing to do/way to be.

If only she could have been a little kinder to herself...

[badgerbag]

Thanks for writing this, Susie. I also have a lot of respect for Dworkin and her incredibly challenging thought-provoking writing and public speaking...

What did she actually say about transmen/transwomen? And where did she say it? Can anyone let me know? I don't have all her books.

[Boxster]

Susie,

I know how you must grieve for your mom. I didn't allow myself the time because of personal circumstances, and now I can see how it set me back. And I have an ill dad and wife to take care of, plus employment and other family situations.

I think one thing we are all groping for here is the following: our cultural touchstones in the arts and letters are dying. Who will replace them? Helmut Jahn? Dave Letterman and Jon Stewart? Camille Paglia (okay, I like her in a weird way)? Andrew Sullivan? Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa? MoDo (compared with Mike Royko and Jack Newberg)? MLK or the Jesse Jackson family?

Dare I say we are losing our youth. Or are we beginning to see where we lived in an era of giants and we see them replaced by manufactured celebrities and scholars?

Boxter

[Roy Kay]

>Every time you hear some preacher/politician talk about “violence against women” or how something is “degrading to women” tell them to to send a royalty check to Andrea and ask them where they’ve done lately to empower female sexual authority. I never understood why she didn’t attack them the way she attacked feminist pornographers.

Because they elevated her into the popular culture, or at least THEIR popular culture. She hated the people they hated and that was all either of them really cared about.

They formed a non-aggression pact with each other like the communists and fascists of old. As long as sex-positive people were between them as a buffer, they never shared a border.

[Christian Mann]

Wow. What a year this has been. I just returned from Amsterdam where I traveled with my oldest son to eulogize his godfather, David Weiss who passed away last week. David played a pivotal role in my growth as a person and as a producer of erotica. David was Bill Higgins'partner in Drake's Bookstore(s) in L.A. as well as in Amsterdam and Prague... the point being that it seems so many people are departing, or I'm just getting old (44!).

As for the oft-villified, sometimes justifiably, Ms. Dworkin: her belief in the anti-female, sexist slant of most men was validated by my assumption that she was anti-sex because she was so physically unattractive. Even I, a man who professes to be an enlightened thinker, have that base prejudice hard-wired to the degree that no amount of surface cognizance can erase it. I can see why Ms. D believed there was something askew in the male psyche. On that point, she was correct.

The problem with Andrea's desire to "free" women is the same as all of history's would-be liberators: they merely propose a change of incarceration, not a real liberation. Andrea wanted women to be released from societally imposed demands of female sexual self-image, so that they could now don her bondage wear, i.e. her imposition that the only alternative to casting off the former was to adhere to her asexual or antisexual vision. Andrea was as much a liberator in the long run as Castro, Stalin, Khomeini or Bush. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss... we won't get fooled again!"

I will be eternally grateful to Ms. D. Absent her insane lightning rod antics, who will the pro-sex movement have to hold up and demonize? Andrea made it easy to point to the other side as fanatic, crazy and repressive. She was our unwitting ally. It's the silent enemies we must truly fear, the pragmatic agendaists.

Wherever Andrea goes next, I hope she's wearing a sexy teddy with lace ruffles, fishnet stockings, garter belt, and lotsa makeup. In my vision of her new gig, she has a 36D-24-36 figure, the boobs are fake and she's being dominated by five well endowed studs.

The question is this: in the scenario we just created, is she in heaven or hell?

Farewell, Ms. Dworkin. My genuine wish for you is that you may be happy at last.

Christian

P.S. Susie: thanks for a great eulogy.

[Claire]

This line has been thrown around by you. Palac and crew since the early nineties. I don't buy it for one second:

" every single woman who pioneered the sexual revolution, every erotic-feminist-bad-girl-and-proud-of-it-stiletto-shitkicker, was once a freakin’ crazed fan of Andrea Dworkin. We all were."

The truth as I know it is much closer to what Bianca had to say up above:

" I think for feminists born in the eighties the role models were sex radicals like you and Carol so there's a kind of knee-jerk resistance to Dworkin, but then I realize I've never even read her... hmmm. The porno-horror analogy is very fitting, though."

Yes, yes, I know the first crew wasn't born in the 80s, but I meet soooo many women who are anywhere from teenagers to 40ish now (teens in the 70s and 80s) who tell me they were taken in by the media-push of pro-exploitation "sex-positive" stuff and then were blown away by reading the work of feminists like Dworkin, and they mean it. That bit about staunch radical feminists later finding their Happy Hooker side, on the other hand, strikes me as PR fluff.

[chriso]

I am expecting many a "ding dong the witch is dead" type responses to the death of Andrea Dworkin. And I am sure that many of the folks who make them would say some things I'd even agree with since I really didn't like her staunchly anti-porn/anti-sex stance. But your entry was amazing. Honest, balanced and compassiononate.

It reminds of me of my graduation ceremony from Sarah Lawrence College in 1997. All of us had been quite upset when our departing school President completely ignored our voting and requests for a speaker at the ceremony (something that had never been done in the past when people selected such amazing speakers as Toni Morrisson, Cornel West, etc.) and gave the honor of speaking to the man who was going to be her boss at her next job. We formally protested days before the ceremony and, the day of, all wore blue ribbons to signify free speech and feeling that ours was being violated. We were also protesting a recent long range plan presented by the faculty that included nothing about diversity as they had promised. When our class president got up and spoke she addressed the faculty and staff members who were angered by our protests and told them that they were the ones who always taught us to speak our minds and stand up for what we believed in. This was their doing as much as it was ours.

Your statements about what people like you and Carol Queen took from Dworkin's work were really beautiful to me. It showed me that by seeing her work as totally negative I had never seen the opportunity for it to inspire people to new ideas and frames to work in. The idea that something so awesome could come out of work that seemed so conservative and upsetting rocks my world. Thank you for pointing that out to all of us.

[Nalo Hopkinson]

Thank you, Susie.

[Doug Henwood]

I'm surprised to find myself listed first in such distinguished company in the lead of this very fine piece.

What an odd and amazing character she was - clearly lots of brainpower, but so twisted up about lust and aggression. I guess that's what made her so compelling to read. Somehow all the bottled up lust & aggression came out, despite the best efforts of her ideology to contain it.

[Boxster]

Chriso

I think you are on to something. I went to a prominent liberal arts college (a secondary Ivy, if you will), so I rather have an idea about the philosophical points to which you are alluding.

A glorious radio comedian in Chicago once said that that the true radical is the one who takes the arrows in his or her back to advance society. I think Ms Dworikin did. On some issues she was quite correct, especially in those issues expressed in the bedroom with one's SO. My extended family has had problems with spousal rape and beatings and unwanted pregnancies and jerk husbands. I should also say I am of an age where we were all entranced with the late Ms Dworkin Gloria Steinem, Dick Cavett, Alan Alda and Phil and Marlo for advancing knowledge of these sorts of issues.

As Susie mentioned in her obit (and I in my cloddish posts above), the times left the woman by. She never understood what the second wave of feminism meant. Whether Susie, Nina. Carol, Susan Block, or Ducky, Andrea took the arrows for the second wave of feminism. Here, think of progressive conservatives such as Ike, JFK and RFK allowing a more progressive society to emerge. Not to mention Eleanor and Franklin and Mr Truman.

Even in my prosperous community, I can see female intellectuals who are true feminists explore motherhood and a senior management positions.

Imagine! A story kept from the wires getting this much response. I think we all recognize a cultural shift going on and, dare I say, it, folks like us know we are all like the Chicago White Sox....soon to be on the dust heap of history.

Let me wax my sports car and listen to Sinatra.

boxster