introduction by Johanna Fateman

LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT:

The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

Black-and-white photos show a hippie couple in a city-hall ceremony in Amsterdam. The bride is not the Andrea Dworkin we know, who wore a uniform of denim overalls and sneakers, militant and unmitigated by a single capitulation to feminine beauty standards. This one is very young, just twenty-two, with black-rimmed eyes and a chin-length hair cut with bangs. In a letter from April 1969, she writes to her parents in New Jersey about her wedding, “no one gave me away. in the ceremony we promised to respect each other.”¹ In a group shot, the newlyweds, dressed in embroidered robes (hers Turkish, his Tibetan), stand seriously at the center of their long-haired friends. Oddly, the groom’s hand isn’t around Dworkin’s shoulder or waist, but gripping her neck. It’s also on her neck in the photo of them standing before a canal kissing.²

In New York, the women’s movement was charging forward, still in its first exhilarating years. Just two months before Dworkin said “I do,” Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone founded the action-oriented radical-feminist group Redstockings. And soon after, Willis reports, from a fly-on-the-wall perspective for the New Yorker,³ a group of some thirty women wreaked havoc on an abortion-law hearing of the all-male New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Public Health, demanding to testify as the “real experts” on illegal abortion. Though one day Willis would become Dworkin’s enemy, Firestone would first become her hero for writing The Dialetic of Sex (1970). And the Redstockings’ winning tactic—of which their disruption that day was just one early example—would become Dworkin’s guiding principle, her religion: The advance guard of the second wave showed that by casting off stigma and shame, by forcing their stories into the public record, they could open the floodgates of women’s rage to change the culture and the law.

In September 1971 Dworkin writes home in tall, fast cursive.4 It’s her handwriting, but not the writer we know. Composed in the aftermath of a cataclysmic visit from her parents—during which they witnessed her husband’s rage and saw him hit her; during which she begged them to take her away and they refused—the long letter is an excruciating document of concealments, excuses, and apologies—all things she would eradicate from her prose shortly. By November, she’s living as a fugitive. At her husband’s hands she’s been disabused—almost fatally—of her faith in the male-led Left. Now she hides from him on a farm, on a freezing houseboat, or in the basement of a nightclub, with the help of a new lover. Ricki Abrams brings her books—Firestone’s, which introduces the concept of the sex-class system, Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, from the same year—and together the two women begin to work on one of their own.

In between her letters home, in which she puts on a brave face and asks for money until she can get back on her feet, Dworkin writes with Abrams about fairy tales, foot binding, witch burning, and porn. Until finally, in 1972, desperate and destitute, she agrees to carry a briefcase of heroin through customs in exchange for a thousand dollars and a ticket to New York. The dope-smuggling plan falls through, but Dworkin keeps the money and gets away, carrying with her a ticket to a writer’s life—an unfinished manuscript she’s thinking of calling Last Days at Hot Slit.

The draft she arrived in New York with would ultimately become Woman Hating, published in 1974 (Abrams would decide not to be part of the final version), and this collection is titled for her abandoned idea—chosen to memorialize her escape, the high stakes of her literary debut, and the apocalyptic, middle-finger appeal of her prose. It opens with a postcard written four years after her wedding.5 In New York with Gringo, the beloved German shepherd she somehow rescued from Amsterdam, she’s divorced and ecstatic, working as an assistant to the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Dworkin thanks her parents for their money and solicits their pride, brazenly demanding to be loved for who she really is—now, the author of a truly incendiary feminist text.

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Through chronological selections from Dworkin’s lifetime of restless output—excerpts from her most infamous nonfiction works and examples of her overlooked fiction, as well as two previously unpublished works—Last Days at Hot Slit aims to put the contentious positions she’s best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre.⁶ An iconic figure of so-called anti-sex feminism, Dworkin still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom. In her singular scorched-earth theory of representation, pornography is fascist propaganda, a weapon as crucial to the ever-escalating war on women as Goebbels’s caricatures were to Hitler’s rise. In her analysis of the sex-class system, prostitution is a founding institution, the bottom rung of hell. And in her vision of sexual liberation, there’s no honor in squeezing pleasure from the status quo—s/m is nihilistic playacting founded on farcical consent or craven collaboration, “Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated.”7

And so, in the feminist insistence that women have the right to make and use pornography, to choose sex work, to engage in every kind of consensual act without shame, and to do so as revolutionaries, Dworkin is the censorial demagogue to shoot down. But nearly four decades after the historic Barnard Conference on Sexuality, which drew the battle lines of the feminist sex wars—pro-sex feminists staking out territory for the investigation of pleasure, while Women Against Pornography protested outside—and nearly three decades since the ascendance of the third wave signaled her definitive defeat, we hope it’s possible to consider what was lost in the fray.

This collection is the product of years of conversation. When Amy Scholder, my co-editor, invited me to contribute to Icon (2014)⁸—a collection of nine personal essays, for which each author chose a public figure who influenced, intrigued, or haunted her—she reignited a teenage obsession of mine, which proved to be contagious. By choosing Dworkin as my subject, I returned to a moment in the 1990s, when my discovery of her militant voice fueled my nascent feminist rage, and when I quickly disavowed her politics with the kind of clean, capricious break that youth affords. But for Amy and me both, in reading Dworkin’s books with fresh eyes—measuring them against her lingering presence in feminist discourse as a symbol, frozen in time at the helm of a failed crusade—we found much more than the antiporn intransigence she’s reviled or revered for.

Dworkin was a philosopher outside of and against the academy, one of the first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy. With astonishing vulnerability and searching rigor, she wrote of fucking, whoring, and the atrocity of rape; she wrote without apology, wielding the blunt, ugly language most appropriate to the bitter subject matter of her life. And while her work is by no means all autobiographical, her lifelong, unflinching inquiry into women’s subjugation was founded on a simple desire: “I wanted to find out what happened to me and why.”9

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Born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Camden, New Jersey, in 1946, Dworkin was raised under the specter of the Holocaust, in the hushed home of a frequently bedridden mother. Sylvia Dworkin’s heart condition is prominent in Andrea’s portrayal of her childhood. She and her brother Mark are separated and sent to live with relatives during Sylvia’s hospital stays; Harry, their father, is often absent, working two or more jobs so his wife can see the best doctors. Andrea keeps Sylvia alive through psychic vigilance and peaceful conformity, she thinks. Conversely, she makes her sicker with the disruptive force of her true personality.

Childhood is a long, drawn-out loss of girlish illusions, as it becomes clear, through a series of painful lessons, that her ambitions—to be a poet, to obey only her instinct for adventure—are categorically male. There’s a mythic dimension to this narrative: The female hero’s journey is a search for greatness and meaning, in which rebellion and naiveté alike are punished by stunning sexual cruelty. And there is no home to return to, transformed or not.

Her life comes into focus through the overlapping accounts of her essays and fiction. At age nine, left alone for the first time to see a movie, a paperback of Baudelaire in her pocket, she is sexually assaulted in the dark of the theater. “The commitment of the child molester is absolute,” she writes, regarding the incident in My Life as a Writer (1995), “and both his insistence and his victory communicate to the child his experience of her—a breachable, breakable thing any stranger can wipe his dick on.”10 Her novel Mercy (1990) complements that cold indictment with the flustered anguish of a child. Narrated by her first-person protagonist, also named Andrea, it opens with a long scene in which the trauma of that day is defined by the twin horrors of the molester’s violation and her mother’s shame-tinged panic to confirm that “nothing happened,” i.e., that he only wiped his dick on her daughter, didn’t force it inside.

Dworkin has a book with her when she’s jailed in 1965, too—a volume of Charles Olson’s poetry. While a freshman at Bennington, participating in the college’s work program as a volunteer for the Student Peace Union in New York, she’s arrested protesting the Vietnam war outside the U.N. and held at the Women’s House of Detention for four days, where she is subjected to a sadistic pelvic exam, a gynecological rape. Upon her release, bleeding, she writes outraged letters to the papers about her ordeal. Her efforts lead to a highly publicized grand jury hearing about the jail’s conditions, at which she testifies. In a New York Times article—one of the many reports that would mortify her parents—Dworkin is a “plump girl with black hair and dark eyes,” who describes how the leering, brutal doctor questioned her. “He asked me where I went to school. Then he wanted to know how many Bennington girls were virgins.”¹¹ In an apt foreshadowing of what’s to come—at age eighteen, before her feminist awakening is even on the horizon—she’s willing to brand herself with an image of sexual shame in the name of justice.

Fleeing her parents’ humiliation and disapproval, Dworkin exiles herself to Crete, arriving almost penniless. The trip marks the start of a period of sporadic survival sex and prostitution. There she writes poetry, self-publishing a number of chapbooks, including such seething juvenilia as Notes on Burning Boyfriend,12 a surreal homage to the Quaker activist Norman Morrison, who set himself on fire below Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office window. Her teenage poetry is antiwar, anticapitalist, and sexually explicit, influenced by the dramatic landscape of her surroundings and the intensity of the love affair that consumed her during this sojourn. Though she returns to Bennington to finish her course work, she’s gone again before commencement—to Amsterdam, to write about the Dutch-anarchist movement Provo. She falls in love with one of its members—but now we can skip to a better beginning.

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“This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. It has no other purpose,” Dworkin writes in Woman Hating—a sentiment that might preface every one of her works. The book is steeped in the anti-imperialist, socialist vision of her countercultural milieu, informed by the tactics and rhetorical style of the Black Power movement, and profoundly indebted to Firestone and Millett. Dworkin writes with palpable hope, believing that the women’s movement can build upon the radical ideas of the day, bring new truths and momentum to global struggles. Among the five short excerpts included here is a portion of the introduction, which lays out Dworkin’s planetary agenda for revolution and makes explicit her expectations of the reader. “One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an unfree world, and in the course of redefining family, church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. To attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.”

Dworkin presents a vision of American—or rather Amerikan—feminist history as one inextricable from Black liberation, beginning with “prototypal revolutionary models” such as of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. And while her account of the first wave and the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 glosses over the rift between its white organizers and Black suffragists, we find her grappling with the importance of class and race in a revolutionary analysis of her own time. She names the biases of the women’s movement as its “most awful failure”—even as she echoes the mistakes of her white feminist peers. Readers will find a simplification of the thorny issues, a comparison of (implicitly white) women’s degraded social role to that of a “shuffling” caricature of minstrelsy, and a jarring deployment of racial slurs to make a point. Dworkin’s concept of “primary emergency” though, a rudimentary, intersectional distinction that acknowledges a woman’s most acute oppression may not be as a woman, while not groundbreaking, represents a challenge to the arrogant myopia of many of the white second wave’s loudest voices. Her antiracist ethos is rooted in her upbringing—her parents’ vocal support for the civil rights movement—and informed by her own work to end the war, but Dworkin’s evolving attunement to race, apparent in her subsequent writing, will arise from her close study of pornography’s favorite tropes—its sexualization of skin color, dependence on ethnic caricature, and interest in enslavement.

She writes in the fresh tradition established in Sexual Politics by Millett, whose literary analysis of the male canon illuminates the political character of sex. Dworkin will use it as a model throughout her career, expanding its application to systematically dissect patriarchal artifacts, whether canonical works such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or the unacclaimed novels Black Fashion Model and Whip Chick. “Woman as Victim: Story of O,” is emblematic of her sensibility. Her treatment of Pauline Réage’s 1954 classic of sadomasochistic literature in Woman Hating obviates the need to debate its status as art or pornography—either way, Story of O is allegorical, the distinguishing details of its story easily boiled off to reveal its essence as a perniciously instructive schema of sexual metaphysics. Dworkin uses the word cunt and refers to fucking, cocksucking, gangbanging, and rape without relent, in a rebuke to Réage’s vocabulary of erotic euphemism as well as the official language of philosophical abstraction. Though she refines her execution of such analyses over the years—and calibrates them with varying degrees of artistic reverence and castrating bravado—the strategy is fully formed in her seductively rough-hewn first book.

Her afterword, “The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle,” is a rebuke of standard punctuation, offering an alternate vision of her text—a glimmer of how she had wanted it to appear on the page. “Ive attacked male dominance, thats ok,” she writes of her fight with the publisher, “Ive attacked every heterosexual notion of relation, thats ok. Ive in effect advocated the use of drugs, thats ok … lower case letters are not. it does make one wonder.” Though she was prevented from delivering the body of Woman Hating in an overtly experimental form, we have included her concluding, unconventionally punctuated statement, in hopes that it will draw out the formally innovative qualities of subsequent works, too—her scant commas, never-ending sentences, her use of repetition, about-face confrontations, and deadpan absurdism. She cared about style.

Though it found an appreciative feminist audience, Woman Hating didn’t earn enough to support her, nor did it result in paid writing opportunities. “I was convinced that it was the publishing establishment—timid and powerless women editors, the superstructure of men who make the real decisions, misogynistic reviewers—that stood between me and a public particularly of women that I knew was there,” she reflects. “The publishing establishment was a formidable blockade, and my plan was to swim around it.”13 Speaking gigs became a way to survive, and to reach women.

Of the many talks Dworkin gave, at feminist conferences, colleges, and for women’s groups that passed a hat around after Q&A’s, we’ve included “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality,’” from 1974, in which she calls for “an absolute transformation of human sexuality,” a demand in line with her expanding understanding of patriarchy’s incursions into every aspect of life, the institutional nature of even our most intimate dynamics and acts. Here, she introduces a vision of sex that would rankle and repel many, a scenario of ostensible liberation that came to represent, as feminist debates around pleasure and desire unfolded, a sharply constrained and prescriptive menu of behavior. Speaking of the profound changes required to realize a just society, she says, “For men I suspect that this transformation begins in the place they most dread—that is, in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together.” Such presumptions regarding how women do or should make love together would cause her trouble—though not as much as her perceived threats to male orgasm. But if she left hazy the controversial specifics of revolutionary sex at this juncture, her understanding of the ancient, hidden epidemic of male sexual violence was achieving a level of devastating precision.

Dworkin had some stability by now. She lived with the writer John Stoltenberg, a gay man who would be her partner until she died in 2005. (They married in 1998.) Polaroids from this period show a life of pets and books—Gringo with a Frisbee in the sun; Stoltenberg with a kitten on his chest; Dworkin armored in overalls, reading in an armchair, a tuxedo cat and an orange tabby standing guard at the window. In another image, they lounge with her on the bed, a SMASH PATRIARCHY poster on the wall behind them.14 After seeing Lily Tomlin perform at Lincoln Center, Dworkin sent her a copy of Woman Hating and a note (“I feel so shy about writing to you. I love your work enormously. It means so much to me”).¹⁵ Looking through the writer’s papers, I was always happy to find evidence of joy, because by all accounts, the terror and numb despair of her past were always close, constantly brought to the fore by the nature of her work.

“The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door,”¹⁶ a longer speech, which she wrote in 1975, the same year that Susan Brownmiller’s landmark book Against Our Will was published, is a striking document from a time when marital rape was legal in all fifty states, and when women’s radical candor was still just beginning to reveal the depth and ubiquity of sexual violence. The title—the word atrocity—underscores Dworkin’s insistence on reframing the commonplace and infrequently prosecuted act of rape as not just a tool of political control, but as a war crime, committed on dates, in respectable households, and everywhere else you can imagine. “I am here tonight to try to tell you what you are up against as women in your efforts to live decent, worthwhile, and productive human lives,” she explained to her college audiences. “Once you understand what rape is, you will be able to resist all attempts to mystify and mislead you into believing that the crimes committed against you as women are trivial, comic, irrelevant.” Dworkin labored against a backdrop of naturalized, normalized, invisible misogyny to illuminate the genocidal character of violence against women, and while there were legions that would charge her with hyperbole, there was also a growing feminist army who found, in her electrifying indictments of male supremacy, the truth at last. Delivering a talk like “Rape Atrocity,” came at a great cost, though.

I heard about rape after rape; women’s lives passed before me, rape after rape; women who had been raped in homes, in cars, on beaches, in alleys, in classrooms, by one man, by two men, by five men, by eight men, hit, drugged, knifed, torn, women who had been sleeping, women who had been with their children, women who had been out for a walk or shopping or going to school or going home from school or in their offices working or in factories or in stockrooms, young women, girls, old women, thin women, fat women, housewives, secretaries, hookers, teachers, students. I simply could not bear it. So I stopped giving the speech. I thought I would die from it. I learned what I had to know, and more than I could stand to know.17

Knowing more than she could stand became a default state, because Dworkin was morally compelled to speak out about the most difficult, the most painful things for the rest of her life. Just as women, to win the right to abortion, had spoken out about facing death in motel rooms and back alleys to terminate pregnancies, or of being forced as teenagers to carry their rapists’ babies to term, she would have to talk about the violence of her marriage in order to help other women. “A Battered Wife Survives” is her first public account of that time in Amsterdam, and we preface it with her letter to her parents, in which she warns them of their cameo appearance in her story.

At the same time, her focus on pornography intensified. In the late 1970s, her thundering speeches—delivered at conferences and colleges, also rallies and marches—named porn as terrorism, as material created to demonstrate women’s inferiority through the unrelenting depiction of them as whores hungry for violation and punishment, designed to make men sexually reliant on such portrayals and to teach them to act out the scenarios. “Images of women bound, bruised, and maimed on virtually every street corner, on every magazine rack, in every drug store, in movie house after movie house, on billboards, on posters posted on walls, are death threats to a female population in rebellion,” she explained to a small group of students at the University of Massachusetts in the winter of 1977. “Female rebellion against male sexual despotism, female rebellion against male sexual authority, is now a reality throughout this country,” she continued, perhaps too optimistically, assessing the state of the women’s movement. “The men,” she accused, “meeting rebellion with an escalation of terror, hang pictures of maimed female bodies in every place.”18

To put such a dramatic pronouncement in context: In 1975, the producer of Snuff, a low-budget film about a Manson Family–like satanic biker gang had courted publicity with the claim that the movie showed the real dismemberment and murder of a woman; and the next year a Sunset Boulevard billboard advertising the Rolling Stones’ new album Black and Blue showed model Anita Russell in bondage, her legs spread, a dark mark on her inner thigh, and beside her, the text, “I’m ‘Black and Blue’ from the Rolling Stones—and I love it!” A new group called Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) organized letter-writing campaigns and consumer boycotts, initiating a model of feminist media critique and action that caught on. More groups would soon form, specifically focused on porn, and interested in legal interventions.19

The Equal Rights Amendment was still on the table, and with nearly a decade of feminist cultural and legislative victories adding up, it wasn’t crazy to view such violent material, particularly its new mainstream presence, as dangerous political retaliation—especially if you were suffocating in women’s stories of sadistic abuse and rape while writing through the night, night after night, as Dworkin was. In 1978, she addressed a packed auditorium before the first national “Take Back the Night” march, in which thousands of women walked through San Francisco’s red-light district after dark, their protest banners mingling with the neon signs. “If a woman has any sense of her own intrinsic worth, seeing pornography in small bits and pieces can bring her to a useful rage,” she said. “Studying pornography in quantity and depth, as I have been doing for more months than I care to remember, will turn that same woman into a mourner.”²⁰

Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) is the sophisticated descendant of Woman Hating, a more intricate argument that does not stop with the dissection of patriarchal artifacts. In it, porn is formulated as propaganda on a par with that of any genocidal regime, relying as it does on an identical vocabulary of dehumanizing racial, ethnic, and sexual stereotypes to justify the persecution of a group. It is also evidence of persecution—a literal documentation of abuse and degradation in some cases, and a faithful representation of commonplace practices, such as rape, in others. “The force depicted in pornography is objective and real because force is so used against women,” Dworkin writes. “The debasing of women depicted in pornography and intrinsic to it is objective and real in that women are so debased. The uses of women depicted in pornography are objective and real because women are so used. The women used in pornography are used in pornography.” In her logic, the production of the image, the image itself, and the sexual-ideological use of the image in white-male supremacist society are folded together in pornography as a cultural practice. The book is difficult to excerpt—and difficult to read—because much of its power is derived from what it asks you to weather as a reader, tracking the progression of her argument through a punishing, cumulative process of rhetorical extremes and unsparing descriptions of cruelty.

While the instinctual response to Dworkin’s central argument is the procurement of real or theoretical counter-examples to her generalizations about pornography as a genre rooted in the debasement of women, such efforts are futile—debasement is baked into her definition. At one fell swoop in her preface, with a characteristically startling and pointed transhistorical flourish, she damns both Ancient Greece and the ACLU by invoking porn’s etymology—its origin in the word pornai, which denotes the lowest caste of prostitute, the brothel slave. “This is not a book about the First Amendment. By definition the First Amendment protects only those who can exercise the rights it protects. Pornography by definition—‘the graphic depiction of whores’—is trade in a class of persons who have been systematically denied the rights protected by the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights.” Sexually explicit images portraying true equality, made by choice under fair working conditions—should they exist—are not pornography, but something else. The feminist pornography movement would emerge later, in the mid-1980s, with such endeavors as Candida Royalle’s woman-centered film production company or the lesbian magazine On Our Backs. And though Dworkin would be hostile to their material too, it wasn’t what she was talking about in 1981.

While it may be possible now to read Pornography in a number of ways—as experimental literature, durational cultural criticism, a provocation dramatizing the representational crises posed by a rapidly expanding porn industry—in its day Dworkin’s book was anchored in a vocal and prominent antipornography faction of the feminist movement, defined by dogged grassroots action and an uncompromising view of media that depict sexual subordination. Linda Marchiano, known as Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat (1972), had, in 1980, come out with a shocking account of her abuse and coercion during its filming, and the slogan “Pornography is violence against women” had become doctrine. Dismayed feminist detractors felt antipornography activism had sucked the air out of discussions of sexuality and added to the prohibitions on women’s behavior, while also flirting dangerously with pro-censorship positions. Any chance of a substantive discussion of Pornography’s innovative structure, Dworkin’s aesthetics of rage, or theoretical nuance was lost—the text was inextricable from her public persona within the rancorous melee of the women’s movement, splintering as it entered the Reagan era.

The author of the book’s negative New York Times review is none other than Ellen Willis. She opens with a pointed rhetorical question: “Who would have predicted that just now, when the far right has launched an all-out attack on women’s basic civil rights, the issue eliciting the most passionate public outrage from feminists should be not abortion, not “pro-family” fundamentalism, but pornography?”21 To Willis, unmoved and alarmed by Dworkin’s polemic, the “peculiar confluence” of the feminist antipornography movement and the cultural agenda of the Right was “evidence that feminists have been affected by the conservative climate and are unconsciously moving with the cultural tide.” In her view, both religious moralism and Dworkin’s metaphysical absolute of male power offered no path forward for women’s sexual liberation. And while “The misogyny Andrea Dworkin decries is real enough,” she grants, the author’s vision is, Willis writes, “less inspiring than numbing, less a call to arms than a counsel of despair.”

The next year, Willis participated in the Barnard Conference on Sexuality, an event organized by Columbia University professor Carole S. Vance, who was explicit in her mission to critique the feminist antipornography movement and to regroup around such open-ended questions as, “How do women get sexual pleasure in patriarchy?” Outside, protestors stated one way women should not get it: Their t-shirts read FOR A FEMINIST SEXUALITY on the front and AGAINST S/M on the back. In general, Dworkin’s writing does not directly engage with the positions of her feminist adversaries; she might argue that her rebuttals are implicit in her broader critique of male supremacy. And publicly, her allies took up for her. (Women Against Pornography leader Dorchen Leidholdt responded to Willis’s review in a letter to the editor.)22 But this is not to say that the opposition of pro-sex feminists did not enrage and grieve Dworkin, that she was above private attacks and demands for ideological fealty, or that accusations of political and sexual conservatism escaped her notice.

In the unpublished manuscript Ruins (1978–83), a novel structured as a series of letters to people from her past, there is one piece titled “Goodbye to All That.” Published here for the first time, it was written in 1983, calling out, with livid sarcasm, the biggest names associated with the antipornography counter-movement, skewering them as false renegades. “Goodbye, Ellen, baaad baaad Ellen,” she writes. Though she addresses her critics by first name only, they are, undoubtedly, in addition to Willis, sex radical Patrick Califia, queer activist Amber Hollibaugh, and Gayle Rubin, a cultural anthropologist associated with queer BDSM groups. More generally, Dworkin bids adieu to “all you swastika-wielding dykettes, all you tough dangerous feminist leatherettes, all you sexy, nonmonogamous (it does take the breath away) pierced, whipped, bitten, fist-fucked and fist-fucking wild wonderful heretofore unimaginable feminist Girls.” And in heartbroken half-resignation to the changing tides, she also says goodbye to her friends and comrades. “Goodbye to the dummies who thought sex could express reciprocity and equality and still be sexy. Goodbye to the dummies who thought this movement could change the world.”23

But these rifts, and the academic trends precipitating the emergence of gender studies programs and queer theory, could not distract her from the real war for long. That same year, she addressed an audience of hundreds of men, at a National Organization for Changing Men conference. “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape” is a rare appeal to the unfair sex, illustrating her vivid sense of women’s unrelenting emergency. “We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us.”

She didn’t broker a détente that day or ever, but the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance that she coauthored later in 1983, with feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, represented a new battlefield strategy. It was an attempt to reframe pornography as a form of sex discrimination, a civil rights violation, allowing those harmed by it to sue for damages. High profile but doomed campaigns to enact the law in various cities throughout the eighties took Dworkin beyond the polarizing skirmishes of the women’s movement, and put her at the center of a larger public debate. The 1986 Meese Commission’s report on pornography included a transcription of thirty minutes of her brutal, poetic testimony; her image would never recover from this strategic alignment with anti-obscenity conservatism.

Dworkin’s apparent—or suspected—sympathy for the Right was perhaps, more accurately, a profound resentment of the progressive pretensions of the Left, dating back to her teen experiences with the radical lip-service of men who’d fucked her over. The booming porn industry of the 1970s was rooted in a fraternal counterculture, she often pointed out, led by cynical entrepreneurs of the so-called sexual revolution. Her book Right Wing Women, published that same pivotal year—1983—explores women’s fate at the other end of the political spectrum. What is perhaps most notable about the book in the context of her career at this point is her use of the misogynist cruelty of the Right as a foil to the sexist betrayals of the civil-libertarian Left—each side harbors a virulent strain of antifeminism, and she doesn’t really have a preference. Her position is, in some ways, a confrontational for-the-sake-of-argument pose. Dworkin was functionally, on all other issues, left of the Left. But her involvement with proposed antipornography legislation made her bipartisan disdain suspicious.

The book, expanded from a 1977 article published in Ms., is a compassionate exploration of mostly white, Evangelical women. Dworkin’s chapter on abortion and anti-abortion women is brutally thorough; another titled “The Coming Gynocide” is, as the title suggests, a harrowing presentation of her predictions for the near future, where male supremacist ideology realizes its logical extreme. We’ve included her first chapter, “The Promise of the Ultra-Right,” in which she looks at women’s embrace of religious absolutism and conformity as a savvy calculation made to better their chances of physical and social survival. It is some of Dworkin’s funniest writing, as she acerbically summarizes the positions of her right-wing sisters and their instructions for how to love and submit—or, to look at it another way, how to use a career of antigay activism (Anita Bryant) or born-again therapy (Ruth Carter Stapleton) to escape forced childbearing and the prison of the home.

Right Wing Women gets a backhanded compliment in the paper of record four years after its release, in a double pan of Dworkin’s nonfiction work Intercourse and her first novel Ice and Fire, published simultaneously in the United States in 1987. Dworkin writes her own letter to the editor this time:

I despair of being treated with respect, let alone fairly, in your pages. The review of “Ice and Fire” and “Intercourse” (May 3) is contemptuous beyond belief. In an adjacent column, Walter Kendrick, who has written a pro-pornography book and has equated me with Hitler in the pages of The Village Voice, is congratulated for insulting me. Thirteen years after its publication, your reviewer comments that “Woman Hating” is brilliant—thanks. And only four years after the publication of “Right-Wing Women,” it too is called brilliant. Don’t get ahead of yourselves. Neither book, by the way, was reviewed by The New York Times.24

Carol Sternhell’s review reflects the cultural forces working against Dworkin’s legibility as a thinker by this time. “Sexual intercourse should be abolished. It’s the cause of many (most? all?) of women’s problems. It’s a lousy idea for the human race,” she glibly mischaracterizes the argument of Intercourse (and, as she sees it, the implicit message of Ice and Fire as well). “Besides, men are such creeps—all they want to do is ‘occupy,’ ‘violate,’ ‘invade’ and ‘colonize’ women’s bodies,”25 she mocks. Dworkin’s untempered prose, her focus on the extremes of sexual violence and the exploitation of women in the sex industry—and arguably, her failure to make crystal clear at every possible opportunity the distinction between the social construction or metaphysical definition of male power and actual men—had earned her a reputation as a man hater and a gender essentialist. Her sweeping descriptions of patriarchy’s toxic viscera were taken as evidence of a conviction that men are irredeemable; heterosexuality is hopeless, and, most famously, all sex is rape. But the bedrock of Dworkin’s feminism was, to the contrary, a repudiation of the essentialist, biological determinist logic that undergirds fascism and genocide. She believed that men, women, and sex could be different than they are now.

That her lifelong, most fundamental position was consistently construed as its opposite was no doubt demoralizing. And yet Dworkin did not cater to the Sternhells of the world, trying to get them to understand. The formal daring and dirge-like excavations of Intercourse rendered it incomprehensible to those indifferent or hostile to her project—and though that bothered Dworkin, it wasn’t enough to change the way she wrote.

Fucking is subject to radical skepticism in her book. She explores its meaning as an act and an institution by inhabiting male writers’ perspectives and portrayals of it, in works by Leo Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Gustave Flaubert. (Ironically, critics, in egregious misunderstandings of the text and Dworkin’s strategy, frequently took Tolstoy’s pessimistic view of sex as hers.) Reading Intercourse now, I find it lucid and almost uncontroversial in its denaturalization of the act; Dworkin’s exposure of intercourse as the linchpin of heterosexuality, as its emblem and climax, rings true. Intercourse is socially and legally regulated to create and enforce sex difference and male supremacy—who can deny it? Many contemporary readers will have already wandered to this place, or somewhere nearby, through Foucault or Butler.

As Dworkin points out in her introduction to the 1995 edition, which we have included, skepticism, with regard to something as precious as intercourse, is not allowed—not from a woman author and certainly not from a harridan like her. We’ve also included a particularly skeptical chapter, “Occupation/Collaboration,” that moves dangerously back and forth between the metaphysics of fucking and women’s physical experience of it, provoking readers with an intentional blurring of worlds. “How to separate the act of intercourse from the social reality of male power is not clear, especially because it is male power that constructs both the meaning and the current practice of intercourse as such,” she writes. “But it is clear that reforms do not change women’s status relative to men, or have not yet. It is clear that reforms do not change the intractability of women’s civil inferiority,” she adds grimly. “Is intercourse itself then a basis of or a key to women’s continuing social and sexual inequality?”

That question, which throws the viability of intercourse into doubt should equality ever be realized (fat chance), and which demonstrates Dworkin’s unencouraging agnosticism on the issue, somehow raises the stakes unbearably high for many readers. She doesn’t threaten (emptily) to take fucking away, but she does issue a serious challenge: “If intercourse can be an expression of sexual equality, it will have to survive—on its own merits as it were, having a potential for human expression not yet recognized or realized—the destruction of male power over women…”

Again, Dworkin’s notoriety foreclosed any possibility that her work would be recognized or contended with as art. Stoltenberg—an antipornography and antirape writer in his own right, focusing on the socialization of men—describes, in a 1994 article about their life together, finding safety under siege. “Over time, ‘home’ has been seven different places, including an apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, where we scraped by on food stamps; a mold-growing bunker on a buggy island in the Florida Keys; and a rat-ridden, fumy walk-up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side,” he recalls. “We are now fortunate to own our own house, a Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn, filled with warm colors and woodwork and walls full of books. We feel almost blissfully happy here—partly because this is our snug harbor against the storm…” Dworkin was an object of derision for writers like Sternhell, ostensibly a feminist, while also facing death threats and more dangerous ridicule, such as a series of antifeminist, anti-lesbian, anti-Semitic caricatures in Hustler. She sued for libel, and the court ruled against her in 1989. Speaking to the difficulties of those years, Stoltenberg writes, “Andrea’s and Larry Flynt’s lawyers deposed me, and I found I could not get through the interview without breaking down in sobs.”26

Dworkin wrote novels because she wanted to; she wrote them for a tiny readership, for a future audience, or to cast them into the void. Certainly, their reception was disappointing for an author who still harbored an aching literary ambition. We have included a short section from Ice & Fire, an excerpt that could be read as a fictionalized snapshot of her life, post-jail, post-Crete and pre-Amsterdam. She takes drugs and turns tricks with her best friend, as they try to be artists together in New York. “We are going to make a movie, a tough, unsentimental avant-garde little number about women in a New York City prison,” Dworkin writes, laughing a little at her young self, “I have written it. It strangely resembles my own story: jailed over Vietnam the woman is endlessly strip-searched and then mangled inside by jail doctors.” The novel is tragic, but this part isn’t. At the Woolworth’s photo booth they “pose and look intense and avant-garde,” she writes, “We mess up our hair and sulk, or we try grinning, we stare into the hidden camera…”

Mercy (1990) is more explicitly autofictional, a pointed mirroring of Dworkin’s own life events, though one that spins off into the kind of unhinged hallucination her nonfiction was often accused of. Never cited as a work on a par with Pornography or Intercourse, the unsung magnum opus is a revelatory foil to those works, just as formally complex, but uninhibited by the demands of traditional argumentation. “My narrator, who is a character in my book, knows less than I do,” Dworkin reflects, writing of her final novel. “She is inside the story. Deciding what she will see, what she can know, I am detached from her and cold in how I use her.”27 It’s a telling observation, as the opposite might be assumed—that Mercy’s unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness or diaristic style constitutes a loosening of her rhetorical grip.

In the first-person novel, Dworkin chronicles—or grieves—the life of Andrea, who writes of her name, many times throughout the book, with anger or disbelief, that “it means manhood or courage.” Of her childhood home, she notes, also in a mournful refrain, that it was just down the street from Walt Whitman’s house in Camden. The historic site’s proximity fuels dreams of Leaves-of-Grass greatness; and for the anti-imperialist teen poet she becomes, Whitman is a symbol of an alternate, mythic nation. “I’m from his country, the country he wrote about in his poems, the country of freedom, the country of ecstasy, the country of joy of the body,” she insists, “not the Amerika run by war criminals.”

Mercy is indisputably a tale of horrific sexual violence, beginning with Andrea’s molestation at the movies, and never pausing for long in its depictions of abuse. But contrary to Dworkin’s reputation—to the image of her as a prudish, perennial victim—she also offers a passionate account of the adventures of a sexual rebel. In her fiction, depictions of sex, good and bad, with men and women, begin to answer the questions that she raised throughout her career about the possibilities of pleasure under patriarchy, to represent her vision of a liberated sexuality—not through the example of a superhuman revolutionary who practices a squeaky-clean reciprocity, but through the trial-and-error journey of an imperfect protagonist.

At age twenty, living in New York, she sees a woman she desperately wants. “The room’s empty but she sits at the table next to me, black leather pants, black hair, painted black, like I always wanted.” They’re at a Kosher restaurant downtown. “I can’t go with her now because she has an underlying bad motive, she wants to eat,” she wryly observes, “and what I feel for her is complete sex.” Encounters with women provide fleeting reprieve from male violence; they’re trapdoors to Whitman’s ecstatic country. “Your life’s telling you that if you’re between her legs, you’re free—free’s not peaceful and not always kind, it’s fast,” she writes. “There’s not many women around who have any freedom in them let alone some to spare, extravagant, on you, and it’s when they’re on you you see it best and know it’s real.”

Mercy also tells of a marriage in Amsterdam, much like Dworkin’s it would seem, offering a level of detail not present in her nonfiction. The relationship begins as a profound romance between radicals, the couple’s shared drive to sow antiauthoritarian chaos fueling a gender-transcending sexual bond. Dworkin describes it as “a carnal expression of brotherhood in the revolutionary sense, a long, fraternal embrace for hours or days, in hiding.” Sex affirms their freedom and sustains their underground life of righteous crime. “I liked fucking after a strike, a proper climax to the real act—I liked how everything got fast and urgent; fast, hard, life or death; I liked bed then, after, when we was drenched in perspiration from what came before; I liked revolution as foreplay; I liked how it made your supersensitive so the hairs on your skin were standing up and hurt before anything touched you.” Pleasure and pain are entangled, sensitively, in her accounts of their relationship before it turns. “I liked to be on top and I moved real slow,” she writes, “using every muscle in me, so I could feel him hurting—you know that melancholy ache inside that deepens into a frisson of pain?” But Andrea is not always on top, and doesn’t mind (“there wasn’t nothing he did to me that I didn’t do to him”), until, somehow, she finds herself always on the bottom—tied to the bed, and then, beaten almost to death.

How do we reconcile this Andrea—desirous, self-critical, principled, the author’s obvious self-portrait—with the antisex villain invoked in third-wave defenses of sexual empowerment? And how can we understand this Andrea next to the ruined monster of Mercy’s end? Her blood runs green, she has nothing left to lose, and at last she summons the courage and manhood suggested by her name to visit arbitrary nighttime vigilante injustice on the city’s most unlucky men.

This time, the Times review makes the stunning claim, regarding Mercy, that “Ms. Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men.”28 However outlandish its author Wendy Steiner’s interpretation may be, it’s perhaps an accurate measure of the public perception of Dworkin’s politics. And she insightfully credits her with a “new representational strategy,” “risking the prurience of the pornography she deplores,” written in a style combining “the repetition of the early Gertrude Stein and, ironically, the unfettered flights of Henry Miller.” But in a misreading that echoes so many reactions to Dworkin, she 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. In fact, Dworkin’s real plan—always—was simply, unironically, to be as unfettered as Miller was, to beat him at his own game:

My only chance to be believed is to find a way of writing bolder and stronger than woman hating itself—smarter, deeper, colder. This might mean that I would have to write a prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography. How would the innocent bystander be able to distinguish it, tell it apart from the tales of rapists themselves if it were so nightmarish and impolite? There are no innocent bystanders.²⁹

More than murder, suicide figures in the final stretch of the novel. It is an escape and a protest, a desperate last measure to bestow meaning on a female life. Dworkin retells an ancient legend—the story of nearly a thousand Jews, living in exile in a fortress on the rock of Masada. Under Roman siege, with their extermination or enslavement inevitable, the men decide to kill themselves—everyone—rather than submit. Andrea recalls a past life as an old woman on that rock, who overhears the men and slits her own throat before the massacre begins. Dworkin also depicts Andrea’s self-immolation. Like Norman Morrison at the Pentagon decades ago, she burns outside a porn theater in Times Square. “I go to outside Deep Throat where my friend Linda is in the screen,” she writes, “and I put the gasoline on me. I soak myself in it in broad daylight and many go by and no one looks and I am calm, patient, gray on gray like the Buddhist monks, and I light the fire; free us.”

“Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite,” wrote Huey Newton, one of Dworkin’s militant heroes, speaking of the Black Panther movement in 1973. “We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.” Radical struggle shortens one’s life, he writes. “Other so-called revolutionaries cling to an illusion they might have their revolution and die of old age. That cannot be…”30

Last Days at Hot Slit concludes with an excerpt from the previously unpublished work My Suicide (1999),³¹ found on Dworkin’s hard drive by Stoltenberg after her death in 2005, at age fifty-eight. After years of chronic illness and pain, she died in her sleep; the cause was inflammation of the heart. In its entirety, the piece is a 24,000-word autobiographical essay, dedicated to “J.S.” (Stoltenberg) and “E.M.” (Elaine Markson, her longtime literary agent and dear friend). Stoltenberg writes of discovering the text, “it was finished; as if for publication. And I understood why she did not show it to me or Elaine. She had to have known it would devastate us. Because she had written it in the form of a suicide note.”³²

It is an account of her drugging and rape in a Paris hotel, where she had gone alone to celebrate the completion of her epic work Scapegoat, a book on the Holocaust, which would be published the next year. She tells of reading in a garden, a second cocktail that doesn’t taste right, and blacking out in her room. She wakes to find herself bleeding, she finds a bruise, and feels a kind of internal pain that only rape can explain. My Suicide is an interrogation of memory and trauma, a searching recitation of the same events again and again, which takes the spiraling form we now recognize from the experimental structures of Mercy and Intercourse—as well as from her entire body of work, with its vivid, long-running leitmotifs. The drug rape is one more prism through which her life’s narrative is refracted, and it’s one more aspect of sexual violence she comes to know intimately. “I want to live but I don’t know how,” she writes, “I can’t bear knowing what I know.” Her hallmark refrain is delivered in a new register of defeat.

A cruel footnote—which surely felt more like a headline then—is that she was disbelieved during this time of emotional crisis, a period that also marked a sharp decline in her physical health. When she wrote an article for the British magazine The New Statesman,33 chronicling the events and aftermath of her Paris trip, the strange, unverifiable story was met with the raised eyebrows of even sympathetic feminist friends. Stoltenberg, who appears in My Suicide as Paul, understandably wished for another explanation, which is the kindest breed of doubt. And then there were the true attacks—her story publicly picked apart to discredit her once and for all, as evidence of a false politics, an entire career rooted in histrionics and paranoid fantasy.

_____

Amy and I did not, of course, expect to finish this book under Trump; I didn’t expect to write this introduction while witnessing the ascendance of full-throated white supremacist populism, or the consolidation of power under an authoritarian regime in my country—but Dworkin has been my companion through this time. It’s hard to argue that she offers comfort, but I will say that just as it was her curse to see the seed of genocide in everything—the calamity waiting in every expression and symbol of inequality, however small or private—it was her gift to see in everything an opportunity to resist.

To read Dworkin at eighteen was to see patriarchy with the skin peeled back. Her work was a bloody revelation that demanded a blood oath in repayment, and who was I at that age—angry, a writer, a punk girl at the dawn of riot grrrl—to deny her? She modeled rage as authority; her imperious voice and dirty mouth represented a feminist literature empty of caveats, equivocation, or the endless positing of one’s subjective limits. To me this was a new kind of greatness—I guess it still is. So though I subsequently had a whole career of disagreeing, for the last five years, I’ve been intermittently immersed in Dworkin, reading everything by and about her—considering her as a person, a symbol, a flashpoint, and an artist—and have become a different kind of loyalist.

There are many ways to be erased. One can be obliterated by caricature—the image of fat, fuck-you Andrea Dworkin in a Hustler cartoon or raving in feminism’s most uncool margin is one way to pave over her ideas. Then there is the self-perpetuating misrepresentation, the groove made deeper with every unexamined repetition of a rumor; and a sneakier phenomenon—the feminine/feminist race to perfection which renders our movement’s dialectics shameful, our human arrogance, floundering, and failures unaccounted for in an honest intellectual history. There’s always the blithe forgetfulness of a world where women’s writing means less, is worth less, and is swiftly out of print, too. And the irrelevance accidentally initiated by the sycophant: If Dworkin is reduced to source material for a strange dogma, one that extrapolates her singular radical feminism into the present, if her writings exist only as tracts, that’s one more kind of death.

Greatness is not synonymous with perfection or popularity. In the long-arc narratives of male genius that reach far beyond a lifetime, greatness is established despite, and in the glaring light of, great flaws. Great men are by definition to be reckoned with and honored for the dilemmas they force us to confront, while the ways to castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition are second-nature and sometimes fatal, whether she’s deemed evil or merely, as they say, problematic. My point is, right or wrong—right and wrong—Dworkin’s oracular voice helped to shape the historic grassroots feminist organizing of the late ’70s and ’80s; she rallied the forces of the antipornography, antirape and battered women’s movements, and she left behind a complex, experimental body of work that will make your blood run cold.