Andrea Dworkin, 1946-2005

Maggie says:
Feminist icon Andrea Dworkin died last weekend. In the wake of her death, there've been some great pieces written about her life and her work, some complementary but many pretty stinging.

Personally, Andrea Dworkin was not my icon. She represented an extreme view of sex, one that to me has no room for women who have healthy experiences and (gasp!) actually like it. For all her rhetoric on heterosexual intercourse (she saw it as rape and colonization, however consensual) and pornography ("an instruction manual for rape"), she really had little to no impact at all on the very real issues facing women every day (unequal pay, sexual harrassment, domestic violence, etc.). And to me, that was her biggest failure: not that lots of women, including me, disagreed with her views on sex, because she at least gave us something to react to and in that reaction form our own personal feminist philosophies. But the problem with Dworkin was that she never touched the women who couldn't care less about feminist theorists - she was never real enough to really make a difference for anyone, and certainly not the women in emergency rooms or in checkout lines with their kids and their food stamps. And sure, how many theorists actually do make a difference to everyday folks? Well, I'd offer that valuable rhetoric shines lights on problems and offers solutions, but Dworkin mostly just isolated and infuriated people to the point where each side became so extreme the debate literally worsened as soon as she entered.

Watching the reaction to her death has been pretty interesting, but I'd like to see more articles debating the state of feminism today. And it goes without saying that I'd like that debate to allow me to take part in it, not call me a betrayal to my gender for my bedroom preferences. So with all due respect to the late Andrea Dworkin, I hope her legacy is that we never regress to her level of debate again.