Dworkin

Trish Wilson notes the passing of Andrea Dworkin, and Professor B. offers a roundup of relevant commentary. I don’t really have much to add to the consensus within these links; I ultimately disagree with Dworkin’s analysis and conclusions in any number of respects, but I also object to the way in which her work has been mischaracterized, particularly since she was often turned into a strawman with which to attack feminism in general. Citing Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, feminism is often made to stand for propositions such as “men are evil” or “all sex is rape,” so it seems important to clarify that Dworkin herself did not believe these things. This article doesn’t seem available on their website even for subscribers, but Martha Nussbaum (in the New Republic, 8/11/97) put it well:

Andrea Dworkin knows that good men exist. Indeed, among the most moving passages in the autobiographical essay that opens her book (alongside portraits of strong women who inspired or helped her) is the portrait of her father, a gentle man who adored her and treated her with respect, challenging her Socratically to debate and to argument. Once in high school, asked to give an example of a great man in history, she named her father and was ridiculed. “But I meant it–that he had the qualities of true greatness, which I defined as strength, generosity, fairness, and a willingness to sacrifice self for principle.” Dworkin also warmly praises her brother, a Jewish scientist who married an Austrian Catholic, also a scientist. They transcended “cultural differences and historical sorrow,” she writes, “through personal love, the recognition of each other as individuals, and the exercise of reason, which they both, as scientists, valued.” At his funeral, the chief rabbi of Vienna officiated and her father sat with the women, in protest against the Orthodox separation of the sexes. And finally there is the man with whom Dworkin has lived for twenty years: “I love John with my heart and soul…. We share a love of writing and of equality; and we share each and every day. He is a deeply kind person, and it is through the actual dailiness of living with him that I understand the spiritual poverty and the sensual stupidity of eroticizing brutality over kindness.”

So: Dworkin, whose history includes child molestation by a stranger, sexual abuse by prison guards, domestic violence and prostitution, also knows that the world is complicated and contains some very good male people. She knows, too, that reason may do some good in this complex world. (Both her father and brother are portrayed sympathetically as reason-loving types, and her Jewish education is praised for teaching her the argumentative skills.) But Dworkin aims to deliver shocks to the heart. Her political hero is not Socrates or Kant, it is Frederick Douglass, “someone whose passion for human rights was both visionary and rooted in action,” whose political speech “was suffused with emotion: indignation at human pain, grief at degradation, anguish over suffering, fury at apathy and collusion.”

Dworkin’s prose is a powerful instrument. (Less so in her fiction, with its frequently turgid stream-of-consciousness.) She is inspired to indignation and grief by the evils of violence against the female body, in rape, in domestic violence, in prostitution; and by the sheer fact that women throughout so much of the world’s history have been understood to be mere objects for the use of men. To make a difference (she reports her own earlier reasoning), she will need to write in a way that strikes readers as “nightmarish and impolite,” denying them the option of seeing themselves as “innocent bystander[s].” And she will have to give up “sentimentality” toward men in favor of a “militarist’s” stance. What this means, among other things, is a focus on the evils perpetrated by “the collective him” and a refusal of sympathy, and of mercy, to many individual hims, each of whom a philosopher might hold to be basically good at heart, and capable of being persuaded.

R.I.P.