Some of her ideas (particularly, IIRC, around rape) were very important and - while controverial - did get people thinking a different direction. And she can take credit for helping exposing porn as “not just erotica.” A lot of people really weren’t really aware that their was a more violent, darker side of porn than Playboy before her and her ilk. But she couldn’t tell the difference between the ugly stuff and the relatively harmless. And she can take some credit that we don’t have the same “boys will be boys” mindset we used to.
(And I agree, Cosmo has done far more harm to women in the last 30 years than Playboy. Bill Clinton, while he shouldn’t have been impeached, was WRONG to have had any sort of sexual contact with a subordinate (the marriage part I’m neutral on, the subordinate thing I’m irate about) - and there were plenty of feminists who didn’t think it politically expediant to defend that (but didn’t want to see the guy impeached), and I’ve been a card carrying member of NOW for 20 years and could have filed for a minor in Women’s Studies - having plenty of credits there. And I’m slim, married to a guy, pretty good looking, and shave my legs.).
The fact that you keep referring something as a fact will not without reasoning or proof make it a fact, no matter how often you try to assume the fact in issue. And that’s a fact.
I (admittedly ignorant and just now reading about this person) keep getting the impression that she went around saying things that she didn’t believe very loudly. Or rather, they were things she wanted to believe, because it would give her a purpose in life.
From what I have read (and that admittedly not primary sources) her fundamental problem was a deep contempt for heterosexual women: implicit if not explicit. Telling someone that they only like something because they are oppressed is telling someone they don’t know their own mind, which is insulting to many and rightly so.
I’m not really glad she’s dead, but I can’t summon so much as an ounce of sorrow over her death. She was a freedom-hating, censorious scumbag who helped the cultural conservatives in their effort to censor the media in the 80s. She testified before a committee set up by Reagan to form the basis for censorship. By positiong that both cultural conservatives on the right and feminists on the left favored censorship, the Reagan Commission attempted to get a consensus that censorship of all media should be reinstated in America.
This failed, because too many Americans had porn tapes and VCRs and could see for themselves what porn was, and that it wasn’t the penultimate evil described by the censors (I would argue that favoring cnesorship among conservatives is a sexual dysfunction, that censors grow excited by porn and can only express that excitement by attempting to suppress porn.) All they succeeded in doing was preventing images of men and women having sex while the WOMAN is in bondage censored, in a de facto sort of way.
I gladly consign her and Catherine MacKinnon to the dung heap of history.
As you may know, a brief that she and Catharine MacKinnon had written for the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) was submitted to the case of R. v. Butler, in which it was ruled that the Charter’s free expression provisions do not cover pornography. The proximate result was that gay and lesbian bookstores (especially Little Sister’s in Vancouver and Glad Day in Toronto) have had to spend millions in legal fees trying to provide access to all manner of Queer writings (not only erotica, or even sexually explicit works, but also any kind of writing), that have been seized at the border based on the arbitrary decision of Customs workers that the material is obscene.
According to quotations that I’ve read, Dworkin broke with MacKinnon on this subject, opposed her brief being used in this case, and said that the court decision was based on homophobia and sexism. Either she’s disingenuous on this subject, or she has had the worst case of the boomerang effect of any queer political figure in recent memory.
For those who want a devastating, yet accurate commentary from a partial misanthrope regarding A.D., you might want to search the web for the article “Fucking Andrea Dworkin”. I will not link to it since it has some NSFW pictures and is a .pdf file.
One point made about the article’s author is that it is unfair to lump A.D. in as a ‘feminist’ since the aquisition of rights and opportunities appears nowhere in her writings or her lectures. Instead it is mostly hand-wringing anti-sex hysteria. That’s probably one of the kinder things said by the author.
A young, feminist co-worker of my GF said upon AD’s death “She’s dead? Good, now I can enjoy my porn in peace”.
I also like what one feminist author (Camille Paglia?) had to say about AD:
"Dworkin, wallowing in misery, is a “type” that I recognize after 22 years of teaching. I call her the Girl with the Eternal Cold. This was the pudgy, clumsy, whiny child at summer camp who was always spilling her milk, dropping her lollipop in the dirt, getting a cramp on the hike, a stone in her shoe, a bee in her hair. In college, this type - pasty, bilious, and frumpy - is constantly sick from fall to spring. She coughs and sneezes on everyone, is never prepared with tissue, and sits sniffling in class with a roll of toliet paper on her lap. She is the ultimate teacher’s pest, the morose, unlovable child who never got her mama’s approval and therefore demands attention at any price. "
She will not be missed, and contrary to some I don’t think she did any good to this world. Other feminists deserve the credit for progress. Dworkin just stole some by shouting louder.
Anyone who sees the world in terms of ‘types’ is doing themselves a disservice IMO.
My reasons for disrespecting Dworkin are more to do with my perception that her ‘arguments’ were actually more the diseased ramblings of a mentally ill person than anything I would consider to be logical. She relied totally on introspection and assertion to make her points. She did a lot of harm to freedom of speech by being hijacked in the anti-pornography debate to a very illiberal point of view. She no doubt annoyed a few patriarchs who needed to be annoyed but overall she took the debate between the sexes backwards rather than forwards.
I was once lent her book ‘Pornography’ and read about 33% of it before abandoning it as unreadable.
OTOH she did give rise to a very funny spoof feminist in fiction; I think Millie Tant is a very well-drawn and funny caricature of her, in Viz magazine. Perhaps in the long view that will be seen as her greatest contribution.
Rather unforgiving of adolescent awkwardness isn’t she? Makes one think maybe she’s describing herself as a child. Ah never mind. Psychoanalyzing either Camille Paglia or Andrea Dworkin is too depressing an exercise to contemplate.
Yep, we’re known for our spectacular lack of spines. If I said I was a feminist I wonder what images of my beliefs your brain bucket would conjure up. Sure, you can figure that I think men and women should have equal rights but is that it? That’s to easy though, what about other feminist issues like day care, inequality of pay, affirmative action, etc?
It doesn’t tell you all that much about what I actually believe. So no, I don’t call myself a feminist any more then I call myself a conservative. To much attached baggage that really doesn’t tell you what I believe. I’d much rather tell you how I stood on an issue rather then giving you a label that could be misinterpreted.
Mockingbird, that’s not what I said. I consider myself a feminist. What I said was that many people are introduced to these terms in contexts devoid of nuance, and choose sides under the misapprehension that the Dworkin/Daly school is the predominant school of feminist thought. I think Dworkin was, in this respect, harmful to feminism. That’s an observation, not a prescription.