She was a rip-roaring public speaker and a vigorous organizer critics considered her censorious when her and Catherine MacKinnon’s anti-pornography analyses were incorporated into law in Canada. “Because she did this she made people very nervous and very uncomfortable.” While identifying as a lesbian, Dworkin lived with and married the gay feminist writer John Stoltenberg. “She tried to create more understanding of what the dehumanization of women does to people,” says Marcia Cohn Spiegel, Dworkin’s aunt and herself an activist against domestic violence and the oppression of women. Herself a victim of rape and battery, Dworkin critically charted the boundary between male heterosexuality and male domination of women’s bodies and found it to be very narrow. She became a leader of the “Take Back the Night” movement, which sought safety for women on city streets, and a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography wing of the feminist movement. Dworkin was the author of Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (1974), Pornography-Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), among other books. (Notes are attached.Andrea Dworkin, one of the most radical and polarizing figures of the feminist movement, died on this date in 2005 at age 58.

Her ultimately unproductive rhetoric allows for no commonality among men and women, and serves only to separate the sexes further. Instead of finding 'male truth' Dworkin has created a radical feminist myth of male truth.

Dworkin's rhetoric thus blames men while avoiding questions such as why some men are not drawn to pornography. Even when the image is nonviolent the ideology behind the image must be violent as an expression of the male world vision. Dworkin further sees pornography as an agency of violence that awakens men's deeply rooted obsession with death, directing it toward women.

Her referral to the ancient meaning attributes motive to the purveyors: the subordination of women through the way women are represented, equating them with vile whores. Dworkin's definition of pornography comes from the ancient Greeks, whose word 'porne' meant the lowest class of whore. For Dworkin, this tension is compounded by the tension between 'what is' and 'what appears to be.' If appearance-that pornography is about sexuality-were truth, pornography would be a liberating agent for both sexes.

Dworkin's position derives from the tension between 'what should be' and 'what is.' Her conception of the difference between the feminine and masculine nature offers women as the glorious image of what men could be, while men are the dark reminder of what is. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin has been instrumental in efforts to curtail pornography by defining it as a violation of women's civil rights and allowing individual women to sue the distributors for damages.

Andrea dworkin pornography