It is the latter that earned Dworkin and her collaborator, legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, the most infamy: The civil ordinances in which they defined pornography as an actionable violation of women’s civil rights passed in some cities but were subsequently shot down on First Amendment grounds. Now 55, she has recently published her thirteenth book, a memoir that describes how she went from being jailed for protesting the Vietnam War to launching a crusade against pornography. Of the abuses leveled against women, Dworkin says she has endured nearly all of them: rape, prostitution, battery. Women refuse self-annihilation.”Īt an address sponsored in part by the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, Dworkin, easily the most vociferous and controversial feminist author and thinker in America today, outlined why the work of the women’s movement is still unfinished.

Women want to have a self that’s real, not one that’s torn into little pieces and thrown out with the garbage. Women want to be able to know what introspection is. “Women,” she says, a hand clutched to her chest, “want to have an interior life. (Notes are attached.When Andrea Dworkin speaks, her voice quivers with the fervor of reckoning. 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