Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature by Robert McCain

Author:Robert McCain [McCain, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2015-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Indecent Mind of

Andrea Dworkin

“Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible. The context ... is one in which men have social, economic, political power over women. Some men do not have all those kinds of power over all women; but all men have some kinds of power over all women; and most men have controlling power over what they call their women — the women they fuck. The power is predetermined by gender, by being male. …

“They force us to be compliant, turn us into parasites, then hate us for not letting go. Intercourse is frequently how we hold on: fuck me.”

— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (1987)

Her death in 2005 removed Andrea Dworkin’s strident voice from the angry feminist chorus. She was 58 and died of heart failure, having lived the previous several years in declining health, her knees wrecked by arthritis caused by her morbid obesity. Dworkin fought many battles — and was mostly defeated — during her three-decade career as a feminist scourge. Most notably, during the 1980s, she and fellow radical Catharine MacKinnon tried to pass anti-pornography laws in Minneapolis and Indianapolis. The mayor of Minneapolis vetoed the Dworkin/MacKinnon law there; federal courts ruled the Indianapolis law unconstitutional. Thus, the radicals were defeated by so-called “pro-sex feminists” in their Reagan-era showdown, with consequences that reverberate to the present day.

Andrea Dworkin was a strange and tragic figure. She was abused as a child and abused as an adult, too. In the 1960s, she traveled to Europe, where she engaged in prostitution, “had a passionate romance with a Greek man” and married a Dutch anarchist “who beat the living shit out of her,” to quote Ariel Levy’s foreword to the 20th anniversary edition of Dworkin’s most notorious book, Intercourse.

Dworkin was 28 when she published her first feminist book, Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, in 1974. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that this book suffers from the usual faults of early radical-feminist writing. Woman Hating shares with Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex a utopian vision of what can only be called a post-biological future. Dworkin begins Woman Hating thus:

This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. It has no other purpose. It is not cerebral wisdom, or academic horseshit, or ideas carved in granite or destined for immortality. It is part of a process and its context is change. It is part of a planetary movement to restructure community forms and human consciousness so that people have power over their own lives, participate fully in community, live in dignity and freedom.

The commitment to ending male dominance as the fundamental psychological, political, and cultural reality of earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment. It is a commitment to transformation of the self and transformation of the social reality on every level.

Hers is no modest ambition. By the concluding chapter, Dworkin avows herself an apostle of “natural androgynous eroticism”:

The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs.

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