Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar

Author:Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar [Gilbert, Sandra M. & Gubar, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, American, General, history, women, Literary Criticism, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Epub3, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780393651720
Google: 9QEDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-08-17T00:21:09.527523+00:00

ANDREA DWORKIN AND THE SEX WARS

At the start of the eighties, important debates in the women’s movement issued in a battle that pitted feminists against feminists. Much of the anger of seventies activists had coalesced in protests against the violence that girls and women too often experienced: rape, incest, child abuse, domestic battery, workplace harassment, and femicide (a nineteenth-century legal term that was revived). Activists questioned early sexual liberationists: how liberating is sexual freedom in a male-dominated culture?

The proliferation of pornographic magazines and movies suggested that pornography itself might be to blame for assaults on women. Snuff and slasher movies had surged in popularity. What should be done about them? This question led to the so-called porn or sex wars. Although no single crusader can represent the many voices raised against sexual violence, Andrea Dworkin often starred in that role. As activists organized the first Take Back the Night marches, Dworkin began to represent the group called Women Against Pornography. She was loud, large, and “the angriest woman in America”—a radical feminist, she explained, but “not the fun kind.”7

At the podium, Dworkin’s “dramatized martyrdom and revival-tent theatrics”8 arose from damaging experiences: she was assaulted at the age of 9 and later fled a marriage to a physically abusive husband. Before that marriage, at freewheeling Bennington College, she prided herself on having “never slept with faculty members, only their wives.” Later in life, she married the feminist activist John Stotenberg, who also identified as gay. After being arrested at an anti–Vietnam War protest and “sexually brutalized” by a gynecological examination in New York City’s Women’s House of Detention, Dworkin brought charges that eventually helped lead to the closing of the prison. Homeless at some points during a sojourn in Europe and resorting to prostitution, she returned to the States determined to lecture as a feminist “because I had a lot of trouble getting my work published.”9

Claiming that she was too impoverished to buy her favorite women’s movement button, “Don’t Suck. Bite,” Dworkin spoke out against the idea that women were to blame for the violence inflicted on them: “it was presumed that the woman was sexually provocative or was trying to destroy the man with a phony charge of rape.” She called for “a generation of warriors who can’t be tired out or bought off. Each woman needs to take what she endures and turn it into action. With every tear, accompanying it, one needs a knife to rip a predator apart.”10

Dworkin opposed those feminists who aligned with civil libertarians to reject all forms of censorship and who quickly became known as “pro-sex.” Wary of moral pieties that had historically inhibited women from experiencing sexual pleasure, pro-sex feminists emphasized the difficulty of distinguishing between sexually explicit art and pornography: “What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic,” Ellen Willis quipped. Dworkin dismissed this stance as a collaboration with the enemy, for she agreed with Robin Morgan that “pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.”11

Gloria Steinem, who

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