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Catharine MacKinnon on Andrea Dworkin
Apr. 16th, 2005 02:26 pmWho Was Afraid of Andrea Dworkin?
By CATHARINE A. MacKINNON, OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR, The New York Times, April 16, 2005
ANDREA DWORKIN, an inspiration to so many women, died last week at the age of 58. Over the course of her incandescent literary and political career, she also became a symbol of views she did not hold. For her lucid work opposing men's violence against women, she lived the stigma of being identified with women, especially sexually abused women.
Instead of being lionized and admired for her genius, instead of being able to earn a decent living as a writer, Andrea Dworkin was misrepresented and demonized. In the words of John Berger, she was "perhaps the most misrepresented writer in the Western world."
The range of her literary contribution alone - 13 books spanning fiction, literary criticism, journalism, speeches (no one could move a room like she could), essays, history, political analysis - is exceptional. But there was no Nobel Prize nomination. Her voice was fresh, her ideas original and powerful, her perceptions and moral principles fearless, her eloquence oracular, direct and riveting.
"Men have asked over the centuries a question that, in their hands, ironically becomes abstract: 'What is reality?' " she wrote in an essay titled "A Battered Wife Survives." "They have written complicated volumes on this question. The woman who was a battered wife and has escaped knows the answer: reality is when something is happening to you and you know it and can say it and when you say it other people understand what you mean and believe you. That is reality, and the battered wife, imprisoned alone in a nightmare that is happening to her, has lost it and cannot find it anywhere." Her profound abilities only made publishing a constant struggle. She would not be silenced, but her speech was not free.
Lies about her views on sexuality (that she believed intercourse was rape) and her political alliances (that she was in bed with the right) were published and republished without attempts at verification, corrective letters almost always refused. Where the physical appearance of male writers is regarded as irrelevant or cherished as a charming eccentricity, Andrea's was reviled and mocked and turned into pornography. When she sued for libel, courts trivialized the pornographic lies as fantasy and dignified them as satire.
Andrea Dworkin exposed the ugliest realities of women's lives and said what they mean. For trusting the knowledge of her own experiences of battering, rape and prostitution, for listening to harmed women, for standing up for women with humor - "now the problem with telling you what it means for me, bertha schneider, to be in an existential position is that I dont have Sartres credibility," she wrote in a short story - lyricism and brilliance, she was shunned. Critics and reporters often talked about her ideas without reading them. She was tortured by editors, some of whom she considered censors ("police work for liberals").
Only power did not underestimate Andrea Dworkin. Threatened by this Jewish girl from Camden, N.J., the minions of the status quo moved to destroy her credibility and bury her work alive.
Andrea Dworkin saw through male power as a political system - "while the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true," she said - and exposed the sexual core of male supremacy, the heart of the male darkness. She stood with, and therefore for, sexually abused women. So she was treated as they are treated, denigrated as they are denigrated. She was the intellectual shock troops, the artistic heavy artillery of the women's movement in our time. She took its heaviest hits.
And she wanted to change the face of this earth. Our idea of empowering harmed women to sue pornographers for civil rights violations they could prove were done to them would stop the pornography industry in its tracks.
"Pornographers use our bodies as their language," she said. "Anything they say, they have to use us to say. They do not have that right. They must not have that right." She concluded: "They do benefit from it; and we do have to stop them." Such work is risky to do at all. It costs a woman's life to do it well.
Because of her subject, because of the substance of her ideas, and most of all because of her effectiveness at expressing them, Andrea Dworkin faced especially naked misogyny: "woman hating," which is the title of her first book. How she was treated is how women are treated who tell the truth about male power without compromise or apology. It is why few do.
This warrior for women was gentle, sweet, loving, raging and deeply vulnerable. "Being stigmatized by sex," she wrote, "is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible." She was well named Andrea. It means "courage."
Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, is the author of "Women's Lives, Men's Laws." She was an editor, with Andrea Dworkin, of "In Harm's Way."
By CATHARINE A. MacKINNON, OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR, The New York Times, April 16, 2005
ANDREA DWORKIN, an inspiration to so many women, died last week at the age of 58. Over the course of her incandescent literary and political career, she also became a symbol of views she did not hold. For her lucid work opposing men's violence against women, she lived the stigma of being identified with women, especially sexually abused women.
Instead of being lionized and admired for her genius, instead of being able to earn a decent living as a writer, Andrea Dworkin was misrepresented and demonized. In the words of John Berger, she was "perhaps the most misrepresented writer in the Western world."
The range of her literary contribution alone - 13 books spanning fiction, literary criticism, journalism, speeches (no one could move a room like she could), essays, history, political analysis - is exceptional. But there was no Nobel Prize nomination. Her voice was fresh, her ideas original and powerful, her perceptions and moral principles fearless, her eloquence oracular, direct and riveting.
"Men have asked over the centuries a question that, in their hands, ironically becomes abstract: 'What is reality?' " she wrote in an essay titled "A Battered Wife Survives." "They have written complicated volumes on this question. The woman who was a battered wife and has escaped knows the answer: reality is when something is happening to you and you know it and can say it and when you say it other people understand what you mean and believe you. That is reality, and the battered wife, imprisoned alone in a nightmare that is happening to her, has lost it and cannot find it anywhere." Her profound abilities only made publishing a constant struggle. She would not be silenced, but her speech was not free.
Lies about her views on sexuality (that she believed intercourse was rape) and her political alliances (that she was in bed with the right) were published and republished without attempts at verification, corrective letters almost always refused. Where the physical appearance of male writers is regarded as irrelevant or cherished as a charming eccentricity, Andrea's was reviled and mocked and turned into pornography. When she sued for libel, courts trivialized the pornographic lies as fantasy and dignified them as satire.
Andrea Dworkin exposed the ugliest realities of women's lives and said what they mean. For trusting the knowledge of her own experiences of battering, rape and prostitution, for listening to harmed women, for standing up for women with humor - "now the problem with telling you what it means for me, bertha schneider, to be in an existential position is that I dont have Sartres credibility," she wrote in a short story - lyricism and brilliance, she was shunned. Critics and reporters often talked about her ideas without reading them. She was tortured by editors, some of whom she considered censors ("police work for liberals").
Only power did not underestimate Andrea Dworkin. Threatened by this Jewish girl from Camden, N.J., the minions of the status quo moved to destroy her credibility and bury her work alive.
Andrea Dworkin saw through male power as a political system - "while the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true," she said - and exposed the sexual core of male supremacy, the heart of the male darkness. She stood with, and therefore for, sexually abused women. So she was treated as they are treated, denigrated as they are denigrated. She was the intellectual shock troops, the artistic heavy artillery of the women's movement in our time. She took its heaviest hits.
And she wanted to change the face of this earth. Our idea of empowering harmed women to sue pornographers for civil rights violations they could prove were done to them would stop the pornography industry in its tracks.
"Pornographers use our bodies as their language," she said. "Anything they say, they have to use us to say. They do not have that right. They must not have that right." She concluded: "They do benefit from it; and we do have to stop them." Such work is risky to do at all. It costs a woman's life to do it well.
Because of her subject, because of the substance of her ideas, and most of all because of her effectiveness at expressing them, Andrea Dworkin faced especially naked misogyny: "woman hating," which is the title of her first book. How she was treated is how women are treated who tell the truth about male power without compromise or apology. It is why few do.
This warrior for women was gentle, sweet, loving, raging and deeply vulnerable. "Being stigmatized by sex," she wrote, "is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible." She was well named Andrea. It means "courage."
Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, is the author of "Women's Lives, Men's Laws." She was an editor, with Andrea Dworkin, of "In Harm's Way."
