Andrea Dworkin by Jeremy Mark Robinson

by Jeremy Mark Robinson

ANDREA DWORKIN Of this study of her work, Andrea Dworkin It’s amazing for me to see my work treated with such passion and respect. There is nothing resembling it in the U.S. in relation to my work. Michael Moorcock wrote of American feminist and writer Andrea ‘I think feminism is the most important political movement of our times. People think Andrea’s a man-hater. She gets called a Fascist and a Nazi - particularly by the American left, but it’s not detectable in her work. To me she seemed like a pussycat… She has an extraordinary eloquence, a kind of magic that moves people’. Dworkin is a very positive writer, always driving onwards for revolution, change and radical thinking. In the introduction to Letters From a War Zone, she ‘I am more reckless now than when I started out because I know what everything costs and it doesn’t matter. I have paid a lot to write what I believe to be true. On one level, I suffer terribly from the disdain that much of my work has met. On another, deeper level, I don’t give a fuck’. Dworkin’s life’s work balances the individual suffering of the writer with the larger, worldwide suffering of women’s subordination, so that, she says, one becomes, on a personal level, immune to pain, while on the larger, global level, the pain of women and children around the world continues to grow, and continues to make her madder and ‘I wrote them [essays and speeches] because I believe in writing, in its power to right wrongs, to change how people see and think, to change how and what people know, to change how and why people act. I wrote them out of the conviction, Quaker in origin, that one must speak truth to power. This is the basic premise in my work as a activism or writing’. Here Dworkin posits her work as a crusade, that’s the newspaper term for her kind of polemic, a ‘crusade’ against silence and violence, against cruelty and inequality, and certainly Dworkin is often portrayed in the media as a crusader, someone who really believes in herself, in her convictions, someone wholly committed, as few others are, to a radical change. Michael Moorcock, in his piece on Andrea Dworkin (New Statesman, 1988) [w]hat she fights against, in everything she writes and does, is male refusal to acknowledge sexual inequality, male hatred of women, male contempt for women, male power’.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A COMMENTATOR THAT DWORKIN HERSELF PRAISED

Author Jeremy Mark Robinson wrote in the Preface to the 2nd edition (2008) of this 1994 book, “For this second edition… I have opted not to rewrite the book. The text is a response to the astonishing power of Dworkin’s writing and work. She’s a one-woman revolution. Reworking the book would probably turn it into something different, so I’ve kept the freshness of the initial response. The format---a single, continuous paragraph---which was meant to emulate the style of Dworkin’s own novels (not her non-fiction), I have also left alone.”

He notes, “[Michael] Moorcock writes… ‘People think Andrea’s a man-hater. She gets called a Fascist and a Nazi---particularly by the American left, but it’s not detectable in her work. To me she seemed like a pussycat… She has an extraordinary eloquence, a kind of magic that moves people .’ Dworkin is a very positive writer, always driving onwards for revolution, change, and radical thinking,” (Pg. 28)

He states, “the red stuff, which is blood, which in Dworkin becomes the blood of rage, the reg rag waved at a bull… it’s part of Dworkin’s rage, her rage against the world, against life when it gets incredibly difficult, but against people mostly, not the ‘human condition,’ her rage is not really against being human, a flesh and blood body, but against the constraints put on it by systems, values, attitudes, ideas, dogmas, structures, strictures, institutions, religions, cultures, arts, laws, constraints which Dworkin reacts against violently, for she is really a liberal, in some sense, a liberal fighting for ‘freedom,’ though she might dislike the term ‘liberal’…” (Pg. 33-34)

He points out, “Dworkin has a profound view of writing and art: she believes writing is important, that it is not something you do as a sideline, that writing is central to her life, and to a society’s well-being, that the writer is someone who ACTS, that writing is an ACT, not an idea, not something invisible and flimsy…” (Pg. 42-43)

He observes, “critics often lay into Dworkin personally---they mention ... the size and shape of her body, her stereotypical feminist appearance (dungarees) and, often, they question her sexuality---she’s a lesbian, they say, or she’s bisexual, or she hates men but lives with a man (John Stoltenberg), or has men as companions, which some radical lesbians think is wrong, to collude with men, which is ridiculous, and critics wonder about her sexuality, because, as in so much of humanist criticism, they think the personality of the author is important…” (Pg. 48)

He suggests, “perhaps … there can never be a ‘distanced,’ cool, detached, ‘objective’ reading of pornography, so that Dworkin’s critiques of pornography are pornography itself, yet pornography remains a crucial issue with feminists, even though many feminists regard it as secondary to issues of power, race, class, economics, and so on…” (Pg. 70)

He asserts, “while (some) other authors distance themselves from their works… Dworkin is very serious about what she does, and it shows in all her works, so the serious, committed tone is found in the fiction, the non-fiction, the speeches and lectures, and for some reason people find this difficult to deal with, so that Dworkin is seen as someone threatening, perhaps because what she has to say is not usually said, or not said in quite the way Dworkin says it.” (Pg. 79-80)

He says, “these are the (few) moments when Dworkin’s texts ooze idealism and poetry, rare they are, rare because a book about being successively raped can’t have silly bits of nature lyricism…” (Pg. 95)

He explains, “Dworkin’s view is that these words can never be redeemed from pornography: ‘words stay dirty because they express a contempt for women, or for women and sex, often synonyms, that is real, embedded in hostile practices that devalue and hurt women… Dirty words stay dirty because they ... express a hate for women as inferiors; that hate inextricably, it seems, is part of sex---a hate for women’s genitals, a hate for women’s bodies…” (Pg. 118-119)

He contends, “for Dworkin, the oppressor is male, it couldn’t be otherwise---at no point in her non-fiction does Dworkin identify women as oppressors, but only as victims, the downtrodden and raped, but never oppressors, and only rarely does Dworkin call women colluders or conspirators in male power, rather, she sees women as having one choice---‘lie or die’---not a conspiracy but a forced pretense…” (Pg. 136-137)

He notes, “Andrea Dworkin is not anti-sex… she is anti-bad sex, anti-rape, anti-victimization, for there is much sex in her fiction, a searing and orgasmic kind of lovemaking…” (Pg. 146)

He admits, “at time, it does seem as if Dworkin hates any kind of sexual expression---certainly in written form she finds few if any texts which are not pornographic; for her, erotica is simply high class porn, so all these people critics regard as writers of good, sensitive sexual moments… are in fact peddling pornography just like everyone else, that is, their writing, no matter what their intentions might have been, turns out as pornography in the end; pornography, it seems, is inescapably where sex and art meet---this seems to be Dworkin’s position, critically, when she looks at authors and books … in Dworkin’s view, there are no true ‘erotic’ writers…” (Pg. 150)

Incidentally, Dworkin said of Robinson’s book, “It’s amazing for me to see my work treated with such passion and respect.”

This sympathetic portrait will be of great interest to fans of Dworkin’s works.