Death of a Militant Feminist

I had resolved not to write about celebrity deaths. It is such a trite thing to do. Besides, my life is so far removed from the celebrity context, I have been out of contact with the media for so long, that it was a week before I knew that Mother Teresa and Princess Diana were dead. Some of my friends say I live under a rock.

But Musafir sent me an article from The Guardian that compells me to write about Andrea Dworkin, the militant feminist who died this week at age 58. Wow. So young... Just a few years older than my mother would have been.

When I was a student at Smith College I was privileged to meet Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Camille Paglia, and Susie Bright. Four very different women, each of them feminists in my opinion. But the most radical extremist feminist of them all, Andrea Dworkin, I never had the opportunity to meet or hear speak. Mom was a big fan of hers--she embraced radical lesbian separatism and often quoted Dworkin to me. Their views were so extreme that my sweet young avidly-heterosexual self was appalled and repelled. My own experience of sexual violation by a woman made me dig my heels in--if all men were considered potential rapists because a man committed rape, did not the same 'logic' apply to women?

Andrea Dworkin did a lot for women--she dared to look at what polite society denied the existence of: pornography and the sexual degradation of women. She was a lightning rod and her thoughts and opinions attracted and repelled women for decades. She profoundly affected the feminist movement in the 60's, and even if she disapproved of the tangent that women like Susie Bright pursued under the feminist banner, I firmly believe that if it was not for her and her bellicose in-your-face self-expression, women today would be as out of touch with their sexuality and the politcs of sex as they were in the first half of the 20th century.

Women like Andrea Dworkin had a direct and profound effect on their peers, on women like mom. Andrea Dworkin was a brilliant woman, and sadly for her, her passion was the illumination of the oppression and degradation of women, rather than medicine, or physics, or education. She was reviled and oft misunderstood, and most people considered her an unhinged hysterical female. Some few recognized her genius, leavened with madness and passion. And it was her passion that was infectious, that spread her views, that caused their multitude of mutations through the word-of-mouth re-tellings and the generations, until much of what today's young women believe is hardly recognizable as rooted in Dworkin's activism. If mom were alive, she'd have a candlelight vigil. She'd take over the nearby park and have a radical feminist rally, hold public readings of Intercourse and Pornography, and lecture susceptible young women on why it is important to recognize the bestial nature of men if one is going to be involved with them. Oh yes... Mom was influenced by Andrea Dworkin. And thus, so was I.