April 12, 2005

Andrea Dworkin and Me
by Lorraine Berry

Andrea Dworkin died over the weekend. I mourn her, even as I acknowledge how much I disagreed with her.

What follows is a personal reflection on Dworkin: it's not intended to represent her entire body of work, but I hope, in the interweaving of Dworkin's theories and my experiences, to open up a space for dialogue among feminists for a discussion of her legacy.

I grew up in the 1960's and 1970's. I experienced sexism, sometimes in incredibly hurtful ways. The first feminist in my life was my father, who was always there to help me sort out why boys had said horrible things to me (like telling me that girls were not allowed to be medical doctors) and reminding me that there was nothing I could not do simply because I was a girl.

In 1980, I went off to college. My first semester, I took my first women's studies course, and the very first book we read was Andrea Dworkin's Woman Hating. She told me about things I had never heard of. I was a white girl from a small town in Western Washington: I knew nothing about practices like foot binding. I knew about the witches, of course, but it was Dworkin who tied all of these things together and presented a world to me that was virulently anti-woman, and had been, seemingly since the beginning of recorded history.

I remember being wounded by that book. My reactions to it were visceral. I remembered wondering if it was okay that I was heterosexual, how I could have relationships with men if the whole history of my sex was one of oppression at the hands of those we loved.

Not surprisingly, I made gender the focus of my studies as an undergraduate and graduate student. I went on to read copious quantities of feminist, post-colonial, post-structuralist, Marxist, and various other theories to try to come to an understanding of gender. The one that came to inform so much of my work was the one put forward by Joan W. Scott, a theory that argued that gender was a relationship of power, not of sex. And that in analyzing power relations, one could see “gendered” relations at play. So, for example, I was able to see in my studies of witches, that while a majority of those accused of witchcraft were women, that even the men accused of witchcraft were coded as feminine by those who persecuted them. That similar power dynamics were at play between Christian and Jew. And that as a white woman, I could see colonial relationships as gendered, too.

So, for me, notions of “misogyny” were not all that useful as terms of analysis. I became one of those “academic feminists.” Did I see sexism in my culture? Of course. Do I still sexism in my culture? Of course. And plenty of misogyny, too. But I still see those power dynamics at work, too.

But while many feminists went off in the various directions dicated by a multitude of theories, Dworkin continued to hammer away at the very real misogyny that she saw around her. For Dworkin, however, that misogyny began in the sexual relationship between men and women; for her, penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse was domination played out at the most intimate level. As she wrote in Intercourse

A human being has a body that is inviolate; and when it is violated, it is abused. A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. The discourse of male truth--literature, science, philosophy, pornography--calls that penetration violation. This it does with some consistency and some confidence. Violation is a synonym for intercourse. At the same time, the penetration is taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use; it is appropriate to enter her, to push into ("violate") the boundaries of her body. She is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include physical privacy. She is, in fact, human by a standard that precludes physical privacy, since to keep a man out altogether and for a lifetime is deviant in the extreme, a psychopathology, a repudiation of the way in which she is expected to manifest her humanity.

There is a deep recognition in culture and in experience that intercourse is both the normal use of a woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a violative abuse, her privacy irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable. And it is recognized that the use and abuse are not distinct phenomena but somehow a synthesized reality: both are true at the same time as if they were one harmonious truth instead of mutually exclusive contradictions. Intercourse in reality is a use and an abuse simultaneously, experienced and described as such, the act parlayed into the illuminated heights of religious duty and the dark recesses of morbid and dirty brutality. She, a human being, is supposed to have a privacy that is absolute; except that she, a woman, has a hole between her legs that men can, must, do enter. This hole, her hole, is synonymous with entry. A man has an anus that can be entered, but his anus is not synonymous with entry. A woman has an anus that can be entered, but her anus is not synonymous with entry. The slit between her legs, so simple, so hidden-- frankly, so innocent-- for instance, to the child who looks with a mirror to see if it could be true--is there an entrance to her body down there? and something big comes into it? (how?) and something as big as a baby comes out of it? (how?) and doesn't that hurt?--that slit which means entry into her-- intercourse--appears to be the key to women's lower human status. By definition, as the God who does not exist made her, she is intended to have a lesser privacy, a lesser integrity of the body, a lesser sense of self, since her body can be physically occupied and in the occupation taken over. By definition, as the God who does not exist made her, this lesser privacy, this lesser integrity, this lesser self, establishes her lesser significance: not just in the world of social policy but in the world of bare, true, real existence. She is defined by how she is made, that hole, which is synonymous with entry; and intercourse, the act fundamental to existence, has consequences to her being that may be intrinsic, not socially imposed.

As a heterosexual woman who enjoys penis-in-vagina intercourse, I was pretty fucked. In reading Dworkin, I found no space in which I could be a subject. Dworkin, along with Catherine MacKinnon, who argued in "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 635 (1983), that "sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object." Where, in these theories, was the space for someone like me?

I couldn't find one, and thus, read MacKinnon and Dworkin, but didn't subscribe to the theories they put forth. As much as Dworkin had opened my eyes to the sheer viciousness of misogyny, I felt unable to continue following her down a path where my enjoyment of intercourse, my relationships with men, somehow made me complicit in my own suffering.

Dworkin continued to document male dominance of women, and in 1981, wrote Pornography.

She continued the theme in 1981 in Pornography, possibly her most influential book. She wrote: "Pornography is a celebration of rape and injury to women; it's a kind of union for rapists, a way of legitimising rape and formalising male supremacy in our society." She said that pornography is both a cause of male violence and an expression of male dominance, that women who enjoy porn are harming women, and that lesbian porn is self-hating. She had no time for the textual analysis of porn so beloved of academia; what she cared about was the women performing in the films, the harm they suffered, and what other women had to suffer as a result of men watching porn.

Pornography, she argued, primed men for rape. Dworkin and MacKinnon eventually put their objections to pornography into action, drafting model legislation that would treat pornography as a civil rights violation and allow women who had been injured by porn to bring suit against its purveyors. Those injured included not only actresses in pornography, for example, but any woman who felt that her rape was the result of her attacker's having viewed pornography. Since Dworkin argued that pornography led to rape, it was essential to her that its victims had recourse.

What horrifed many feminists, myself included, were the supporters that Dworkin and MacKinnon atttracted. Christian Fundamentalists joined the anti-porn bandwagon, and some of us watched in pained disbelief as people whose other politics were about as misogynist as one could get, joined with these two prominent feminists to oppose pornography.

And here, again, I parted ways with MacKinnon and Dworkin. Full disclosure: I write erotica, and I am paid to do so. I celebrate the female body, and I celebrate sexual contact between bodies. I write mostly heterosexual erotica; consequently, in my work, I explore the various facets of coupling, some of which include domination and submission, power, penetration. Does this make me a bad feminist? I don't think so. Perhaps Ms. Dworkin would have seen me as a dupe of the system, a woman who writes the kinds of things that inflames men's lusts and that therefore, I should take responsibility for the consequences of that.

My argument is that if there is something illegal being perpetrated in a pornographic film: murder, rape, pedophilia, then that's the crime. Not the portrayal of sex. I know that some are going to argue that there is no difference between good porn and bad porn, but I would argue that there are no black-and-white answers on this. As with everything else on this earth, there's a gray zone, and as grownups, it's our responsibility to struggle with those gray areas. It's too fucking easy to say something's “right” or “wrong.”

And, as a feminist, the First Amendment sometimes feels as if it is the only thing standing between me and those who would silence us for speaking out. I'm one of those Voltaire-type free speech people: you know, the "defend to the death your right to say it" kind of people, and while I'm not a fan of all pornography, as long as it doesn't show a crime being committed, it's none of my business what gets people off.

Andrea Dworkin was the victim of rape ten years ago. She spoke eloquently about the horrible damage that had been done to her by the man who raped her. Her pain was wrenching. I hope that she found some peace of mind after the attack. Her physical pain as she dealt with the physical ailments that crippled her must have been awful. She died too young and too soon. But I hope that at the end, she did not suffer.

She possessed a great mind and a great spirit. Hers is a difficult legacy, but it is a legacy, and I am grateful, still, that it was Ms. Dworkin's anger that first gave rise to questions I have pursued my entire adult life.
RIP Andrea Dworkin: 1946-2005

For more on Dworkin:
Dworkin
The Dworkin-Irving exchange
Irving
Dworkin response
Irving encore

Posted by in Censorship, Feminism, Pornography, Testimonial, Violence
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Found inApril 15, 2005 01:11 PM

Say it loud, say it proud!