Andrea Dworkin died 10 years ago this week. She had become famous in the early 1980s for the ordinance that she and the legal scholar Catherine McKinnon had drafted for Minneapolis, recognising pornography as sex discrimination and a violation of women’s civil rights. Women involved in pornography were called to testify from all over America. It was an inventive use of civil law; rather than banning or censoring pornography, it would have enabled victims of the porn industry to claim damages and recognition for the harm it caused.
When Andrea and I met in Brighton in 1996, we connected instantly. There was something intoxicating about getting to know a woman who had been vilified as a man-hating misery but who was, in fact, a warm, open-minded intellectual. Over the next eight years, Andrea and I wrote and spoke regularly, and met up whenever we happened to be in the same country. In late 1998, she sent me the manuscript of Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation . I devoured it, gasping in wonder at the beautiful prose, and the brilliance of its reasoning. But I did not hear from Andrea for much of 1999 until I received a 10-page handwritten fax in July that year. The writing started out neat and tidy, but by the end was almost unreadable. The first line broke my heart.
“Dear Julie. You have not heard from me because in May the unthinkable happened. While I was on vacation in Paris I was drugged and raped. I do not think I can bear this.”
Andrea was never the same again. Her health suffered; the last time we met, in September 2004, she had lost a huge amount of weight as a result of having a gastric band fitted in an attempt to deal with her dangerous obesity.
But during that visit Andrea was in good spirits and we talked of reviving the feminist anti-pornography movement in Europe which was, we feared, dying. “The libertarians are winning this war, Julie,” Andrea said as we sat in her hotel room. “If we give up now, younger generations of women will be told porn is good for them and they will believe it.”
Andrea’s writing and speaking has many legacies, but perhaps the key lesson she taught us was how to conduct ourselves during battle.
There can be no doubt that the feminist fight against men’s sexual, domestic and cultural violence towards women and girls is a bloody and dangerous war. But Andrea never forgot her manners or her humanity in the trenches. Andrea was fuelled not by hatred of her enemy — male supremacy — but of love for the idea of a new world in which sexual sadism was obsolete.
Andrea reminded us that men occupy a sex class that is handed power at birth, and that there is nothing “natural” about male dominance or female submission. In many ways, despite the several knocks she took, Andrea was the most optimistic feminist I ever met.
When the pornographers took their revenge on Andrea, publishing a nasty, sexually explicit cartoon parody of her, she sued, but lost. Despite finding herself painted as a national hate figure, accused of attempting to dismantle the precious First Amendment, Andrea never gave up engaging with individuals who fundamentally disagreed with her.
In today’s world of keyboard warrior activism, Andrea’s life should be a reminder to feminists, and other activists, that nothing compares to meeting and talking to people with whom you wish to find common ground. Andrea’s heart had been ripped to shreds during a lifetime of abuse, but never did she forget her place in the women’s liberation movement. Without Andrea, generations of feminists would be wilfully ignorant about the meaning and effect of pornography, as well as how to overcome a desire for male approval in order to tell the truth about women’s lives. That is not all that today’s feminists could learn from Andrea. There is the respect she had for the human rights defenders who came before her, and her loyalty to other women in the struggle who were attacked by those antagonistic to our aims and beliefs. There was her sheer courage, in never backing down or renouncing her principles because it would make life easier or pay dividends; that was a defining characteristic of Andrea, as was daring to hate the men who hated women.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
