Andrea Dworkin.**

I kept getting these hits from Pinko Feminist HellCat yesterday, and I couldn't figure out why until I realized I'd been skipping over her mention of my Dworkin post from last December. Like many feminists, I'd been Googling Dworkin all weekend long to try and confirm whether or not the rumor was true, if Dworkin had actually died. I couldn't find the first word about it via traditional news sources, and Nikki Craft over at No Status Quo didn't have anything, either. This made me think maybe it wasn't true, because if Nikki Craft hadn't said anything, it wasn't real yet. If that makes sense.

What I did find were several feminist bloggers eulogizing her. They all spoke kindly of her, wrote of how Dworkin had shaped and influenced their thinking, and down to the last blogger, they prefaced their praise with, "I didn't agree with everything she wrote, but..."

How irritating, I thought. You don't just say something like that unless you inherently buy into the fact that, on some level, the person you're speaking about isn't a particularly good person. People quote Aristotle, Nietzche, Freud, and Jane Damn Fonda all the time without first covering their ass by saying, "Now, I don't agree that the body is filled with four humours, like Copernicus did, don't think I'm crazy or anything, heh heh, but his Earth-revolves-around-the-Sun theory may have had a little bit of merit there."

I worked myself up into a bit of a snit over those feminist bloggers and their subconscious "I'm no man hater!" defensiveness, until I reread my blog post and saw that I'd done the exact same thing.

Well. Don't I feel like an ass right now. No shit we don't believe in everything Dworkin said. The only person anybody is in 100% agreement with is their own self, and even then most of us are plagued with self-doubt, so I think I'm going to honor Dworkin in her death as I failed to do in her life by cutting that simpering phrase, "I don't agree with everything Dworkin said, but..." out of all future discussions I have about her. If you think that by my agreement with Dworkin about the need for marital rape laws means I hate sex and I hate men, then fuck you. You have no intellectual honesty, you are stupid, you are not worth it, fuck you. If you think my agreement with Dworkin that pedophiles can not be rehabilitated means I'm a man hater and probably fat, then fuck you.

While I'm passing out the fuck yous, I need to mention that this quote from the Washington Post obituary, written by Adam Bernstein, was particularly odious:

Her book "Intercourse" (1987) helped define her as a firebrand because some reviewers said she was labeling all sex as rape. She spent countless interviews denying that, but she had written pointedly over the years about marriage laws that she felt "mandated intercourse."

I would love to be corrected on this, and maybe it's due to reading the entire obituary and finding it seasoned with words like "strident" and phrases like "self-proclaimed radical feminist," but this particular sentence is translating in my mind as "She claims she never said all sex is rape, but she thinks that [back in the early 70's] there were marriage laws that mandated intercourse. Therefore, she *does* think all sex is rape."

When my mother first got married, a man could force his wife to "perform her wifely duty" with no fear of legal penalty. It was not a crime, and unthinkable that it even could be. Thanks to Dworkin and other second wave feminists, marital rape is illegal in all 50 states. Thanks to Dworkin, it is now considered repellent and abusive and justifiably criminal for a man to rape his wife. If Bernstein believes that changing marriage laws to ensure that domestic violence can be prosecuted is some sort of sweeping indictment of hatred toward men, well, what a pinhead. Thank goodness the majority of our lawmakers have a little touch of the Dworkinite, in this regard, and not so much of the Bernstein.

It would have been nice had Bernstein not stooped to taking bullshit potshots at her in her own obituary, but how fitting, considering the appalling amount of bullshit potshots taken at her in her lifetime, that he found it irresistible.

I wanted to read an obituary written by someone who had actually studied her work and had respect for her as a feminist philosopher (thank you, Katharine Viner), so I dreaded reading what Susie Bright had to say on the subject, since as you can probably imagine, Dworkin and Bright weren't pals.

It was a beautiful, gracious, and classy eulogy, and to say I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement. After all, Bright could have taken the advice of B'rer Rabbit, and said nothin' at all, if she couldn't say anything nice. To my surprise, she had lots of nice things to say, the most important, most fundamental truth was this:

Without Dworkin, there would be no Bright. There would be no Nina Hartley*. On a much smaller scale, there would be no me. Dworkin is the one who asked the tough questions, made the harsh, uncompromising statements about gender relations, sex, and sexuality. Dworkin is the one who, if you've read her books, makes you in turn ask tough questions of yourself.

Most importantly, Bright recognizes the importance of Dworkin's voice in modern feminism:

It was Andrea’s take-no-prisoners attitude toward patriarchy that I always liked the best. Bourgeois feminists were so BORING. They wanted to keep their maiden name and have it listed in the white pages; they wanted to get a nice corner office in the skyscraper. When I was a teenager in the 70s I couldn't relate to those concerns. It was Dworkin's heyday.

Andrea presented herself as a street fighter intellectual, a bohemian freedom fighter, and someone who wanted to get to the bottom of things. That quote about Malcolm X is apt. Malcolm pointed out “The problem is WHITE PEOPLE.” Dworkin said, “The problem is MEN.” And for all the holes that can be poked in that cloth, there is something about that grain that is absolutely true, when you are the short end of the bolt.

I loved that she dared attack the very notion of intercourse. It was the pie aimed right in the crotch of Mr. Big Stuff. It was an impossible theory, but it wasn’t absurd. There is something about literally being fucked that colors your world, pretty or ugly, and it was about time someone said so.

Dworkin mattered as a feminist, Nina Hartley matters as a feminist, and all of us in between matter, too. Nina Hartley will fight for your right to be a porn star, Andrea Dworkin will fight just as hard to tell you to think real hard about your decision first. They're both right, because they're both fighting for women's freedom.

Not that I agree with everything they say.

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*Nina Hartley posted a very passionate statement of her own about Dworkin in Susie's comments section.

**Four people, one computer. This means if you make a really dumb mistake, like saying "Galileo" instead of "Copernicus," or think you did, like saying "elegy," then wondering if "eulogy" might be better, you can't do anything about it until almost everybody else goes to sleep. I want a laptop so badly, I could cry.