Weekly Worker 573 Thursday April 21 2005

What did Andrea Dworkin do for women?

“Pornography is becoming the contemporary mechanism for controlling women, and it is a control that is exercised through sheer terror” - Andrea Dworkin

A feminist friend once said to me some years ago that all feminists admire Andrea Dworkin. Well, this one certainly doesn’t, went my reply! It is strange writing an obituary of one sort or another for a feminist I opposed politically. I rejected Dworkin’s brand of feminism and became a member of Feminists Against Censorship in the early 1990s. Much of my knowledge regarding Andrea Dworkin is around the pornography debate and which I will mainly focus on.

Andrea Dworkin: saw censorship as an answer to women’s oppression

I first read Dworkin’s book Pornography: men possessing women many years ago and because of her death I had another read of it. The book initially depressed and filled me with despair. There did not seem to be much political light at the end of the tunnel. The problem was that sexual desire and its public expression as pornography was the thing responsible for the oppression of women. I still feel the same despair after rereading her so-called seminal book.

My main introduction to Andrea Dworkin came during the mid-1980s. The issue which dominated feminism was pornography or, to quote Robin Morgan, “Porn is the theory; rape is the practice.” Dworkin’s arguments centred on male dominance and she depicted patriarchy as a monolithic, unchanging entity. There was no attempt at analysing capitalism and class regarding the oppression of women. Dworkin believed that “the ideology of male sexual domination posits that men are superior to women by virtue of their penises”. She described the penis as a symbol of terror and claimed that women will be ‘free’ when pornography no longer exists.

What struck me about the book was that for a woman who loathed porn she quoted reams of the stuff - from stories in porn mags, to Marquis de Sade to Georges Bataille’s Story of the eye. Dworkin’s understanding of pornography was very literal: this is what men really want to do to women. It is not seen as an act of the imagination or as metaphorical in any way.

It never ceased to amaze me how feminists could take her views seriously. And now with her death we have the obituaries which glorify her anti-pornography crusade and make her out as some kind of saint. The question I ask is, what did Andrea Dworkin do for women?

Andrea Dworkin joined forces with lawyer Catherine MacKinnon who drafted a city ordinance in Minneapolis in 1983. It defined the production, sale and exhibition of porn, as well as the harm porn does. Several other cities took a similar initiative, such as Indianapolis, though the ordinance there was declared unconstitutional under the first amendment. This led to a commission on pornography, appointed in May 1985 by the then attorney general, Edwin Meese III, which became known as the Meese Commission. Witnesses included spokespersons like the Citizens for Decency for Law and the National Federation for Decency, to name but two. Dworkin, MacKinnon and other pro-censorship supporters testified at great length about the influences of pornography.

What always concerned me was the alliances Dworkin and MacKinnon made to get their legislation through. They aligned themselves with the ‘moral majority’ (which included Coalition for a Clean Community and Citizens for Decency), who cared not about the exploitation and objectification of women, but saw porn as ‘smut’. Anything which depicted sex was bad to these people. Many of them were involved in ‘Stop ERA’ (the equal rights amendment) and championed rolling back the gains the women’s liberation movement had made over the years.

One of them, a Reverend Dixon stated: “Abortion is murder. ERA would destroy the family and the free enterprise system. Homosexuality ought to be a felony” (L Segal and M McIntosh [eds] Caught looking: feminism, pornography and censorship London 1992, p67). A strange and reactionary bedfellow for feminists!

The influence of radical feminism was detrimental to the women’s movement and it smacked of a new puritanism. There always seemed a kind of religious meaning to Dworkin’s feminism. She ‘suffered’ for her art. The sermonising, finger-wagging moralism of radical feminism has served no purpose at all and Dworkin helped to create this. To Dworkin, women were passive victims of male domination. There is no account of women as sexual beings with their own sexual desires, let alone any need for women to express or discuss their sexual desires in public. Radical feminism held up the censorship of pornography as the panacea for the oppression women experience in society.

So what did she do for women? Dworkin exposed violence against women as a social reality, but she made porn the bogeyman. Pornography was Dworkin’s obsession. Is pornography not a point on a continuum of sexist imagery, however?

I will end with a quote from Elizabeth Wilson, which really sums up the porn debate and what I feel is the overall contribution Andrea Dworkin made to feminism: “To have made pornography both the main cause of women’s oppression and its main form of expression is to have wiped out almost the whole of the feminist agenda, and to have created a new moral purity movement for our new (authoritarian) times” (K Ellis [ed] Sex exposed: sexuality and the pornography debate East Haven 1992, p28).
Louise Whittle

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