Dworkin herself never wrote that, though she did deem a common sex act tantamount to colonialism: “The woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally.” Her verdict on pornography was even more extreme, equating fantasies of domination and submission with a fascist wish-fulfillment - “Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated.” The editors, Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, present a chronological selection from Dworkin’s books, essays, novels and unpublished fragments, making it clear that her “restless output,” as Fateman puts it in her excellent introduction, amounted to much more than saying that all sex is rape. “Last Days at Hot Slit,” a new anthology of Dworkin’s work, shows that the caricature of her as a simplistic man-hater, a termagant in overalls, could only be sustained by not reading what she actually wrote. This was someone who thought deeply and read widely and was preoccupied with questions not only of justice but also of style.
The hallmarks of Dworkin’s writing are all there: the confident strut the incantatory repetition the startling, belligerent language the ruthless whittling down of options to a single, irrevocable point (“my only chance”). “I would have to write a prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography.” “My only chance to be believed is to find a way of writing bolder and stronger than woman-hating itself - smarter, deeper, colder,” she wrote in a 1995 essay. So Dworkin decided early on to take a page from the enemy’s playbook. Being conciliatory and ingratiating, submitting oneself as sweet and quiet and ultimately harmless - those were precisely the kinds of tactics with which an individual woman, conditioned to survive on men’s terms, might obtain a reprieve but not respect. She was determined to show how women could never be free as long as they lived in a world that was structured by men’s ambitions, men’s needs, men’s desires.ĭworkin, who died in 2005 at 58, knew that in fighting this battle she would confront the problem that any woman faced whenever it was a case of her word against his: how to be believed. In wartime, no strategy is off the table, and the militant feminist Andrea Dworkin was fighting a war - one she didn’t choose, she said, but one that the patriarchy had foisted on her.
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