Andrea Dworkin

A part of me feels very bad for Andrea, because she was obviously a miserable human being. But the hijacking of feminism by Dworkin and other radicals caused a backlash that is still hurting women today. %0D %0D She was a fabulist: she invented a past as an abused hooker; she invented her supposed lesbianism; she invented a rape in Paris toward the end of her life. Of course, all the time living with John Stoltenberg, who himself has issues up the wazoo.

I'm not sure, OP. Good question.

Fabulist is a very good word for her, though, r1. I'm more than willing to concede that movements from time to time need fabulists, even though I disagreed vehemently with her. I came in contact with her a couple of times in my life, in Minneapolis in the 80s and in Brooklyn in the 90s. She indeed did seem to be a very unhappy person, but I hope she had some moments of peace.

I could never buy into her premise that the presentation of sex itself, especially in porn, was a manifestation of political inequality. That struck me more as a Victorian internalization, and a denial of power of straight women and gay men, questioning that "getting fucked" or any form of sex with a man could be a joyful experience, than a means of empowerment. The fact that she was apparently heterosexual did little to remedy this.

Without her, we'd have to Nan Michiganwoman

What R1 said, but he/she said it much better than I could have

Was she straight all her life?

R5 I'm not really sure, but I have heard that she was.

She was a fake lesbian in that she was never a lesbian, just wanted to be one.

Is 'fabulist' spin for 'liar'?

She was a nutter, but I'll admit her novels are pretty good. Some of her essays, like the one about her visit to the Holocaust museum, are very good.

None of it.

What a weird thing to want to be a lesbo when you're not one. Especially when there are lesbians who would kill to be straight.

Anytime a sex or abuse issue became a hot topic or national news, Andrea always seemed to have a story about how she was a victim of whatever the issue was. When the McMartin school trial was going on in the 80's and stranger abductions were in the news quite a bit, Andrea wrote a story about being in a movie theater and being molested by a man in a trench coat or something like that. When prostitutes turning up dead was in the headlines, Andrea recounted her own time as a prostitute. When prisoner abuse was a hot topic, Andrea recounted being violated at a prison. When domestic violence was a hot topic, Andrea wrote about a ex husband in Europe who abused her.

The rape in Paris in 1999 was similar. Date rape drugs were a hot button issue at the time when Andrea claimed she was drugged and raped in Paris.

I think Time or Newsweek killed a piece they were going to write about her when she refused to give them any information about the ex-husband who beat her in order to verify the claims. Interestingly, Dworkin had a great relationship with her dad but a contentious one with her mother.

R12 that does not mean it's a lie. All that anger must have come from somewhere.

She was a fucking nutcase and the reason women today don't feel comfortable calling themselves "feminists." Thanks a pantload, Andrea!

r13 - as you say. But NO WAY could it have come from *everything* she said...

Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon and their ilk hijacked the feminist movement and changed the public perception of feminists to mean a bunch of strident, humorless victims who got offended by everything. It turned so many people, including young women, off to the true ideals of feminism and to this day Andrea Dworkin is what a "typical feminist" is like in the eyes of the public. She did a real disservice to everyone. Yes, she was a total fucking nutcase.

R16 -- a large part of that problem was the media -- they always treated feminism as a joke and when people like Dworkin appeared, they flocked to cover her as verification of their prejudices. The media loves to embrace the negative stereotype, as seen in hip-hop and rap thuggery (Blacks), Tiger Mom (Asians) and our retarded LA Mayor (Latinos).

I'm sorry you feel that way R16, I think what has put young women off feminism is the fact that women have not attained anything and they're still as powerless as they were. And this has nothing to do with Andrea but with the fact that women haven't been smart enough to break away from all the trash.

She was a nutcase, for sure. But she was also a vehement careerist. She cared less about the well-being of her "sisters" than she did about keeping herself in the public eye and selling her screeds.

Her involvement with Catherine MacKinnon, Linda Lovelace, and the anti-pornography movement discredited her among intellectuals and sent her into the arms of the far right-wing.

John Stoltenberg is a joke and should be considered an enemy of gays, lesbians, and anybody seeking sexual freedom. Another careerist.

These are the type of people who use the struggles of the marginalized to further their own agendas and personal gains. They sneak in, perhaps with genuine convictions, into a movement and then do all they can to exploit the movement and the people around them to their own selfish ends.

R18, I can vote, own property, go to work, go to war, stay at home, have kids, not have kids and generally have a fucking choice. That's not powerlessness to me.

R17, I totally agree.

[quote]These are the type of people who use the struggles of the marginalized to further their own agendas and personal gains. They sneak in, perhaps with genuine convictions, into a movement and then do all they can to exploit the movement and the people around them to their own selfish ends.

Like Kennedys, the co-founders of the NAACP, and most (true) socialists, who call such maneuvering "alliances."

r20 YOU may be able to a lot of those things, but a lot of women in this country are still having rights and opportunities taken away from them at every turn. Try not to be such a self-absorbed fool and read something every once in a while.

"Especially when there are lesbians who would kill to be straight"%0D %0D Um, no.

r21 Sorry, I wasn't aware I'd supported those groups by default. Oh, I hadn't. So, what was your point?

She lost a lot of weight shortly before she died. I don't think even Stoltenberg believed the story about being raped in Paris.

Here is the article she wrote about the Paris rape:%0D %0D "John looked for any other explanation than rape. He abandoned me emotionally. Now a year has passed and sometimes he's with me in his heart and sometimes not."%0D

But now that she's dead, Stoltenberg states it as fact: "At the age of 52, Andrea was drug-raped in a hotel in Paris."

She really had a thing abut men chewing on her huh? I had kinda allways given her the benefit of the doubt about the rape untill I read R26's link and sure enough, in her own words, she's writing about a bruise that she got from being chewed, same as in one of her books I read a gazillion years ago in which some pimp chews on her breasts and her clitoris.

[quote]She was a fake lesbian in that she was never a lesbian, just wanted to be one.

She started that tread did she?! She deserves a punch in the face just for that!

OMG She is SO full of shit. She wrote : A few days later, on a Sunday, at the suggestion of my mate, John, at home in Brooklyn, I placed a call from Paris to my New York feminist gynaecologist of more than a decade. I said that I thought I had been drugged and raped. She said that a gynaecological exam wouldn't prove anything one way or the other and that the call from me convinced her that she should have an unlisted phone number. I thanked her (I'm a girl) and collapsed in tears. %0D %0D %0D %0D Bullshit. NO doctor, especialy a gynecologist, would ever say those things.

I thought the same thing r30. I would think a doctor would say: Go report this to the police IMMEDIATELY. Don't shower or pee yet because you could destroy evidence. Try to remember all the details you can.

A doctor across the Atlantic Ocean cannot say that an exam wouldn't prove anything. But it feeds Dworkin's whole 'what a world, what a world' mindset.

Stoltenberg had to take the AARP job to support himself and Andrea. I wonder if the Paris rape story was Andrea's last attempt to get back into the spotlight and put her back on the speaking tour circuit. It backfired.

Stoltenberg wrote about how Andrea's health went into rapid decline because of her rape. Of course it had nothing to do with her being morbidly obese for a big chunk of her adult life, not did it have anything to do with her being a smoker.

She died around the same time as that other barrel of laughs, Susan Sontag.

Re: r25: And THAT, my friends, is a Cane Face.

Yeah, something has never rung true about her stories. They smack of someone wanting status as a glamor victim. She obviously did have really bad sexual issues, but I think she hid their origins. It could have been a body image issue. Vut I resent her implications about how the act of rape is implicit in regular sex. I've been raped and it sucked but it's completely different than consensual sex, even if consensual sex involves power play.

I also hate the stupid implication that rape destroys people permanently. Noted famewhore Auntie Camille Paglia wrote an essay on the subject that I always agreed with. It basically said that how a person reacts to a rape has a lot to do with their relationship to sex in the first place. And it's wrong to tell someone that they will never get over it and they will be scarred for life. When Paglia hits it right, she hits it right even though she spends a lot of time spewing gibberish.

Andrea herself in that article can't square the issue of power in the drug rape (god I hate that phrase) scenario. "I was unconscious, I thought he was supposed to be getting off on my terror!!!"

Why not just confront the bartender and the waiter?

The reason Stoltenberg finally gave in and repeated the story was because it was the only explanation why these men would pork her.

Anyone know where in DC she lived?

[quote]None of it.

No, most of it.

r13 it comes from a borderline personality disorder. I'm sure little to none of it actually happened.

I thought the Paris rape was allegory.

I'm with R16. Also, Naomi Wolf is more relevant, way hotter and has a sense of humor.

I don't think Dworkin gave feminism a bad name. Most women don't even know who she is. She was a convenient scapegoat for the inconvenient truth that feminism is. Men are not willing to share power. Never have been, never will be.

"I thought the Paris rape was allegory."

How did you come up with that? There was nothing at all allegorical about her claims.

If I took this all to be gospel, Andrea Dworkin was the type who, if it weren't for bad luck she would have no luck.

Whatever her faults about making things up in the past, the most important thing is that her death is real, and for that we can thank her for at last having the integrity not to let us down with the one thing that ultimately matters.

you mean thank her for dying?

The hell are you people talking about? Andrea Dworkin isn't the reason feminism gets such a bad name. Men never gave a rat's ass about women's issues either way. To men, we're subhuman. But she proved a point, did she not? When women are raped, are they taken at their word? No, they aren't. What would Andrea get out of lying about these things? I'm no rad fem, but I see the same thing happen with women every single day. A woman gets raped and if she's mentally ill or has a disability, her story isn't taken seriously. It's disgusting how women can't even get support amongst their own kind.

r20 - where are women having rights taken from them in this country? Exactly nowhere.

That comment was for r18.

She was a fatty

LOL R11, who never met a lesbian, or "lesbo" in real life.

[quote]I'm no rad fem,%0D %0D Uh-huh.

"But she proved a point, did she not? When women are raped, are they taken at their word? No, they aren't. What would Andrea get out of lying about these things?"%0D %0D Because some people, men and women, have serious mental illnesses. Because they get attention for talking about their victimization. Because even if they made up the story and people are dubious about the claim, they can say it demonstrates cultural misogyny.

Definitely a fake lesbian. She lived with John for decades and John is a fake gay man. John also wrote all of her stuff for her (or shall we say "edited"). He's now part of the AARP.

[quote]She was a convenient scapegoat for the inconvenient truth that feminism is. Men are not willing to share power. Never have been, never will be.

Another inconvenient truth is that the majority of women like being women and don't aspire to be men. Most women are willing to trade power for love.

[quote]What would Andrea get out of lying about these things?

She made her career out of being a victim, so I will let you answer that.

[quote]But she proved a point, did she not? When women are raped, are they taken at their word?

She did prove a point, that making false accusations about rape hurt real victims of rape and sexual abuse.

[quote]A woman gets raped and if she's mentally ill or has a disability, her story isn't taken seriously. It's disgusting how women can't even get support amongst their own kind.

I have no doubt that Dworkin was mentally ill. Her morbid obesity, lack of hygiene, an pathological need to be a victim are indicators that Dworkin had serious unaddressed mental health issues. None of those things were the reason her story wasn't taken seriously.

Lets see someone who was an "expert" or rape and sexual abuse issues was raped herself but did not contact police, did not know what to do after she thought she might have been raped, and couldn't/wouldn't provide any real details of the attack. When pressed she then claimed that anyone who questioned her was raping her all over again. She did this before when Time or Newsweek was going to run a in depth profile on her and was wanting to verify some details about Dworkn's time in Europe when she said she was severely beaten by her ex husband. The magazine was unable to verify an ex husband ever existed and when asked Dworkin again claimed that the magazine was violating her all over again. The piece was killed.

Not to mention that Dworkin's description of the rape mirrors what she wrote as fiction years before.

She reminds me of those people who, no matter what happened to you, something WORSE happened to them.

Andrea Dworking was a big, fat, furious, white Tawana Brawley. The stories she told were all true. Even if they weren't HERS, per se.

[quote][bold]Andrea Dworkin | How much of her life was fiction?[/bold]%0D %0D %0D All of it.%0D %0D

One doesn't have to aspire to be a man in order to want to be treated equally.

I don't believe that Andrea Dworkin made it bad to be a feminist, because the average woman (or man) has never heard of her. When people think of feminists, they think of Gloria Steinem or perhaps Betty Friedan. I think many men just don't want to see women getting access to power, so they did their best to smear feminism and twist it's idealogy.

"Most women are willing to trade power for love."

Most powerful women dont trade power for love.

I think that ideally, most women would want the option of being able to have both power and love.

No one has done more harm to feminism than Camille Paglia.%0D %0D And Madonna.%0D %0D

I read the drug rape article. She didn't name the hotel she was staying at, didn't notify hotel security, and claimed that the bartender and another hotel worker raped her. Hotel logs and records would have easily identified who was working that day.

Stoltenberg pretty much shriveled away.

If "love" is contingent upon a power trade, that's not love, is it?

R63 has forgotten Catherine MacKinnon

To Post 11:

I have been a lesbian and activist all of my life (60 years old now) and I have NEVER met another lesbian who wished to be straight. Far less that they would 'kill to be straight'.

Every morning I get up and think: 'Thank Goddess I'm a lesbian'.

Are the big words too difficult for you, R8? Maybe your vocabulary will improve in middle school.

Who da fuck am this?

....

Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end.

Nearly 50 people sank on that ship.