Dworkinaissance

Who's afraid of Andrea Dworkin?

We are at the tail end of a decade in which the feminist movement was defined by positivity— sex positivity, body positivity, and many more veins of pastel pink assertion. To be a woman is to be empowered and sexy. It is to exercise our free will to whatever ends we choose, so long as they are in celebration of our femininity. Our sensual, inbuilt, divine feminine energy. This manifests in many ways: Buying sex toys is somehow feminist now. Getting lip filler is empowering and a feminist choice. A woman with a PhD is calling herself a bimbo. Everything is bigger and more. We are girlbosses, we are SHE-EOs, we are holding hands in the Dove campaign at the end of the rainbow. 

This is at least the postfeminist dream, sold to us by corporations and influencers and many other entities in between. In a revolution that began with #Girlboss and the SlutWalk and ended with ‘I’m just a girl’ and BimboCore, choice feminism seemed a new and exciting pinnacle of the women’s movement. But now the tide is turning. There is a sentiment emerging that these movements towards positivity and empowerment were not really in service of women, but in service of capitalist and patriarchal structures. To quote the woman of the hour, we are forgetting that we exist in the context of all in which we live and what came before us. Choices do not take place in a vacuum. It is impossible to decide to get lip filler ‘for yourself’. There is no way to make bragging about your blowjob skills a feminist act. That is not to say these things are inherently bad or wrong, only that they are inherently in service of patriarchal capitalism. Many things we do every day are— I don’t put on mascara and blush to achieve a more well rounded internal sense of self, I do it in accordance with beauty standards taught to me by a patriarchal society and the profit motives of the multi trillion pound beauty industry. I acknowledge the reality of this context. Similarly, many commentators over the last couple years have pointed to a decline in sex positivity among Gen Z. Guardian journalist Gaby Hinsliff wrote about this in 2022, speaking to young women who felt pressured into seeming ‘cool with’ kinky sex and hook up culture but later felt it had been emotionally damaging. Through her article (and anecdotal evidence from my peers), it seems evident this has become the norm among young men. 

Women on social media are increasingly vocalising their unhappiness with this. The insult ‘pornbrained’ has become a common rebuttal to men’s overt degrading sexualisation of their female peers. 

After years of sex positivity, the feminist boomerang is returning home. Like the radical feminists of the 1960s, feminists today are becoming increasingly hostile towards porn, the sex industry, and hookup culture. And whose work better exemplifies the anti-male reactionary feminism of that era than Andrea Dworkin?

Dworkin is a figure much vilified in mainstream depictions of her work. She is often seen as unreasonable and man-hating. She’s an easy target for anti-feminists, or for liberal feminists who want to separate themselves from that kind of (radical) feminism. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest a lot of this vitriol is tied to her physical appearance, Dworkin was a fat woman who did not wear makeup or style her hair or dress fashionably. She is not particularly sexually desirable. She was, in the societal eye, unfuckable. To this day that is still an ‘insult’ thrown at some feminists and a way to attempt to discredit them. Feminists and their opponents alike, all of whom have evidently not read any of her work, accuse her of labelling heterosexuality as evil and inherently exploitative, men as irredeemable, heterosexual sex as wrong, and most famously, that ‘all sex is rape’. 

The truth behind this last statement is a prime example of how her work has been wilfully misunderstood. The original quote is ‘Violation is a synonym for intercourse’. In the passage where it appears, Dworkin discusses the patriarchal cultural idea that the vagina is ‘made for’ penetration: that is its purpose. To be penetrated, possibly impregnated, and to give birth. She says that this mindset implies to woman that she is ‘defined by how she is made, that hole, which is synonymous with entry; and intercourse, the act fundamental to existence, has consequences to her being that may be intrinsic, not socially imposed.’ She is speaking about the way that cultural ideas and biology are so intertwined, and I think she has a point. The burdens of sex overwhelmingly lie on women: the risk of unwanted pregnancy especially, as well as a higher likelihood of experiencing pain and discomfort during sex. The burden of contraception and protection against STIs is often placed on women, as well as the burden of clear and informed consent. It is the difference between fucking and being fucked. This isn’t to say that Dworkin’s assessment is entirely correct, there’s a lot I disagree with, but it’s undeniable that the vulnerability of having something, or someone, inside of you, has certain implications both within sex and within society at large. The survival of the human race being dependent on women consenting to this penetration, this violation of privacy and bodily integrity, makes it central to the way societies view women. The personal remains political, and to try to disentangle what happens behind bedroom doors from what happens beyond them is a naive and sisyphean task. 

I have spent the last couple weeks reading Intercourse, and this is just one example of how I’ve found Dworkin’s work to be drastically misrepresented in the public eye. To call her ‘anti-sex’ is so far from the truth. The way Dworkin writes about sex is heart wrenchingly beautiful. 

‘Sometimes, the skin comes off in sex. The people merge, skinless. The body loses its boundaries. We are each in these separate bodies; and then, with someone and not with someone else, the skin dissolves altogether; and what touches is unspeakably, grotesquely visceral, not inside language or conceptualization, not inside time; raw, blood and fat and muscle and bone, unmediated by form or formal limits. There is no physical distance, no self-consciousness, nothing withdrawn or private or alienated, no existence outside physical touch. The skin collapses as a boundary—it has no meaning; time is gone—it too has no meaning; there is no outside. Instead, there is necessity, nothing else—being driven, physical immersion in each other but with no experience of “each other” as separate entities coming together. There is only touch, no boundaries; there is only the nameless experience of physical contact, which is life; there is no solace, except in this contact; without it, there is unbearable physical pain, absolute, not lessened by distraction, unreached by normalcy—nearly an amputation, the skin hacked off, slashed open; violent hurt.’

This is not a woman who is against sex. This is a woman who understands the deep deep vulnerability of a sexual encounter, the emotional depth and rawness it entails. She understands its importance, and hence has undertaken to explore it in its fullness, its social implications and the ways it is misused and wielded as a tool of oppression. She may not reach the same conclusions that I would on some fronts, but she offers a difficult and vulnerable analysis of the structures of oppression tied up in an incredibly human act. 

So why have I embarked on this Dworkin defence crusade? To be certain, she has some ideas I disagree with. I find her perspectives on pornography to be lacking in nuance, and some of her writing on sex could use a bit more of an intersectional exploration. Nonetheless, I think her contributions to the feminist movement are real and important, and are more relevant now than ever. As covered in the Financial Times earlier this year, young men and women are becoming increasingly politically polarised. Women are continuing on the leftwards trajectory that most young generations go down, while young men are becoming increasingly conservative. The contrast is at its worst in South Korea, where an already historically misogynistic society has taken an even more drastic turn. This has led to the birth of the Dworkin-esque feminist separatist movement, 4B. Anna Louise Susssman’s excellent 2023 article in The Cut explores  this radical feminist rejection of South Korea’s rigid patriarchal society and aggressive pro-natalism in which young women are swearing off heterosexual sex, dating, and marriage, as well as birth. Some of these women are lesbians, but some are simply swearing to celibacy because of the intensely patriarchal society and ideas around dating. Even in countries where the divide is less extreme there is a shift happening. Women are becoming increasingly critical of sex positivity and pornography, especially its impact on young people. In her book Tomorrow the Sex Will Be Good Again Katherine Angel writes about how sex positive ‘consent culture’ has created an overly formalistic procedure of ‘acquiring consent’ that puts the burden on women and allows men to feel like they’ve ticked the box, so to speak. In an article where she discusses Angel’s work, Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (who I incidentally took a class with in undergrad) says the following: 

‘I remember the first time a friend told me that she had been choked without her consent during sex. I was in my early 20s, and it hadn’t been the first time for her – she had also been slapped and had her hair pulled, all by men she had met online – but I was shocked and concerned. “It’s as though he was trying to do what he has seen in porn,” she said. As our 20s progressed, my single friends came to feel that a transactional dating environment only exacerbated the problem: the men they met would watch porn, then “order” a woman on Tinder to act out what they had seen. It felt, by all accounts, mechanistic, depressing and disempowering.’

This anecdote was probably about ten years ago but rings true to women in their twenties today. This ‘pornbrained’ attitude towards sex combined with the rise of the ‘manosphere’ is leading many young women away from sex positivity and towards a more critical engagement with their own sexuality and relationships with men. Everyone has horror stories to share of a suddenly sexually violent Hinge hookup or discovering a man has been secretly harbouring reactionary conservative views halfway through a date (see my latest podcast episode with Sofie Lea). 

The more we talk about it, the more we realise the issue is systemic and political. These are not isolated experiences but issues with very real political roots and causes. We are realising all over again that individual choices have systemic and gendered roots. The radical feminist boomerang is coming home. At the tail end of third wave feminism we are facing a reckoning with the lessons it has taught us. The mainstream acceptance of feminism has led to the commodification of it and its aesthetics. Feminism has become marketable, liberalised, stripped of its radicalism and repackaged as a consumerist good. What does this sanitised feminism have left to offer us? When you feel yourself start to hate men (or at least the way they treat you), feel disheartened by patriarchal ideas about sex and relationships, scared by the rise of tradwives and the manosphere, misled by liberal feminist sex positivity, where do you turn to? To the original ‘man-hater’ herself. A symbol of a movement many young feminists were quick to shun, but maybe it’s time to reconsider. Welcome to the Dworkinaissance.