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     kola@aalbc.com Moderator Username: Kola Post Number: 545 Registered: 02-2005 Rating: |
Andrea Dworkin---"A Good Daughter"  Love her or hate her, she's a feminist icon, says Louise Armstrong Monday June 25, 2001 The Guardian It may well be time to face one of the stranger phenomena of contemporary feminist life. And it is this: despite all the requirements for feminist celebrity status, spelt out for us recently by Elaine Showalter in these pages - TV appearances, public buzz, a blitz of stories in the press - the ur-feminist icon, the real template, is a woman with none of the above. It is not Hillary Clinton or Oprah or Princess Diana. This woman is not a "celebrity" by the acknowledged standard. She is... Andrea Dworkin. More than any of the above, she matches Showalter's definition of feminist icon: someone on to whom a disproportionate amount of adulation and loathing is projected. Projected is the key word here. To the pornographers and the new female libertines, she is the symbol for man-hater, sex-hater, killjoy. The feminists who adore her and flock to her lectures sit so rapt it is tempting to use the word rapture (she is a brilliant, even mesmerising speaker). There is something quasi-religious about the divide between devoted followers and those who would brand her a heretic, pillorying her over and over, as though to reassure themselves that they have the power.  Both sides have transformed a human being into a symbol. No other living person I can think of, who is so much out of the public eye, is so deeply entrenched in the public psyche as either heroine or demon. What is strangest about the demonisers is, why do they bother? She does not have her own TV show, her books are not bestsellers. Why the need to keep bringing her up in order to put her down? It is parallel to what so much media does to feminism itself: "It's over! Retro! Let's party, girls!"  So strong a signifier has Dworkin's name become that it is dragged in, higgledy-piggledy, whenever the speaker/author wishes to dump poo on advocacy with which he/she disagrees. I have seen her name yanked in out of left field, in the New York Times, for example, to say that an author displays an "Andrea Dworkin-like" attitude toward the genetic alteration of apples. Until now, all this has been truer in the US than in the UK, where serious and respectful attention has been given to her work by such as Will Self and Michael Moorcock. And yet now, in the Independent last week, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown claims that men are interested in the new cult of the "surrendered wife" because it pleases them to "think that yet another shovel of muck is being thrown over Andrea Dworkin and her demented daughters". Demented daughters? What next? Strip-searched for the mark of the devil? Elaine Showalter, writing about the search for heroines, says: "No amount of preaching the appeal of designated heroines will make us feel for women whose lives seem remote, or keep us from feeling, despite our embarrassment, for women whose lives have stirred and surprised us. I wish Andrea Dworkin no harm, but I doubt that many women will get up at 4am to watch her funeral." Remarkable. Is that the standard for deciding which women's lives have stirred and surprised us? Getting up early to watch them interred? Think of it this way: Dworkin is a true feminist icon precisely because she is not a celebrity in the safe sense. She has not been brought down to scale, as Hillary Clinton was, by constant exposure; by Bill's peccadilloes; by her own efforts to adjust to please the public, to moderate. Dworkin is a threat, of course, to exactly the extent that radical feminists have always posed a threat - pointing out unapologetically the degree to which violence against women and children by men remains rampant. She will not shut up. Folks get wild when Dworkin does not get it right, either her timing or her pitch (in their view). Should she have written, in the New Statesman, about a rape she could not only not prove but could not herself be sure happened, because (she alleged) it was a drug rape? I don't know. But I remember the squall. Everywhere I went, feminists lined up on one side or the other: "I believe! I don't believe!"  What was the meaning of all this high emotion projected on to Dworkin? Other writers have been controversial without inviting crucifixion. High emotion continues to fester around issues of male violence against women: men's rage, women's fears. This despite over a decade of PR campaigns to de-fang the issues. Given that, it's tempting to say that if Andrea Dworkin didn't exist, we would have had to invent her. Which, come to think about it, is exactly what we have done. ________________________ ANDREA DWORKIN...FEMINIST ICON...DIES  NEW YORK - Andrea Dworkin wrote openly about the experiences as a prostitute, rape victim and battered wife that led her to become a crusader against pornography and violence against women — and a lightning rod for the feminist movement. Dworkin died Saturday at her home in Washington, said her husband, John Stoltenberg. She and Stoltenberg, who were openly gay, began living together in 1974 and married in 1998. Dworkin was 58 and had been ill for several years from ailments including osteoarthritis.   "In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve," fellow feminist Gloria Steinem said in a statement. "Andrea is one of them." Dworkin's radical-lesbian brand of feminism brought both attention and discord to the women's rights movement. Some women objected to her crusade against pornography as an infringement on women's choice of how to use their bodies, and civil libertarians opposed it as an assault on the First Amendment. Once described as the Malcolm X of the women's movement, Dworkin devoted her work and more than a dozen books to fighting what she considered the subordination of women, notably in marriage and pornography. "She really committed her life to giving voice to the women at the bottom, the women who were battered, raped, who were prostituted, who were made into pornography," Stoltenberg said. Her first book, "Woman Hating," published when she was 27, launched her lifelong advocacy on the ways pornography harms women. She campaigned frequently on the subject and teamed with legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon to draft an ordinance defining pornography as a violation of women's civil rights, allowing women to sue for damages. The ordinance was inspired by the situation of Linda Marchiano, who as Linda Lovelace appeared in the pornographic film "Deep Throat" and later said she had been coerced. The anti-porn ordinance was originally drafted for Minneapolis but vetoed by the mayor there. It was adopted by other communities, but later ruled unconstitutional. "Pornography is used in rape — to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act," Dworkin testified before the U.S. Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in 1986, according to a transcript on her Web site. She was well known as a firebrand for her views on pornography and her 1987 book "Intercourse," in which some reviewers said she labeled all sex as rape. She denied that, but wrote about marriage laws that she felt "mandated intercourse." She was often lampooned as a prude or man hater and criticized by other feminists for making women out to be the victims of sex. She filed a $150 million libel lawsuit against Hustler magazine in the 1980s for running sexually explicit caricatures using her name, but courts ruled the cartoons were protected by the Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected her appeal without comment in 1989. Dworkin said repeatedly that she did not hate men, just the subjugation of women. Originally from Camden, N.J., Dworkin graduated from Bennington College in Vermont in 1968 with a degree in literature. She was arrested at a protest against the Vietnam War when she was 18 and sent to prison, where she said she was subjected to a body cavity search by prison doctors. She also said she married a man who beat her, was raped and at one point became a prostitute. Her many books included "Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation," which in 2001 won an American Book Award, given to honor cultural diversity in American writing. She was writing a book with the working title "Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation," when she died, Stoltenberg said. A public memorial will be held in New York, said Stoltenberg. Arrangements were incomplete. | ||
| Asherah ikke Newbie Poster Username: Asherah Post Number: 5 Registered: 04-2005 Rating: N/A |
Thanks for posting this, Kola. I also think Andrea was a courageous and brave woman. I think sadly for Andrea, but like many of those brave people, she most probably will receive the respect and credibility that she deserves while she's not here anymore, because she's no longer a threat. I guess it's no coincidence either that we only got to know her now that she passed over.. The fact alone that active Feminists like Andrea and you who never shut their mouth are still ridiculed, and not taken seriously says a lot about the importancy of Feminism still today and how stupid and coward women are when they adopt philosophies like "It's over! Retro! Let's party, girls!" that patriarchal men like to manipulate naieve women with. But many of those naieve women aren't really that stupid I believe, they just don't want to be confronted with their own cowardice. | ||
| Kola Boof "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Kola_boof Post Number: 194 Registered: 02-2005 Rating: N/A |
Thanks, Asherah. I have ordered Andrea's book "HEARTBREAK" and I've been in tears all morning....because her writing is so beautiful and the "love" inside her is so phenomenal and SO.....misunderstood. All she really wanted....was for people to truly KNOW LOVE and to value each other. I can't believe they've painted this woman as a MONSTER. Bu then again....I more than believe it, I know it. |
