The American writer and radical feminist activist Andrea Dworkin, whose texts on consent and sexual abuse have more weight today than ever in light of #MeToo, also predicted the rise of Donald Trump and assured that pornography reinforces the power of right on women.
Her friend Gloria Steinem said of her that she was “an Old Testament prophet who was always warning what was going to happen,” and when reviewing her work, she was right.
Accused of hating men, her incessant fight against prostitution and pornography earned her the hatred of both men and certain liberal feminist segments.
When denouncing the dehumanization of women in pornography, which she claimed is a product of male power within Western patriarchal culture, she encountered various voices that accused her of offering a repressive view of sexuality.
Although his most famous work is
Pornography, Men Possessing Women,
a book in which he portrays the pornographic industry as an endless focus of violence against women, while ensuring that the effects of pornographic consumption are the eroticization of submission and the perpetuation of violence against women, her first book was
Hatred of Women
, which she published at the age of 27, in 1974.
In her writing she already claimed that pornography incited violence against women, and when she was accused of censorship, she had to defend herself in various essays.
In fact, her writings always encountered various obstacles to being published, although it was precisely the United States that finally gave the OK to her publication.
“That country of lies and platitudes that tells us that we can talk about whatever we want,” she herself assured ironically.
At the end of her life, faced with the obstacles she encountered in continuing to publish her controversial texts in America, she met with editors from
The Guardian
, a medium that published some of her texts shortly before the death of her.
She confessed that she had never felt such respect from the publishing world, further proof that her life, both outside and inside literature, was never easy.
“I have never felt that the editors I work with treat me with this kind of respect.
I really appreciate it,” she told her friend, journalist Julie Bindel (responsible for orchestrating these meetings) in the last email she received from Dworkin.
Precisely now, consent is once again on the debate table with the publication of
The Sense of Consent
, an essay in which the philosopher Clara Serra reflects on consent based on three bases: consensual sex does not necessarily have to coincide with desired sex;
There is the right to have all kinds of sexual desires and also, there is the right to explore and make mistakes.
Of course, Andrea Dworkin spoke in the play of her consent.
In her case, to question its validity in a world full of structural inequalities and not exempt from pressure relationships.
In this way, it reflects on how in a framework characterized by disadvantage or vulnerability due to gender, race or social class, free and autonomous consent is in a compromised situation. “Consent cannot exist in a system of oppression,” he said.
The cover of 'Pornography, men possessing women'.
A battle that used words as missiles
The author made sure to compose her work from a personal place, but far from staying with the anecdote, she extrapolated what happened in her life to use it, as she herself stated, “as a compass.”
Understanding her writings and even her anger without talking about what happened to her outside of the books is essential.
She was abused by both her father and her first husband, and when she was arrested at the age of 18 during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration, she was abused by two doctors at the Village women's prison.
After studying literature at Bennington College, she made feminism the epicenter of her struggle and decided to dedicate her life to strengthening the movement.
She raised her voice against pedophilia, pornography and violence against women and vehemently defended the idea that men use sex to establish their patriarchal power.
She did so using a very characteristic style, full of scratches and edges, and Dworkin herself stated that her objective was to use “a prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than a beating, more devastating than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more full of threats and attacks than pornography.”
Columnist Moira Donegan said her style was “shrill, angry, and her conclusions are often harsh, bluntly expressed and difficult to read.”
When talking about how misogyny entered the lexicon of second wave feminism thanks to the book
Hate Women.
Nina Renata Aron, in an article published in
New York Times
explains that reading Dworkin was “a kind of rite of passage” in the 80s and 90s.
“Her writing offered a strident and raw look at the systemic bias that affects women's everyday experiences.
Was there real hatred lurking behind every meeting with your boss or commanding officer, every quote, sermon, novel and television advertisement?
Yes, Dworkin insisted.
At the time, this was a radical idea, and for many it still is,” the journalist writes.
Without a doubt, the rage of her texts is radically opposite to the writings of authors like Caitlin Moran, who use humor to fight and criticize sexism, something that, without a doubt, for Dworkin would have been another example of how women inhabit “ a system of humiliation from which there is no escape.”
The yoke of sexual violence
At the beginning of the 70s, she did not hesitate to raise her voice against the abuse to which she had been subjected, and in 1999, at the age of 53, she was drugged and raped in a Paris hotel, a terrible act that made her leave the world. world to meet only on rare occasions with her close circle until publishing
Broken Heart: Political Memory of a Feminist Militant
in 2002
, her autobiography, where she embarked on a new battle against rape.
“The doctor who knows me best assures that osteoarthritis appears long before it paralyzes you.
In my case, it was possibly due to homelessness, sexual abuse, or my weight.
John, my partner, blames
Scapegoat
, a study of Jewish identity and women's liberation that took me nine years to write and which he claims is the book that stole my health.
I blame the rape of which I was a victim in Paris in 1999″, she wrote in
The Guardian
, in which it was the first text that the medium published after her death.
“Dworkin's work takes on greater meaning in the face of the #MeToo movement, which has made visible the way in which sexual violence has been silenced.
“She was more right than she thought: the dominant culture avoids confronting the role that pornography plays in asserting male sexual domination,” said Dr Gail Dines, who has been fighting the porn industry for more than three decades. .
Knowing the way in which so many white women supported Trump's policies, the American would undoubtedly have talked about how the political right makes sure to exploit women's fear to make them see that far from having to change things, the best It is accepting the situation and taking advantage of any means to access the available power.
Her book
De ella Mujeres de Derecha
, dating from 1983, could well have referred to the way in which Donald Trump rose to power.
“If we had listened more to Dworkin during her decades of activism and taken her work more seriously, more women would have embraced an uncompromising feminism, as opposed to the smiley, fun feminism, replete with the kind of slogans you read on newspapers. t-shirts and that applauds a kind of
girl power
that fights to be able to wear pants instead of defending a collective movement with which to emancipate all women from the tyranny of oppression," says Julie Bindel, who met Dworkin at a conference that organized on violence against women in 1996.
Her fight against pornography was not only carried out through her talks and writings, but she allied herself with the feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon (both believed that sexuality is based on the subordination of women through male sexual domination, which which translates into gender inequality) to present a law that stated that pornography is nothing other than sexual discrimination, a law thanks to which women could sue producers and distributors.
After being approved in Indianapolis in 1983, the United States Supreme Court legislated against it due to the power of the porn industry.
Andrea Dworkin died at just 58 years old due to heart failure.
Although his name is constantly repeated because of the way in which his texts have helped to understand the reason for Trump's rise to power and how, in the face of #MeToo, his fight against sexual abuse is more present today than ever, his work It has not been translated into Spanish, and the stigmatization that always surrounded the author has not abandoned her even after her death because of those who continue to assure that her voice defends a puritanical and outdated feminism.
As stated in 'Andrea Dworkin', a book in which Jeremy Mark Robinson examines her work, the writer Michael Moorcock said that feminism was the most important political movement today, with the figure of Dworkin being vital.
“People think Andrea hates men.
She is called a fascist and a Nazi, especially by left-wing Americans, but her work indicates no such thing.
In reality, she had extraordinary eloquence, the kind of magic that mobilized people,” she assured.
His ideas were manipulated and misinterpreted, hatred and contempt accompanied his writings and even his physical appearance was the object of mockery throughout his life, but his work is still present and his reflections and criticisms remain as alive today as before.
“In each century there are a series of writers who help the species evolve: Andrea is part of them,” said Gloria Steinem at her friend's funeral, and the truth is that we must applaud all those who with their writings incite reflection and debate, because those are the keys to moving forward.