‘On the issues of pornography and prostitution, she is a genius.’ Colin McPherson/Corbis/Getty Images
If I were Andrea Dworkin, I’d be glad that I was dead. When the radical feminist writer succumbed to heart disease aged 58, it seemed tragically young — but at least she avoided the undignified spectacle of the fourth-wave feminists of 2025 wincing over a body of work with which they are just too chicken to engage.
In a bonanza for publishers, Dworkin is back in vogue. Three of her best books — Woman Hating, Pornography, and Right-Wing Women — are being re-released as Penguin Modern Classics today, giving her a gold plaque in the pantheon of essential feminist writers. Dworkin’s life story is almost as strange and striking as her writing: a Jewish self-describing lesbian from New Jersey who ended up marrying two men, she cut her teeth at uber-liberal Bennington College where she made national news with testimony of an invasive internal examination by police following a protest. She moved to the Netherlands, where she met and married an anarchist activist who beat her and burned her with cigarettes; a spell of poverty after their relationship collapsed forced her to sell sex. She returned to America, made her name as a feminist writer in the anti-pornography and anti-prostitution movement and married the gay activist John Stoltenberg, with whom she remained until she died.
In revisiting her, Penguin is shrewd: Dworkin is having a moment among young women tired of the half-arsed, commercial and cowardly endstage of Twenties feminism. Young feminists who have realised it is not, in fact, empowering to sell ass pics have taken up Dworkin with both zeal and relief. On X, a viral tweet recently responded to a post by a pornographic model posing as Joan of Arc, saying “I know a writer who may have had a relevant thing or two to say” about the unironic sexualisation of a celibate, androgynous teenager. One black-and-white picture of our anti-porn patron saint has become a stock meme response to hypersexual nonsense on that website. It has become so prolific that there is now even a Batman spotlight variation.
Yet Dworkin’s hardcore approach to the topics of pornography and prostitution is still a bit spicy for some, as I discovered recently while listening to one podcast in which Dworkin was praised for her “bravery” — but chastised for her apparently incidental anti-“sex work” position. The host was careful to let us know that sex work is work and that women should have the freedom to sell their flesh, presumably because she had spent approximately two minutes considering the implications of such a statement, decided it was not worth the risk of being cancelled and did not realise, or care, that this cowardice put her in absolute opposition to anything Dworkin ever said or wrote.
Dworkin, after all, is not a “fun feminist”; the main thing most people know about her is that she was hated by many, many men in her lifetime. Dworkin knew what every writer who questions men’s inviolable right to purchase women’s bodies or masturbate over images of them knows: that the first epithet to be slung their way is, ironically, “whore”. Even while receiving abuse, often violently sexual in its nature, from both the pornography lobby (Hustler and Playboy, among other porn rags, continually ridiculed and harassed her) and its furious, horny readers, Dworkin was unbothered. “When a woman expresses an opinion — about anything — and the response is to undermine perceptions of or question her sexuality … the response can be identified without further analysis as implicitly antifeminist and woman-hating,” she says, and she is right. She won the argument.
But then, articulate, well-read and serious women will always win the argument against those motivated only by a jealous defence of their own erections, for whom the biggest crime of feminism is calling attention to the real lives of the women of their masturbatory fantasy. These lives are a hideous inconvenience, a boner-killer. As one woman interviewed by Dworkin, who knew the physical consequences of having a partner obsessed with porn, attests, “pornography is not a fantasy. It was my life, reality.”
Then, as now, it was not always easy to sort male allies from cynical opportunists. Dworkin knew that the soi-disant progressive men who despised her, among them Norman Mailer and Hugh Hefner, would only fight for women when it came to their right to debase themselves. The heirs of the “flower boys” of the Sexual Revolution — who were all for women engaging with free love in the Sixties but made themselves scarce as soon as feminism began “taking away the easy fuck” — are today the ones refusing to engage with the battlelines of gender, body image or the pay gap. Whether they are pleading the ethical right to choke women without asking, or defending a woman’s freedom of expression only when she is expressing herself by being naked, they only pop up when the debate gets sexy, and so their opinions can be, I think, safely discounted.
It’s a shame that Dworkin’s porn-sick detractors, who never bothered reading her anyway, have come to unfairly dominate assessments of her life. Dworkin deserves to be considered on her own terms, head-on, as what she calls a “serious woman”. Her writing, she promises, “takes power, sadism, and dehumanisation seriously” — on this, she delivers. After all, she has earned her place alongside contemporaries Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and Shulamith Firestone not by being hated but by being read. So let’s read her.
Dworkin’s genius is for spotting the hypocrisy of Left-wing men, and the shrewdness of Right-wing women in despising them. She understands the “selective blindness” of the Left when it comes to arousal: “Profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat … the Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.” She acknowledges, without the politically polarised doltishness we see today, the sagacity of Right-wing women — despite not being among their number — in knowing that “the Right offers them the best deal: the highest reproductive value; the best protection against sexual aggression … the most reliable protection against battery; the most respect”. This realism, this practical empathy, is completely alien to liberal feminist discourse now, which sees any glimmer of conservatism as irrational and evil. For this, she must be welcomed back.
Dworkin is well known for taking literally and seriously the meaning of pornography — that it makes of all women porneia, the lowest class of prostitutes in ancient Greece, and that “we are the women in it”. She understands that “the boys are betting on our compliance, our ignorance, our fear”; here, she prophesies the kinksters on dating apps who want to hurt their “liberated” partners. All these strikes are delivered with devastating clarity.
On prostitution, she is just as unyielding: “The model exists to entice counterfeit female sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men who enjoy them,” she savages. The reality of the brothel, something we are now scorned for acknowledging, is that prostitutes “absorb, endure, or get indifferent toward an enormous amount of male aggression, hostility, and contempt”. Dworkin shows us that questions of “expressions of will”, the defence of naive women and gleeful men, are pointless — society creates the oppressive conditions in which a woman feels compelled to sell her consent, meaning her will is never truly free; it then only bats for her side when she is making a decision which titillates men. Progressives who ignore the realities of prostitution are, we are told with a straightforward, punk disdain, “profoundly immoral”. “Sexual freedom is when women do the things men think are sexy,” Dworkin writes, auguring the era of OnlyFans.
On free love, she is similarly contemptuous: “Its purpose — it turned out — was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints, and in that it was successful; freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by more men.” Dworkin is talking about the Sixties here — she describes the women writhing with long-haired comrades at Woodstock and Altamont, being told they must abandon their “sexual repression” when they became “tired” or “cross”, then, a few short years later, schlepping round communes barefoot with the resultant children and no support. How different is this state of affairs from the casualised dating culture we live in today, from which women emerge feeling used, wounded and disrespected (if less commonly pregnant)? I sorely wish I had encountered Right-Wing Women as a teenager. For any future daughters of my own, it will be required reading.
Most of all, Dworkin is an antidote to fake, self-serving liberal middle-class feminisms, of the kind posited by Florence Given, for whom praxis means selling phone cases which say “dump him”. Why? Because “feminism is not a lifestyle or an attitude or a feeling of vague sympathy with women or an assertion of modernity”. It is about being unpopular and vocal and careful and consistent, and ignoring fashionable, distracting nonsense. Steinem said of Dworkin that she had a quality of “Old Testament” doom to her, and as such was often “misunderstood”. Her voice booms with the prophetic weirdness and unforgiving directness of such a god; now that we are used to politically correct pop feminists of the kumbaya, New Testament mode, this can feel unsettling.
Dworkin is not perfect. She at times writes total codswallop. Her most offensive transgressions come at the end of Woman Hating, where she slips in a few short but emetic passages on incest, bestiality and paedophilia. Her vision of a post-patriarchal society is one which magics away the world’s other power dynamics so that, in a utopian state of “androgyny”, anything goes. This is the bizarre context for this egregious statement: “Needless to say, in androgynous community, human and other-animal relationships would become more explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse.” Never has the phrase “needless to say” been so cynically deployed. The taboo around incest is “a particularised form of repression”; children “too are erotic beings”, she argues, with no small whiff of Peter Tatchell. It is difficult to decipher precisely what she means here — this is, after all, a writer who said of the Californian woman who shot her son’s abuser in court: “I loved that woman… I have no problem with killing paedophiles.” The benefit of the doubt suggests she ended her life (this was five years before her death) with the latter view.
These are moments where Dworkin’s context in the wacky world of Seventies radical feminism completely defeats her; at times, she approaches unreadability. She is at points juvenile, writing an extended passage about the patriarchal nature of capital letters: “My publisher, in his corporate wisdom, filled the pages with garbage: standard punctuation.” She is positively neurotic about the always-oppressive act of heterosexual “fucking”, and her solution, for that state of “androgyny”, makes little practical sense given the pesky problem of physical reality. And in her first book, she takes literally the Freudian psychoanalytical dream theory which can only reasonably be understood to be metaphorical, and so ends up suggesting that “men have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed as a horror of the womb”. This literalism is, it goes without saying, off-putting. Thankfully, it abates in her later work.
These are, I suspect, not passages that Penguin will use in their marketing for this Modern Classics edition. They warn us not to treat people as prophets — just like Greer, Dworkin’s corpus is a body of general brilliance pockmarked by instances of bizarre transgression, probably the result of being stuck in antagonistic theoretical worlds for too long. When Greer used a column in Suck magazine as an apology for rape, framing it as a radical Marxist act of the stealing of assets, she did a disservice to her broader work. Some years later, she retracted her view. Dworkin never did.
Penguin’s hot new old-school feminist sometimes got it wrong — a fact which is likely to perturb initiates into this collection. But on the issues of pornography and prostitution, she is a genius: her words leap from the page into 2025 and demand we expect more. On these ever more relevant twin poles of misogyny, Andrea Dworkin, this flawed, abhorred, ruthless woman bellows down the decades to shock us out of our stupor; you’d be a fool not to listen.
“The taboo around incest is “a particularised form of repression”; children “too are erotic beings”, she argues,..”
Say it all doesn’t. There’s nothing that cannot be excused or explained away if your politics are correct
My problem with Dworkin is not her hatred of porn, nor the sex trade. I full on agree with both. It’s her full on hatred of men. I am one. I’m not that bad.
Have you read any of the works of John Stoltenberg, who was Andrea’s partner. Examples: Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice and The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience ?
Hurrah! Yes, let’s all re-read Andrea Dworkin. The book I found most enlightening was the largely autobiographical “Mercy”, hard to plough through, but I read it twice. In it there was a wonderful passage about a woman walking along the street carrying a bag (plastic I think) which she tries to keep so still it makes no sound, her aim being to avoid the attention of men.
Boo hoo!
This forceful endorsement of most of what Dworkin had to say sure goes well beyond Sowerby’s last column here, which contained elements of a more selective and qualified appreciation. I’ve tended to think of Dworkin as a wingnut whose own life struggles made her quite blind with rage. Doesn’t mean I’m correct, let alone show that’s all she was.
But can the person(s) in charge of clickbait headlines—which are rarely penned by the authors themselves—tone it down a notch or two? Thankfully, Sowerby made a much more targeted case against pornography and prostitution, and the attitudes of some men than the title of this article implied. It was still polemical, but not at the same level of cheap generalization.
*My last complaint of the day (I hope): Why are articles like this preemptively bunkered behind “click here” buttons and automatic long delays for every comment? Let the boys and girls be boys–and girls! Or adults, in whatever mix they see fit. There is already enough time-outing and suppression for certain buzz words, or for sheer unpopularity. With rare exception, the comments should at least post before they are inspected, then perhaps removed. Perhaps one of the clickbait specialists can do more real-time BTL monitoring on “touchy” articles?
Couldn’t agree more, both about the clickbait headings and an apparent change in the author’s tone. Perhaps she’s just doing that very human thing – living and growing. It’d be something for her to think about whilst she writes her articles, which i often (though not always) find entertaining and very occasionally enlightening.
I wish her well.
She sounds like she’s come fresh from reading Dworkin without taking time to reflect, not just on Dworkins writings but on her own response to them. She also seems to have lost her sense of humour along the way.
You’re far too generous. Sowerby is little more than (just another) product of what, mercifully, seems to be coming to its sociological denouement now (what comes after is less clear). The product? A layer-of-the-cake made up of largely misguided, ahistorical, envious and resentful self-promoters; selective readers and consumers of modern pop culture that wear their dilettantism like they (hope to) wear their Gucci.
This might get me blocked here at “selectively-UNread”, but recent sociology literature has, somewhat startlingly (but in keeping with my 56 years of lived experience) indicated that, and specifically among western women: a) there is a significant inverse relationship between the level of tertiary education achieved and knowledge of world affairs/politics and b) the current cohort of “empowered” women, and liberal women in particular, have never been as unhappy as they are today.
I have a young daughter and will be making sure that her opinions are rooted in a heterodox set of values and experiences. Thank you very much.
Not the perfect metaphor, but here’s what happened: when post-sexual revolution women looked at the wall of human history they noticed the bricks (men) had more surface area than the mortar (women) and then set about betting everything on a system that would build walls with only bricks – i.e. use social pressure and the state to “make them more like bricks”. Well, you can do/try that – and they did and it (largely) worked! – but I think we can see what we’re left with.
Walls made only of bricks don’t stand up well when storms come, or when “barbarian” battering rams come calling. And they’re at the gates.
A heterodox indoctrination? I hope that after a certain age that heterodoxy isn’t too strictly curated. How can you even be a good freethinker or “heretic” without knowing something about the source texts first hand?
Same here. I think her style is entertaining. She has some of the pluses and downsides of youth and I think she’ll get a bit more balanced with added years. Not too balanced, I hope.
On much of this we only have Dworkin’s word to go on. Right up to the end of her life she was making bizarre and implausible claims about sexual violation – in one case by hotel staff while she was asleep. She seems to have been a pretty disturbed person.
I hadn’t heard that but your last sentence fits with my lightly-informed opinion of her. My unwillingness to read or listen to Dworkin much makes Sowerby’s take of more interest to me. If they don’t become blind acolytes, I don’t think all “descendants” (or mere avid readers) of an author are certain to become infected with all of her bullshit. As for finding the wisdom in an active butcher like M a o or you-know-who, that’s a bit too perilous a dive for me. It’s a matter a discernment and degree. I see no reason to doubt that Dworkin had some hideous formative experiences with men. Nor to extend her unlimited credulity.
Yeah I dunno who writes the headlines for Unherd but somebody needs to rein them in. This happens entirely too regularly to be accidental.
It’s deliberate, aggravated clickbait.
Ms. Sowerby, excellent dissection of the work of Andrea Dworkin. I disagree with Dworkin on much but she was laser-focused on her takedown of hard pornography. It is a violently inhumane practice.
.
My response too, Max.
Most women are heterosexual and therefore want fulfilling sexual and emotional relationships with men. They may read Dworkin and agree with much she says. However, a lesbian with no understanding of heterosexual desire will never be the writer that they are looking for.
Another excellent article by Poppy Sowerby.
Such passionate views are interesting, though I’d hope all left wing folk in a position to set policy see them for what they are. Which IMO amounts to a few fervent women confusing their personal preferences for moral law and what’s good for women & humanity in general. In some cases, it would be a disaster for the general wellbeing if they got their way. The likes of Dawkin might have seen left wing men as hypocrites, but probably realistic to them as more broadminded. None could deny that working in a brothel is hellish for some women forced by economic necessity – but there’s been studies showing relatively high average job satisfaction, there’s plenty of sex workers saying they appreciate their jobs, we sometimes heard form them at Labour meetings back when I attended such things. There may be a fairly strong female preference for long term relationships, but some prefer brief encounters just like some men. The certainty with which some passionate women imagine they can speak for all of their sex gets absurd sometimes- as with recent implications that it’s bad for men to be even mildly sexually dominant – both studies and personal experience suggest this the would hurt women’s satisfaction much more than men if taken seriously.
This is not to say it would be wrong to ban porn & prostitution. Clearly they have harmful aspects and can involve horrific experiences for some; I’ve not looked into the questions in great depth but do tend to lean to banning at least one of them. But frankly, if a Dworkinist was to tell progressives we’re “profoundly immoral” for considering the pro-freedom case, that would just be laughable. On the other hand, if the writer means to suggest men can be too emotionally invested in the pro freedom side beacause of our own self interest, that certainly seems valid.
Poppy Sowerby’s brief may seem a bit “Vice”-like, but it surely gets the clicks and thus I doubt it’ll change anytime soon. After all, taking bank shots off of pornography and misogyny have been a stalwart of profitable journalistic practice since at least Page Six and probably long before. More interesting, but less amenable to lazy feminist praxis, might be to analyze how dependent various institutions have become to being financed by sex work. I’m thinking of the for-profit colleges here in America that, I suspect, are only profitable because students (of both sexes) are paying off their loans by selling off themselves online. Is it too much to ask for less moral bombast/cheap thrills and, instead, for a deeper dive into the economic consequences of modern pornography? Enquiring minds need to know.
Never thought of it from that angle – but this might explain why some universities are so pro sex work. I’ve heard from friends with lasses at Unis etc. that events on topping up earnings from sex work has been a common topic at Freshers week for some years. A few years back when working at investment bank I got invited to certain ‘lads only’ channels that include sugar babe review sections… So many older men / student age women doing that these days. Together with the inverted population pyramid due to fallen birth rates, this is a big reason why so many young men find it hard to get dates. Which in turn is a major driver of rising Misogyny for Gen Z males.
Which IMO amounts to a few fervent women confusing their personal preferences for moral law and what’s good for women & humanity in general.
Nailed it
I personally believe that the harms suffered by women from porn and prostitution could be mostly solved by simply pushing up the legal age of consent in both cases.
I want to emphasise “mostly”: in these emotionally-charged debates, people often resort to maximalist demands for perfect outcomes in the knowledge that they would be impossible to deliver, so I am predicting in advance that such people aren’t going to get what they say they want and there’s no point letting them wreck the debate.
But there does seem to be an emerging truth that most women who enter these areas of life at age 18 just because it’s legal to do so, end up realising they had no idea how much it was going to affect them thereafter. I think therefore that in this case, a change to the law could be beneficial.
Makes a great deal sense – many are quite a bit more mature at say 21 compared to 18.
She wasn’t forced to sell sex, she decided to sell sex.
If they need to read Dworkin to realise that then they really are too far gone. Can they not think of a more rational source of advice? Like their parents, for example?
The men who invented the washing machine did more for feminism and women’s liberation than a thousand Andrea Dworkin’s.
Variants of this were a common feminist trope at one time. The reason for men’s (supposed) hatred of women was that they looked castrated and this aroused anxiety and fear.
None of them stopped to make the simple biological observation that any species in which the female genitals aroused fear, rather than desire, in the male – simply wouldn’t last very long.
If this is really true, it seems like a doubling down on identity politics in face of the anti-woke backlash. Dworkin is far more extreme, and far more invested in identity politics than her descendants. Perhaps a sign that “woke”, far from dying, will only be turned up a notch in the face of Trump, Vance and the rest.
Yes, I can sympathise, but there’s still the difficult issue of agency around pornography, and to a lesser extent, prostitution.
When women freely decide to participate in pornography, and some like “Betty Blue” are publicised and enriched for what is nothing more than prostitution on an epic scale, you have to ask who exactly will decide where the boundaries around consent lie?
They can’t ALL be drug addicts or desperate for money.
This article rightly says that Joan of Arc was celibate and would not appreciate being sexualized (in fact eyewitnesses said she became extremely angry about anything sexual), but she was not “androgynous” as the article claims because those same eyewitnesses also describe her as “beautiful and shapely” and very feminine despite her soldier’s riding outfit and armor.
Lots of men said the same about Margaret Thatcher. I’m a great admirer of Maggie myself, but I’m pretty sure anyone saying that about her would have been under the influence of power as an aphrodisiac.
What has Dworkin, a woman who has written some truly disgusting things based on this article, got to offer women in 2025? The fact that sex work isn’t work? The fact that women debasing themselves won’t make them happy? Any moderately intelligent conservative voice will tell them that. The fact that men are sexist worthless animals? Any moderately stupid progressive voice will tell them that. Her time has been and gone thankfully.
A final note: others have said it but throwing the author under the bus like that with that headline is indecent.
She seemed to give way to the Queer philosophers who have caused all the trans problems. She talked negatively about sex and then they got away with talking about fetishistic transhuman identities.
Who was this ‘beast’ I have never heard of her.
Have I missed out on something here?
Yeah, you should add her to you Comprehensive Library of Seminal Feminist Classics. Crude quip intended.
Andrea Dworkin was right about men
And vice versa, probably.
“The taboo around incest is “a particularised form of repression”; children “too are erotic beings”, she argues,..”
Say it all doesn’t. There’s nothing that cannot be excused or explained away if your politics are correct
It’s pretty weird. If an article is about sex, it boils down to who get who and how, and it’s always written by a woman.
Not really weird at all. Since women were (grudgingly) given a voice in the public square, the first columns by women were invariably on such things as fashion, homemaking, and especially, advice to the lovelorn. On these topics their expertise was unquestioned, particularly concerning the subject of sexual relations. This makes sense because choices women make around sexuality are potentially far more consequential for themselves than they are for men. One should, therefore, expect them to have reflected on these questions more often and more deeply than your average man. Which, of course, doesn’t guarantee that their thinking on these matters won’t be total bollocks.
One thing Dworkin did get rate was the sixties being about f*****g the girls in rotation! Although I was a child at the time, many of my older cousins had to escape from some very strange situations.
I actually find a lot of this discussion to be utterly bizarre. I think the two things that jump out at me in discussions of women’s sexuality and sexualisation is the total rejection 1) agency and 2) male middle ground.
Radical feminists cannot conceive of female agency, except when the women in question don’t agree with them. Then such women can be pilloried as sell-outs, but if they sold themselves out via the sale of sex or sexualisation, then they are victims.
Similarly, men can only be dichotomous, being a) oppressive abusing patriarchs or b) wholehearted allies with zero heterosexual sex drives. Of course, the vast majority of men are in the middle of that spectrum. They just don’t care. They don’t get up in the morning to conspire to keep women down. Rather they yearn for a fulfilling relationship with a woman who will be their partner (something that most women also yearn for, because it’s…eh…normal… I guess that’s an inflammatory comment to some).
And why would such individuals bother with the fringes of feminist argument with all its capricious about turns, constant vitriol filled accusation, flirtation with paedophilia and utter rejection of female agency? It’s all insane bullshit.
“It’s all insane bullshit.”
Good point, well made.
It’s probably no coincidence that so many of these are women most heterosexual men wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.
But getting beyond her looks and the mess she made of her life, there are a number of points she makes that I can strongly agree with. It is to humanity’s shame that so much internet time is taken up with pornography. And I too feel sympathy with the mother of the paedophile victim. People who abuse children and teenagers really aren’t fit to life in civilized society.
You appear in your opening paragraph not to have moved on beyond the ‘you are only a feminist because you are too ugly to get a man’ argument. People were saying that in the 70s, it’s a pity that they still are.
I guess the answer as to why we should bother with it is: it’s there in our culture, it influences education at all levels, it influences relations between the sexes almost without us realising, and if PS is right it’s making a come back in its battiest form.
The fringes of any ideology contain a prevailing measure of insane bullshit. A mind captured by you-name-the ideology is given to such extremes. I agree there is a lot of hatred and garbage that one would have to sift through to get at any marrow worth keeping in the work of most radical feminists. I’m unlikely to do any more of that myself (had to for a bit in uni) but I’m willing to listen to a sharp zoomer who has slogged through much of it herself. I’d guess that Ms. Sowerby might be a little drunk on Dworkin’s extremes at the moment, but I still think an article like this makes points that are worth considering. Though I’m in no danger of becoming a Dworkinite, nor finding full agreement with Sowerby, I think some of the claims she makes here are reasonable, agree with her or not.
“The taboo around incest is “a particularised form of repression”; children “too are erotic beings”, she argues,..”
Say it all doesn’t. There’s nothing that cannot be excused or explained away if your politics are correct
People who adhere to this sort of philosophy should be locked up permanently!
I think it misread your comment earlier, and you may have meant to begin: “Says it all doesn’t it?”. I think that quote from Dworkin is foul and indefensible. So was her misandry. But she saw comparative upside in some conservative men, at least compared to go-along soft-left pretenders–so that’s not 100% political tribalism. Too close still. I don’t think it’s anywhere near that severe with Sowerby.
I do take your point. You said fringes of any ideology contain a prevailing measure of insane bullshit. Agreed
The quote would be sufficient to get anyone cancelled, but Dworkin is apparently back in fashion, in the process of being rehabilitated, being given the benefit of the doubt and receiving favourable if caveated coverage. It would never happen if your were not sufficiently left wing
hey baby, why so pitifully narrow a conception there? The erotic capital om which we W E I R D nations utterly depend, is more or less a matter of”flirting with pædophilia” the entire time. For crying out loud, that p-word.does not even have to correspond with its proper referent – it is enough for W E I R D nations to have the zone of absolute goodness (a “legal” nubile teen) constantly rubbing right up next to the zone of absolute evil (the “illegal, “underage” teen) without anybody even daring to wonder what they have to do w/ one another, which i’m here to remind you is pretty much everything..
Not sure why there is this conflation with porn and male power differentials. What about gay porn? Seems unlikely there is any kind of power differential going on here. It’s difficult to see how the dynamics are any different from hetero porn.
It seems I am being ghost banned
Whenever I read this kind of auto-omphalic rubbish from the feminists, I get a wearisome sense of exhaustion at the pointlessness of it all. So much of the resentment, rage and sense of injustice seems to come from a quite ludicrously perverse reading of social reality, in my opinion.
For instance this: “Dworkin is well known for taking literally and seriously the meaning of pornography — that it makes of all women porneia, the lowest class of prostitutes in ancient Greece, and that “we are the women in it”.” – honestly this stupid old trope just never dies, does it?
Women who appear in porn may well be debasing themselves, I agree, but it has no effect on other women at all except if other women choose to imagine that it does. There are men out there who do all sorts of things I’d never do – does this demean me as a man? Of course it doesn’t, the idea is fatuous and absurd. (And while I don’t wish to get personal towards Andrea Dworkin here, I do have to admit to a knee-jerk “yeah right, you wish!” thought on reading that she imagines herself to be classed as porneia through the mechanism she claims to exist just because other women are capable of qualifying as such.)
There are plenty of other idiocies described above but they can all be collectively deemed as resting on the central feminist fallacy that women equate to members of a female-only class. This is simply not true: women are the female variety of two available sexes. They are not a class, and the Marxist ideology of class cannot be harnessed into defining them as such without creating the sort of absurdities that only people like Andrea Dworkin find useful.
Excellent comments. The idea that Dworkin made money from prostitution is honestly so bizarre that only feminists could believe it.
The idea that any man would have sex with Dworkin is beyond the hounds of credibility!
Reminds me of when some of us Australian women held a demonstration against rape as an instrument of war. There was popular outrage that anyone might suggest that “our men” could ever be guilty of such a thing. On the day, three of us headed to the march rallying point were yelled at by three returned men wearing their old army medals. “Who’d want to rape you lot?” one yelled.
Seems like a scenario of the powerless (and their proxies) fighting amongst themselves.
On one side were women who, with high probability, likely didn’t serve at the front lines of war and, therefore, never faced the demoralizing prospect of being commanded to throw away their very lives at a moment’s notice for an esoteric collective cause regardless of their own desires in that moment. But these were women who were empathetic to, and protesting the plight of, other innocent women caught in war zones and wickedly raped.
On the other side were defensive men who’d once lived with the daily understanding of a front-line soldier (judging by your suggestion of them wearing medals): That their life and the life of their buddies had no value other than to be mowed down for the collective of society, even while knowing that many within that society would’ve happily spit upon their sad little graves (if they got one). Men who could be commanded with no care or empathy to throw their lives away at a moment’s notice. Men who’d witnessed privileged women and men at home enjoying the freedoms that these men and many dead men (and to a far lesser extent, women) purchased for them with blood.
Both are right … and both are wrong.
That which is right:
There’s a percentage of bad soldiers who’ve, if given the opportunity, wickedly raped and killed civilian women during wartime. This is one (amongst numerous) reasons that Western Civilization has developed strict military law to govern, as much as possible, the chaos of war while not putting the collective society’s war goals at risk. It was wrong for those soldiers that you met to be flippant about this plight with their disgusting retort.
There’s also a percentage of callous women who’ve been ungrateful for the hundreds-of-millions of good men throughout the eons that sacrificed everything – that is, their very lives, to protect the civilization of their society’s collective of women, the old, and the young. Men who protected their families. Men who’ll never have the chance to write a best-selling autobiography to give voice to their horror and sacrifice. You can sometimes visually witness their silent attestation while driving past oft-forgotten military cemeteries on your way somewhere, with the legion of white stones reaching upward from those grassy lands.
Those who’ve been bullied can also be bullies. Those who are defenders of that which is virtuous can also be the perpetrators of that which is wicked. Life is complicated, and our languages are often imperfect vehicles when communicating closely-held assertions as well as gratitude.
John, it does affect other women if it affects men’s perceptions of women in general and therefore the way they relate to them. It doesn’t have to be all men, or even a majority of men. If it affects a significant number, and I believe it does, that poses a danger to women in modern society. And that has translated into women feeling unsafe in this world. One may feel they are over-reacting – after all, the vast majority(?) aren’t like that. But it may not be the vast majority one is confronted by in a vulnerable situation (certain places at any time, others especially at night, when alone potentially anywhere).
It doesn’t affect men’s perceptions in general. That, too, is an example of the sort of convenient fiction trotted out by progressives in order to peddle their class-ideology. An awareness amongst men that some women may sell their bodies in one form or another does not equate to some sort of objectification or commodification of women in general. Men would have to be all very stupid for that to be true and while that’s an attractive assumption on the part of feminists, in the real world it’s a mere nonsense.
Just because you see yourself as not being part of the problem does not mean that there is not a problem.
It is facile to assert that the widespread consumption of pornography does not affect the attitudes of many young men to women in general, who do not participate in its creation.
On the other hand, if we are revisiting 70s feminist writing, perhaps it is time to re-read Esther Vilar, who argued that men were the victims, as the subjects of lust and desire, and thus vulnerable to exploitation by women, the objects of said lusts.
Or perhaps Poppy will do that for me ?
Esther Vilar certainly provides a good counterpoint to Andrea Dworkin.
Being a conservative elderly male who enjoyed his pseudo hippyish lifestyle in the early to mid 70s I scanned the article with growing disbelief as to why anyone would want to publish let alone read an author who was clearly away with the fairies and judging by her photograph unfuckable. The topic and the article is a load of tosh.
Yeah, no.
Hey, UnHerd, is it possible to find women writers other than Mary Harrington and Ms. Stock who write articles not about sex, or are 90% of women writers Who Don’t Follow the Herd only capable of writing on sex sex and sex?
Hey, UnHerd, is it possible to find women writers who can write articles that don’t sadly match clickbait titles like “Andrea Dworking Was Right About Men” or “Is it Racist to Like Big Butts?” or “How Porn Absorbed Everything” or “OnlyFans Meets the Age of the Prude: What Does Megyn Think?” or … or … ad infinitum?
Yeah, no.
Hey, UnHerd, is it possible to find women writers other than Mary Harrington and Ms. Stock who write articles not about sex, or are 90% of women writers who don’t follow the Herd only capable of writing on sex sex and sex?
Hey, UnHerd, is it possible to find women writers who can write articles without clickbait titles like “Andrea Dworking Was Right About Men” or “Is it Racist to Like Big Butts?” or “How Porn Absorbed Everything” or “OnlyFans Meets the Age of the Prude: What Does Megyn Think?” or … or … ad infinitum?
Usually, the authors deserve no credit or blame for the awful and inaccurate titles. Someone else writes them. This website has become outstandingly bad for clickbait wording.
Being a conservative elderly male who enjoyed his pseudo hippyish lifestyle in the mid 70s I scanned the article with growing disbelief as to why anyone would want to publish let alone read an author who was clearly away with the fairies and judging by her photograph unfuckable. The topic and the article is a load of tosh
My reaction is the same as it was when she first became trendy: “I promise not to consider Andrea Dworkin a sex symbol!”
To the Unherd moderator who deleted my initial comments, thank you for providing the material for my new blog piece:
Unherd removes Mike Buchanan’s comments on an article lauding Andrea Dworkin
https://j4mb.org.uk/2025/02/25/unherd-removes-mike-buchanans-comments-on-an-article-lauding-andrea-dworkin/
Have a nice day.
Nice to come across your blog, thanks.
I have a lot of time for Dworkin, Steinem, Greer et al – they show(ed) intellectual rigor + humor missing from most current dialogue on gender politics. However Dworkin was an early adopter of simple absolutist solutions to complex issues. This is probably why the opposing polarity saw her as a hate figure. Leaving aside the complex issue of commercial sex, the status of porn in Dworkin world is a good starting point: If a women wants to watch hetero or gay porn surely that is up to her. Quite a few women i know enjoy watching gay male porn and i can see why. IDK a cogent argument as to why they shouldn’t. I don’t see the leftist or fundamentalist theology counter arguments as valid, the more so if the talker is a man who simply doesn’t walk the walk. Also great to see the Batman spotlight meme. I can shoe- horn in the joke – “Holy morbidly obese lesbians, Batman! – time for the Dworkin repellent – oh, hang on, she’s brought her own!”
Can you enlighten the rest of us, as this seems to be a bit of a mystery. Genuinely curious.
It’s a new one on me too, though I suppose it ought not to be a surprise given the popularity of lesbian porn with men. This is however a rare point on which I agree with what many feminists say here: why would men be interested in sexual scenarios from which they must by definition be excluded?
One answer, I suppose, is that because porn tends to involve more beautiful people than average, it depicts scenes from which most people would be excluded anyway, but I feel that doesn’t quite cover it.
“She [Dworkin] is positively neurotic about the always-oppressive act of heterosexual “f*****g”…”
From what I can tell, Andrea Dworkin simply hated men, period. Any sexual encounter between a man and a woman was intrinsically oppressive against the woman.
What else is there to say about her? Besides recognizing that radical feminism á la Dworkin & Firestone is the source material for today’s androgynous “anything goes” sexuality, which reduces every sexual encounter to an impersonal act of self-gratification, and treats the partner as little more than a warm-blooded sex toy.
I enjoy Ms. Sowerby’s columns, but as a man, I can’t help but think I made the right call by opting out of opposite sex relations some years ago. Navigating the nuances of the modern female psyche in light of relevant social conditions, political realities, and advance technology strikes me as far more trouble than it is worth. If Ms. Sowerby is a typical example, the thought processes of women make Unherd’s usual domain of geopolitics, economics, and technology seem trivially simple by comparison. I personally find it far easier to understand and meaningfully comment upon the latter.
The female psyche is designed – at least as far as men are concerned – never to be wholly comprehensible at any given moment. This is why to be a happy man in a long term relationship, one must learn to apologise without needing to know what one has done wrong, for instance.
It’s not something I found myself able to do either. I have played with the idea that there might be some sort of parallel in the humanities disciplines of Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics. My version of such a thing would doubtless be complete bollocks of course, but that doesn’t seem to be any obstacle to progress in academia these days.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/doubting-dworkin-the-radical-writers-dubious-account-of-being-drugged-and-assaulted-does-no-good-for-rape-awareness/article768435/
Like many activist types, she has no problem telling lies to advance her cause
Great article. I remembered Dworkin as just the craziest antichrist that could be dismissed as a circus act of earlier Woke absurdity. But maybe there was more substance there…?
The author asks her readers, male and female, to accept Andrea Dworkin’s works as wise and valuable. She also gives a brief account of Dworkin’s experiences. Andrea, it appears did not know how to relate to men very well, and ended up falling victim to some violent and abusive characters, who likewise lacked the ability to relate positively to women. The result is a great outpouring of anger and frustration based upon her unfortunate experience, and her imaginings about men, prominent and otherwise, that followed. To take her work as an authoritative guide to the male sex, in general, would be a mistake. Men come in many varieties, and whatismore, can have the ablity to learn from direction and experience. Andrea Dworkin and other feminist writers want to condemn and punish men, hoping this will make them change into something more preferable. It will not. Good relations between the sexes can only develop through nurturing social experience and education. Unfortunately, much can go wrong along the way if these are not consistent, hence our present dilemmas.
So are we to believe that the same young women who, up until yesterday, were selling ass pics (or approving of such behaviour) are now reading Dworkin? Something tells me these are not the same young women.
“If I were Andrea Dworkin, I’d be glad that I was dead.” Well, that’s one way to seize the reader’s attention! Is this what passes for courageous writing?
“…a spell of poverty after their relationship collapsed forced her to sell sex.” Notable that the author chooses not to write, “…work as a prostitute”, despite her zeal for the sledgehammer elsewhere in her piece.
Note the writer doesn’t say “forced to work as a cleaner, or flip burgers”. Presumably the rate was too low for Ms Dworkin – plus Holland, like Germany and Tonga, has a national fetish for large bodies.
In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir has a section on “The Independent Woman.”
Ain’t so such living thing. I say: “women expect to be protected.” And when women find out that they are not protected, as expected, they get “infuriated.”
In my view, the whole sound and fury around feminism and women’s liberation and multiple sex partners issues from this. Women expect to be protected. And it’s not just an expectation. It goes deeper: deeper than the conscious mind, deeper than culture, deeper than the unconscious. It issues from the genes.
Sex is something that happens between two people, which means it is a kind of negotiation, and therefore imperfect. Women have to submit themselves to a male gaze, and Dworkin complains about having the freedom only to do things men think are sexy; but the alternative seems to be never to appeal to men at all, or at the very best to do so accidentally. Aside from being a very negative view of what is fulfilling in a relationship, it also implies that sex might very well have to cease to exist, if men and women cannot meet (literally) in the middle.
The theory behind this sort of thing, and behind so many modern theories, is that any restriction on personal liberty is bad, including restrictions imposed by friendship, society, and everything else. It all begins with Rousseau: the idea that people are not free unless they are obeying themselves. Any compromise with other people is a restriction on freedom, is a source of domination; so a woman who compromises (i.e., every woman) ‘is never truly free.’ Any interpersonal reactions are ruled out entirely. Sex is certainly interpersonal, but so is subjecting yourself to pornographic representation, or even just being sexy.
There are two solution to giving up interpersonal relations: one is either to hope for some kind of relationship so perfect that two minds become one:
This is a respectable idea, and as the quote suggests really quite old fashioned – I imagine it is what Poppy Sowerby believes – but women are not more inclined than men to have to wait to find this relationship to experience any kind of intimacy. And who can tell when they find it? And how many people do? And does it last a lifetime?
The alternative solution is to imagine that in some future world all differences between people will have been abolished. This is of course what Rosseau and Hegel and Marx believed, and Dworkin too, which is why she lands on androgyny, and also why she has nothing to say about incest; because the identity of the sexual partner is of the least importance in the world, everyone being the same. If such a world were possible it might be more equitable but it would not be very enjoyable, and it would be a world without love in any human sense anyway.
So, you can either persevere with sex, casual or not, as an expression of freedom – if you think sex is mostly harmful, then an expression of freedom on par with, say, smoking – or you can just give up, and declare that love, not merely sex, is a synonym for submission. And what is the point of living, then.
Jordan Peterson was surely right about Dworkin when he said the had a personality disorder. When it came to hateful sexism, she made Andrew Tate look like Paddington bear.
I don’t think there is any group of people so lacking in self awareness as feminists.
“The taboo around incest is “a particularised form of repression”; children “too are erotic beings”, she argues,..”
Say it all doesn’t. There’s nothing that cannot be excused or explained away if your politics are correct
“ a spell of poverty after their relationship collapsed forced her to sell sex”
I can’t help wondering how many women would think this a reasonable statement.
A very well-written essay, Ms Sowerby. I can sense your highly-nuanced perceptions in wrestling with this topic of a complex individual’s philosophy that came from her personal life’s challenges and successes, and I’ve learned something new. Thank you for sharing with us.
The same arguments about self-defeating female sexual “empowerment” merely feeding the male appetite for commitment-free sex that my conservative father was making in the 1970s.
My first thought on Dworkin, and I’m a little surprised it’s not mentioned in this article, is that she insisted over and over again that all men quietly but conscientiously recognize and participate in an age-old conspiracy/program in which rape is used to suppress women in general. That is, she insisted taht ALL men are conspiratory rapists, over nearly all of human history. What a pile. I couldn’t take her seriously after that, even after getting over the anger.
Seriously? I mean, seriously?
Girl fights are better when visual. Written cat scratching not compelling.
This is not a bad article and gave me an insight into Dworkin I had not appreciated because of her all enveloping prominence for general man hating. As a dad of 3 young women I am virulently anti porn and sexualisation of women. I am not left wing by any definition. The problem with the feminist movement is that it’s anti all men but slides up to lefty sleaze ball men who are fake feminists and predatory whilst at the same time feminists seeks to neuter strong conservative men who have simple old fashioned respect and values for women. The biggest threat to young women is their divorced mothers who tell their daughters to go wild without regrets. No one analyses that!