American radical feminist and journalist Andrea Dworkin was born on 26 September 1946 and became a symbol of the feminist movement for many years. She would become most widely known for her views on pornography: Dworkin argued that pornography and its viewing was a form of rape.
She would take her first steps into politics in 1965 while studying at Bennington College. Dworkin would be arrested at a demonstration against the Vietnam War and placed in a New York City women's detention cell. Prison doctors subjected her to a forcible gynaecological examination in an extremely humiliating and painful way. Dworkin would go public with the story and testify before a Grand Jury, which would deny her a criminal case against the prison administration and doctors. However, the case would become public knowledge and be reported in both American and foreign newspapers. The prison would be closed under public pressure seven years later.
In her first marriage, Dworkin became a victim of systemic domestic violence in its extreme forms – her later fiction books would incorporate this experience in one way or another (critics would call them a reworking of the novels of the Marquis de Sade in the light of feminist theory). Her second marriage was a sensation for its time: calling herself an open lesbian, Dworkin would live the rest of her life with an openly gay man.
Dworkin would become the author of the theoretical foundations of modern feminism. In 1979 she would publish “Pornography: Men Possessing Women”, analysing pornography as a dehumanising industry based on hatred of women. In 2002, major newspapers published her story that one or more men had raped her in a Paris hotel the previous year by spiking her drink with sodium oxybate. This would cause a major public controversy as some famous people would openly question the credibility of the story.
Andrea Dworkin would pass away in 2005 from osteoarthritis.
Source: Andrea Dworkin, “Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin”, Edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, eds. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019
