Freak Feminism: On Andrea Dworkin

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For much of my feminist life, I knew nothing about Andrea Dworkin except to resent her. Perhaps the face of various ideologies labelled “radical feminism,” Dworkin wrote over a dozen texts about women’s oppression. This year, Picador rereleased three: Woman-Hating (1974), Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), and Right-Wing Women (1983). The latter contains an efficacious new forward by Moira Donegan. The new editions come amidst renewed engagement with Dworkin amid the current Trump-era backlash to feminism: positive reappraisal essays, a well-reviewed biographical documentary, and a 2019 edited collection from Riot Grrrl activist Johanna Fateman and feminist filmmaker Amy Scholder

In the feminist spaces where I grew up, Dworkin was an anti-foremother. She was not appreciated, only disidentified with. In fairness, she isn’t for everyone. A survivor of multiple sexual assaults and an abusive husband, Dworkin honed revolutionary ethics in 1960s anti-war movements. She turned these lessons toward liberating women, especially from sexual objectification. Her work questions, as she writes in Woman-Hating, cultures that “define women as hot wet fuck tubes, hot slits.”

The prose style that permeates her work—brazen, grotesque, and darkly funny—is indisputable in capturing the defeat and disgust of misogynistic culture. Woman-Hating, Dworkin’s first book, a series of studies about historical and cultural misogyny, concludes with a call for a world without gender as we know it. This all-or-nothing approach characterizes Right-Wing Women, too. Early in this text, Dworkin, now more embattled in the fight for women’s liberation, escalates that well-justified defeat and disgust at unchanging misogynistic culture: 

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not.

Nothing ever changes, so many women embrace “right-wing solutions” to their marginalization, ranging from accepting domestic life to becoming conservative talking heads like Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly. You might not be liberated, making choices that Dworkin calls “stupid” and “short-sighted,” but you’re at least logical, earning respect and safety from men and the larger culture through hyper-compliance. 

Dworkin’s divisive reputation mostly emerges from critiquing pornography and sex work. In Pornography, Dworkin contends that porn not only reflects men’s patriarchal power, but forms its basis. Pornography fuels much of the Dworkin disidentification in the broadly sex-positive feminism of recent decades. There are legitimate questions about how Dworkin’s stances impact sex workers and others, not to mention founded concerns about her at-times sloppy metaphors comparing gender to race and class.

Donegan’s forward helpfully separates the wheat from the chaff when it comes to Dworkin’s reputation. She does acknowledge Dworkin’s shortcomings, including “cringe” racial metaphors. But Donegan notes how Dworkin never characterized all sex as rape, espoused anti-trans ideology, or attempted to outlaw pornography, three common Dworkin reputational myths. I appreciate Donegan’s frank steadiness in describing what works and what doesn’t in Dworkin. Too often, Dworkin reappraisals are anxiously defensive, sheepishly conveying that the author knows she shouldn’t like Dworkin, and yet, she does, just a little. 

Still, I understand why many Dworkin reappraisers are self-conscious. It’s difficult to reach Donegan’s level of self-possession when so many stake their credentials on being not Andrea Dworkin. Some of this disavowal is direct. Like many millennial feminists, I first learned how to question the status of women in the early 2000s from then-flourishing feminist blogs, which generally promoted post-third wave, porn and sex-work friendly ideals. Dworkin was rarely mentioned and, when she was, her views were labeled old-fashioned and problematic. These blogs were covertly influential, popularizing terms like “TERF” and “intersectionality.” So, it’s not an overstatement to say that these scrappy bloggers’ feelings about Dworkin were impactful for my feminist generation. 

Other Dworkin rejections were more spiritual, repudiating the distinctly unpalatable feminism for which she stands. This was the era of “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” shirts, of contests to “rebrand” feminism, of smugly telling—sometimes begging—people to call themselves feminists if they had even the mildest commitment to gender equality. We were borderline praying for culture-at-large, immersed in the Bush-era gender politics of purity rings and “partial birth” abortion bans, to stop marginalizing us.

We, feminists, didn’t want to be freaks: mythically ugly, man-hating, and excessive. We rarely said it aloud, but I always sensed that Dworkin was the cautionary tale we styled ourselves against. Aside from her controversial opinions and abrasive prose, Dworkin’s plain styling made her an avatar of this stereotype, epitomized by cruel caricatures in Hustler and Penthouse. Most freakishly, Dworkin didn’t care about her reception. In the afterword to Woman-Hating, written with only lowercase letters and little punctuation, Dworkin writes that “my publisher changed my punctuation because book reviewers do not like lower case letters. fuck book reviewers.” Dworkin was never graceful with critics, writes Donegan, arguing that people only “resist” her feminism “because it is an agony” to understand “brutal misogyny.” Dworkin already knows she’s right. She doesn’t need you to believe her.

This contrasts sharply with the desire for a feminist mainstream, where we are friendly women-next-door. In the 2010s, media and marketing departments noticed our desperation. They responded by turning the label “feminist” into a trend: politically milquetoast, overly celebrity-driven, yet one I and some other feminists found bewitching. We struck a regrettable bargain: a “right-wing solution” that brought some of us comfort. Much has already been written about this era’s capitalist capitulations and racial limitations. Our language sold cosmetics, enriched pop stars, and propped up centrist political campaigns. The public perceived feminists for the first time as normies. This doesn’t mean the feminist project had succeeded: abortion restrictions increased, sexual violence was still ubiquitous, and the then-nascent “men’s rights” movement gained steam. But, hey, you could buy a “The Future is Female” shirt at Target. 

It was genuinely nice for a while to not feel like a freak. But a decade on, I see myriad consequences of the perception that being a feminist is normative and mainstream. Some are obvious: anti-feminist, fascist-enabling “manosphere” discourses can claim to be rebelling against feminist mainstream culture. What I see more subtly manifesting on the left, though, is how few progressives make strong commitments to feminism as a philosophy or organizing locus despite the current emergency-levels of women’s subjugation. I see a lot who, validly, poke fun at the last gasps of normie feminism, like the Blue Origin flight, but I don’t see them say “not our feminism,” and propose something more principled. I suspect that many of us on the left have internalized the corny commercials and girlboss memoirs to mean feminism is mainstream, unserious and unnecessary. We no longer see women’s liberation as central to a revolutionary project, as an insurgent and countercultural force.

Revisiting Dworkin is invigorating. She reveals important ideas about what happens when the public perceives feminism as mainstream, even as the needle barely moves on women’s liberation, and subsequently why feminism must always be countercultural, even freakish, to work.

In one of my favorite sections of Right-Wing Women, “The Coming Gynocide,” Dworkin gets conspiratorial, arguing that women who are “politically dissident,” not reproductive nor sexually pleasing to men, will be systemically eliminated through a “gynocide,” epitomized by over-prescribing psychiatric drugs to force compliance and neglecting older women in healthcare. At first glance, it’s borderline crank feminism, but Dworkin cites her sources. 

And, though it is uncomfortable to consider, she’s correct. Dworkin writes that “women are prescribed more than twice the [psychiatric] drugs that men are”—still true. Many of them are over 50, aligning with Dworkin’s argument about post-menopausal women. Today’s SSRIs are nothing like the tranquilizers more common in Dworkin’s day, but it remains true that contemporary women’s anxiety and depression has a deeply gendered dimension, influenced by motherhood and household labor. Dworkin also writes, of amphetamines, “women get the drug by saying they want or need to be thinner no matter how thin they are.” This idea recalls today’s use of semaglutide weight-loss drugs which, naturally, women are significantly more likely to be interested in and more likely to have adverse reactions to. These drugs are safe and effective, but if women’s lives were different to begin with, they would not be so ubiquitous. That women are becoming so much smaller – physically and emotionally, being stymied in their anger and fear – indeed feels like elimination, a gynocide. Importantly, Dworkin also writes about the psychic dimensions of gynocide: isolation, reputational damage, and emotional burdens. This phenomenon hasn’t disappeared. Look at Donegan, whose bold “Shitty Media Men” list led to her paying a large legal settlement. 

Right-Wing Women provides a passionately argued, if not eccentric, reason why it’s so easy to be seduced by likability and acceptance as a feminist: it’s hard to be a really dissident woman under the threat of physical and emotional gynocide. To insist on a kind and culturally acceptable feminism may be a “right-wing solution,” an act of self-preservation.  It’s a risky, but also highly precise, diagnosis of misogyny and implies an antidote: hearing, protecting, and affirming women who speak about oppression, regardless of whether people find them likable, or us likable for listening.

Dworkin also explains why a feminist mainstream, even if we desire it, can never really happen, and why effective feminism must always be countercultural. She does so by interrogating how misogyny always shows up in mainstream culture, even under a patina of caring about women, with communicative and moral clarity. In the strongest chapter of Right-Wing Women, “Abortion,” Dworkin contends that women won abortion rights with support of the male-dominated “Left,” who used “abortion to make women sexually available” in the post-sexual revolution 1970s. These male leftists, Dworkin writes, terrorized women with their focus on sexual availability:

It was assumed that – unrepressed – everyone wanted intercourse all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of and proof of sexual repression.

When women refused to “overcome” that “repression,” male leftists “abandoned” them, allowing for the chipping away at Roe that concluded with Dobbs.

Reading this chapter, I felt like a teenager discovering “patriarchy” for the first time again as Dworkin, with her distinct active voice, succinctly traces the socio-cultural factors that convey how, “women are required to submit to intercourse” and, in turn, to “pregnancy.” “Women,” Dworkin writes, “live in a context of forced sex.” 

Returning to the myth of the feminist mainstream, I see Dworkin vindicated today in how polls show most Americans support legal abortion – but do they, really? Consider the ongoing tension between abortion advocates and “average” people and, by proxy, the political strategists appealing to the latter. Americans prefer messages about abortion that focus on loving mothers making tragic decisions to end wanted pregnancies over those about women simply choosing their freedom, oppose later abortion, and are still attached to the belittling adage of abortion being between “a woman and her doctor.” Most Americans kind of like some abortion, but not when feminists present it as a liberatory tool. That the preferred kinds of abortion represent a patriarchal status quo, where women might, for instance, solve a temporary health concern to go back to being a mother, affirms Dworkin’s argument that acquiescence to abortion rights was never really about women’s freedom. No matter what polls say, the fight for abortion access—free, on-demand, and without apology—will always be countercultural. If you love abortion, you’re a freak. 

Understandably, many women don’t want to take on this label and its risks. In turn, Dworkin speculates that by protecting motherhood-as-institution, valuing embryos more than themselves, right-wing women can survive. They strike a regrettable, self-serving bargain: “what they see is that women get fucked whether they want it or not; right-wing women get fucked by fewer men.” The right-wing woman’s husband will also “pay for the kids” and keep her safe. By embracing anti-abortion misogyny, right-wing women can create safe, unfulfilling lives. This idea manifests today in trad wife influencers and the young women who admire them. In a more transmuted form, it’s reflected in how many women choose quiet, safe lives over rioting in the street over Dobbs. I, and Dworkin, don’t blame them.

Dworkin’s explanation of career right-wing women like Bryant and Schlafly doesn’t map as neatly onto today’s politics. Dworkin weaves both sympathy and contempt for these women into a complex analysis about their abhorrent yet logical choices. Bryant, for instance, was “desperate” for the kind of respect she could never access in her abusive marriage, but also “dangerous” in the way she hastened contemporary homo- and transphobias. Such complexity is reflected in Dworkin’s grammar, where Bryant was passively “badgered into” giving public religious testimony yet actively decided to “use women” for her career. It all checks out. Nonetheless, if I try to apply this same logic to, say, Kristi Noem, I feel disgusting, using an analytic I love, feminism, to understand abhorrent white, Christian nationalism. 

Perhaps this is why this section of Right-Wing Women feels a little delirious. I’m unsure if Dworkin is as airtight in explaining the rise of the female career conservative as she is at diagnosing the pressures of forced sex and gynocide. Still, her analysis is bolder and more interesting than today’s clichés about women voting against their own interests. What she advances is a truly big-tent feminism, one that loves and sympathizes with even the most hateable of women. 

I wonder if my uncertainty comes from the seductive promise of likability and normativity in feminism, trying not to come across as “problematic” in defending some women. I feel the same way in trying to parse my feelings regarding Pornography. Do I have real reservations about Dworkin’s maxim that “we will know that we are free when the pornography no longer exists,” or am I acquiescing to being a fun kind of feminist, not a freak? 

I considered writing about Pornography with what earlier I called “anxious defensiveness.”I’d write less about how I shouldn’t like Dworkin and emphasize more the ways that you should, without having to change anything about yourself. Dworkin didn’t want the state to ban porn, after all. From here, I could comfortably fudge the truth and say that Dworkin merely wanted to closely read porn and engage with it seriously. I could overemphasize Dworkin’s view that conservative distaste for pornography is farcical, a distraction from how they put porn-tinged ideologies like forced pregnancy into practice, contending that she wouldn’t support today’s Republican-sponsored porn bans.

What if she did? Would it matter?  She might not fit into my progressive political fantasies, but that doesn’t change how Dworkin’s analysis is mostly wise and sharp. A chapter about Sade is tedious, feeling out of place amidst Dworkin’s deft work on more contemporary pornographies. For example, she counters the common argument that porn lacks inherent misogyny because images of women dominating men exist by way of analysis about an “absurd and ridiculous” pornographic text called “Whip Chick,” where  “the portrayal of men as sexual victims is distinctly unreal, ludicrous in part because it scarcely has an analogue in the real world.” 

Dworkin might freak out readers not only through her porn-opposition, but her equal opportunity analysis. She considers gay pulp and countercultural kinky porn, for instance, arguing that even these are awfully mainstream in how they still center heterosexual men. Dworkin demands better of even the most “freak” forms of porn. Her ability to envision gendered freedom in the most marginalized of spaces—so often presumed to already be liberatory—speaks to her integrity, her admirable willingness to be unlikable even among those who might otherwise be allies, in pursuit of her all-encompassing vision of a post-patriarchy.

This vision structures Woman-Hating, culminating in a manifesto for “nothing short of everything.” Throughout this book, Dworkin examines how misogyny shows up in taken-for-granted cultural artifacts like fairy tales. Her analyses here aren’t as fresh as in later texts, but Dworkin’s bluntness and dark humor makes it an animated and  easy read. Already, Dworkin, who was completely unaware of the massive backlash she’d face a decade later, shows her admirable willingness to be a freak, most notably in the utopic final chapter and afterword. 

While even the most radical feminist-sympathetic readers won’t agree with all of Dworkin’s contentions, I think today’s backlash to women’s progress renders her a kind of role model. I wouldn’t say Dworkin makes feminism fun again, per se. She famously called herself “not the fun kind” of feminist. But her feminism is refreshingly capacious and lively, an invigorating political force distinct enough to stand against abortion bans, pro-natalism, and the various other sexist backlashes of the Trump era. She’s not hurt if you think she’s a freak. She welcomes it. We can do the same, refusing acquiescence to likability and normativity. If conservatives and some progressives alike really believe that feminists are everywhere, dominating culture, we should make our hard work stand out, like Dworkin did, by refusing to fit in and making a “total commitment” to liberating women.