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Erin Riley profiles the prominent and controversial second-wave feminist, the late Andrea Dworkin.

A year ago, last April, Andrea Dworkin, the famous American radical feminist and writer died at her home in Washington D.C. She was only 58.

Dworkin authored ten books of radical feminist theory and a number of articles and speeches throughout her lifetime. Each of these polemics was designed to assert the presence of and denounce institutionalised harm against women. She was not just some academic high flyer with a bone to pick but a feminist campaigner who had experienced the brutality of a misogynistic society. She had experienced rape, battery and subordination her entire life. It was while in the Netherlands, in the early 1970s, on the run from an abusive ex-husband, that Dworkin made the pledge to fellow feminist campaigner Ricki Abrams that once back in America, she would devote her life to the women’s movement.

Dworkin’s work, particularly that on prostitution, pornography and women’s rights issues have influenced and inspired the work of numerous contemporaries and younger feminist crusaders, such as Catharine MacKinnon, John Stoltenberg (who was Dworkin’s ‘life partner’), Nikki Craft and Susan Cole. She characterised pornography as an industry of abuse and objectification and often discussed prostitution as a system of exploitation.

Dworkin’s writing was contentious, in your face and challenged the binary nature of the human condition. Many of her opponents claimed that she was in bed with the right and was hindering true female emancipation by investigating the pornography industry. Others claimed that her life’s work asserted that all heterosexual intercourse was “rape” and damaging to women’s equality. Dworkin, throughout her life, consistently rejected this interpretation of her argument and continuously fought for the rights of women in a pornography-saturated patriarchal society.

Dworkin is most often remembered for her role in the feminist anti-pornography movement, as a speaker, writer and ardent activist. Her books, Women Hating and Pornography: Men Possessing Women, critiqued contemporary pornography and looked at the role of pornography in creating a culture based on inequality and victimisation. While often admonished by more liberal feminists for hampering what they regarded as true female empowerment, Dworkin believed pornography to be direct female exploitation at the hands of a dominant and oppressive mainstream male culture.

As it was the issue she was most passionate about, it seems only fitting to delve a little deeper into some of the obstacles Dworkin and her fellow anti-porn activists faced as they fought for true female emancipation.

Dworkin and fellow feminists contend that pornography constructs women exclusively as sexual objects – both proselytising and consolidating a false consciousness about the nature of the relationship between men and women. They claim that pornography directly inculcates its male consumers with what amounts to a textbook guide in how to oppress, rape, batter and subordinate females. For the anti-pornographers, actors and pornographers perpetuate the myth that the pornographic image is sacrosanct and ‘real’. Given this threat, feminist activists like Dworkin wanted to educate society, in particular male society, that pornography is not a snapshot of reality but a female-devaluing false consciousness.

The anti-pornography movement rose to prominence in the early 1970s. At about the same time ‘snuff’ films were becoming increasingly popular. These films, in which women were killed (or depicted as being killed), either during or after violent acts of sexual abuse, provided the catalyst for feminist opposition to what was seen as the development of a “rapist culture”. They formed ad hoc groups and picketed theatres that showed these films. However, more often than not, the films would just move elsewhere. From these groups, more organised anti-pornography groups developed and attempted to alert the public to the insidious dangers which pornography posed.

In the 1980s, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon and Sheila Jeffreys identified the increasing diversity of pornographic forms (e.g. cable television and video) as a major obstacle in the way of the anti-porn cause. Dworkin and other anti-porn feminists found it increasingly difficult to get their critical works past publishers’ desks. However compelling their arguments were, publishers could not envision readership beyond a very limited niche market. It was the inability to get the word out about the dangers of pornography that really hampered the movement. The difficulty with the publication of such distinctly feminist periodicals was that it never reached its desired audience (i.e. mainstream males). For the majority of mainstream males, the messages were so couched in feminist meta-language that it was unintelligible and amounted to little more than ‘preaching to the converted’.

Feminist anti-pornography campaigners encountered various forms of social resistance and antagonism from both the right and the left of the political spectrum and also from within the women’s movement itself. When the feminist campaign against pornography began in the 1970s, it was centred around a critique of pornography as a product designed by males for males. This clear-cut demarcation changed significantly in the 1980s as women became a key target audience for porn. Feminist Libertarian theorists encouraged women’s active participation in the consumption of pornography; claiming that because women were now economically ‘equal’, they could sit back and ‘enjoy it’. For the ‘libertarians’, pornography use was seen as the epitome of sexual freedom and expression. They advocated freedom of the sexual marketplace and saw any opposition as ultimately inhibiting to women’s true sexual expression. However, the anti-porn feminists claimed that once women begin to consume pornography, they become active agents in their own oppression.

Dworkin branded these libertarian theorists ‘collaborators’; claiming their arguments ignore all the women who have been hurt, either directly or indirectly by pornography and “protect the pimps who do the hurting”. For anti-pornography campaigners, pornography not only sexually exploits women but enshrines the myth of male supremacy at the expense of female sexual independence.

For Dworkin and others like her, until pornography no longer exists, women will be forced to exist within a patriarchal framework characterised by male-defined values. However, in a society so deeply saturated by porn-induced culture the values that Dworkin sought to instil within society seem nowhere near realisation.