Who’s afraid of Andrea Dworkin? Lots of people, it turns out. In life, she was hated, and knew it. Conservatives and liberals alike pilloried her, making her name a shibboleth for feminism’s dangerous and unsexy excesses. They treated her work with mocking unseriousness at some moments, fevered contempt at others. A different sort of writer might have tried to rise above this mistreatment with a cool dignity. Not Dworkin. She raged against it as a symptom of the very misogyny that she diagnosed with merciless precision. In a scathing 1987 letter to The New York Times, she wrote that the paper “managed to avoid discussing anything real or even vaguely intelligent about my work and the political questions it raises.” She was indelicate, but she wasn’t wrong. It was an accurate assessment of much of the treatment that Dworkin’s writing received in her own time and, indeed, continues to receive in ours.
Over the past decade Dworkin’s legacy has had to fight its way back into the feminist canon from the depths of this reputational nadir. But the estimation of Dworkin as a polemicist or propagandist is, ironically, the product of a good deal of polemic and propaganda aimed against her. It is not a perception that withstands any engaged encounter with her work—especially not with Right-Wing Women (1983), her exacting and ambitious exegesis on women in the conservative movement and the conservative movement’s approach to women.
It is a loss for all of us that Right-Wing Women—reissued this week by Picador—has been so long out of print. But I have felt its absence most acutely in the years since 2016. The rise of Donald Trump reoriented American politics, laying bare our country’s social pathologies and organizing our political system around a newly frank and avowed reverence for violence and inequity. As the years passed, I frequently wished that Right-Wing Women was back in circulation, at least in a form more accessible than the used paperbacks that sold for exorbitant prices, and more comfortable than the pirated PDFs that made the rounds online. The book could have guided more of us, lending its clarity and principle as events called on us to rethink what we thought we knew about masculinity and domination, the meaning of gender in the political sphere, and women’s role in upholding it all.
When she was still alive, Dworkin was often criticized as hyperbolic and unnuanced. But Trump, with his hatred, vulgarity, and love of force, seems to offer up an awful confirmation that what she saw was really there all along. His politics confirm her analysis of everyday misogyny: he has a reverence for domination and sadism, a cruel and peevish enforcement of hierarchy, an egotism that feeds, with an almost erotic enthusiasm, on the pain and humiliation of others.
Such a figure lurks, omnipresent, in the background of Right-Wing Women, in which Dworkin seeks to identify and explain the appeal of authoritarianism—both the grand sort, which animates dictatorial politics, and the domestic sort, which makes tyrants of husbands and fathers. Throughout the book Dworkin looks into this darkness and asks what it would mean to seek safety in it—what sort of desperation and degradation women would have to endure in order to see the political right as their best option for survival.
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Dworkin pays close attention to how the right deploys women’s gendered needs and suffering in rhetoric even as it opposes their freedom in practice. Little, on this score, has changed. In Dworkin’s time, she faced a right wing that opposed women’s inclusion in civil rights protections and mocked their aspirations to be free of sexual harassment—all while claiming the mantle of protecting them from the very violence and poverty it imposed. In our time, we face a right wing that pretends to abhor sexual violence when that rhetoric can be used to scapegoat immigrants, but celebrates sexual violence when it can be used as a marker of men’s virility; a Republican party that pretends that trans women and girls are an offense to cis women while at the same time eroding cis women’s dignity and safety with abortion bans. When Dworkin profiles the prominent right-wing women of her day, including the antifeminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly and the homophobic campaigner Anita Bryant, she wants not just to psychologize them but to investigate the entire conservative gender worldview. That worldview is not, she suggests, the sole remit of the right—it extends across the American political imagination, which transforms sexual difference into hierarchy and ultimately excludes women from full civic equality altogether.
It’s a cliché to say that sexism could not survive without women’s participation, and Dworkin is not the only feminist who has sought to explain their cooperation. In 1988, just a few years after Right-Wing Women appeared, the political scientist Deniz Kandiyoti coined the term “patriarchal bargain” to denote the sacrifices of dignity, opportunity, or self-determination that women make to secure their survival under male domination.1 Dworkin, too, analyzes these trade-offs, the ways that right-wing women seek safety and status within a movement that demeans them. Even the most odious of conservative women, in her telling, suffer the indignities and violence of misogyny. She shows us Bryant being stalked and domineered by her ultrareligious husband, Bob Green, and hoping that enough prayer and fervor would save the marriage. (It didn’t.) She shows us Schlafly, a figure of formidable public passion and organizing power, reduced to begging God for the strength to love her husband.
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“They know that they are valued for their sex—their sex organs and their reproductive capacity,” Dworkin writes,
and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity,” “total woman,” “good,” “maternal instinct,” “motherly love.” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules.
A lesser writer would let investigation slip into exoneration, or gloat at these women’s cowardice, or mock them for making the wrong choices. But Dworkin refuses either to absolve her subjects or to deny their tragedy. She does not allow the cynicism of their bargains to blind her to the unfairness of their circumstances. “They see the world they live in,” Dworkin writes, “and they are not wrong.”
And so what Right-Wing Women theorizes is something darker and more distorted than Kandiyoti’s description of strategic capitulation. Dworkin’s right-wing women embark on a program of active complicity with patriarchy—one that leads them, at last, to a kind of conversion.
Does such a process not explain much of our own political reality? In the faces of the white women who look rapturously up at Trump from the crowds at his rallies, I can see what Dworkin diagnosed in the likes of Schlafly and Bryant: a plea for safety, for belonging, for a security that they love more than their own freedom. These women conservatives are no longer acting, as liberals so often say they are, “against their own interests,” because to act against their own interests, they would have to have their own interests, and indeed their own selves—and that is exactly what the conservative ideological project has divested them of. Revisiting Right-Wing Women today reveals that what Dworkin’s critics once thought of as her hysteria was in fact her prescience. What else might we have missed?
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Born in New Jersey in 1946 to Jewish parents, Dworkin experienced sexual abuse for the first time at the age of nine, when she was molested by a stranger in a movie theater. As an undergraduate at Bennington, she was arrested in Manhattan at a protest against the Vietnam War and subjected to a violent and violating gynecological exam in jail. Later, as a young woman in Amsterdam, her political convictions led her into an anarchist sect, and she married a man she met there. He beat her savagely. Amid his abuse, in her lowest desperation, she turned to friends and her parents for help. But most of them ignored her, preferring to look away. She would later write of this last episode—the inescapability of domestic violence, the traitorous indifference of her community—as the greatest despair of her life. It took her years to escape, which she only managed to do by working as a prostitute: still more sex that she came to see as coerced and unchosen.
This violent biography is sadly not abnormal for women, either in Dworkin’s time or in ours. But what was uncommon about Dworkin was her willingness to speak about it: to name gender violence as an emergency, its infliction as a kind of terrorism, and its widespread acceptance as a social pathology. Critics today like to wield her biography against her, to say that her experiences of violence had rendered her unreliable, untrustworthy, or psychologically incapable of perceiving reality. (The British sex radical Sophie Lewis, in a typical missive, attributed Dworkin’s politics to the psychological damage she suffered from her abuse, and to “the degree of horror and shame she clearly feels regarding her enjoyment—her past enjoyment—of being fucked hard.”) This is a common way to dismiss women, and in particular women who name rape: to say that what has happened to them has made them crazy, and that, therefore, they cannot reliably interpret it.
It is certainly true that violence can alter us, revising how we see the world in that mysterious process of pain and memory that it is now called trauma. But do those experiences deceive us, or do they initiate us into a terrible knowledge? Do they lower a veil over our eyes, or lift the curtain on the unbearable truths of the world, forcing us to see something that other people would rather not? For her part, Dworkin always defied the smear that she was simply deluded: she never backed away from claiming experience as a source of her own expertise. She was famously impassioned and unyielding in her feminist convictions, but when you read her she surprises you with the rigor of her research and argument, with the panhistorical ambition of her project, and above all with her acute, creative, painfully felt sense of empathy.
You may have heard Dworkin caricatured—inaccurately—as having claimed that “all sex is rape.” You would be surprised to discover that her offense at the way sex is used to dominate and degrade comes in part from her faith in eroticism’s transcendent potential to enrich and add meaning to our lives—if only we could divest it from the logic of male supremacy. You may have heard—accurately—that Dworkin critiqued pornography. You might be surprised by her close readings of it, which grapple less with questions of repressive morality than with the influence of representative art on the social world, and with how what we see and consume changes how we think and treat others. You may have heard that Dworkin bore a bigoted or antagonistic view of trans women, a reputation she gained in part because she lent a blurb to the viciously transphobic 1979 book The Transsexual Empire; you would be surprised to discover that Dworkin was also among the first radical feminists to call for gender-affirming care to be paid for by the state, described the categories of “man” and “woman” as “fictions, characters, cultural constructs,” and referred to transition approvingly as a kind of “erotic civil disobedience.” (The reality of Dworkin’s seemingly contradictory attitude toward trans identity may be less exonerating than banal: she does not seem to have thought about it very much.)2 And yet such human contradictions are rarely seen in reasonable proportion in assessments of Dworkin’s work. Few writers are excoriated so confidently by people who do not really know what they said. The result is that many readers come to Dworkin expecting to be made angry. But they stay because they are deeply moved.
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They also stay because Dworkin, at her most successful, attempts a feminism of greater cogency and commitment than much of what has been on offer today. She understands male supremacy as a catastrophe and refuses to minimize the full scale and horror of what it inflicts on women. Her analysis of misogyny as a culturally and historically pervasive system—one that is not merely evidenced through art and literature but reinforced by them—can have a demystifying effect. Perhaps it was this lucidity of her prose, with its omnivorous citation and relentless focus on women’s suffering under patriarchy, that Dworkin’s critics were responding to. Reading her, after all, can be a disturbing experience: it is unpleasant to see such things made so clear.
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Some twenty years after her death, it has become possible to assess Dworkin’s reception with the calm remove of distance. It now seems obvious that much of the hysteria and hate she was charged with by her critics was in fact a projection of their own anxious desires to avoid confronting their own complicity with patriarchal violence, a confession posing as an accusation. “Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships,” she wrote in Our Blood (1981). Dworkin does not spare her readers this agony. A reader’s ability to stomach her, I have found, often comes from a certain personal hardness and determination.
Which is not to say that Dworkin never got it wrong. The cultural resistance to Dworkin’s message makes it difficult to pick apart her real flaws from our own defensiveness. But the flaws are there. Dworkin can be unnuanced and myopic. She pays rigorous attention to how sexuality is used to degrade women, but not enough to how it can inspire and enliven them. She has an acute sense of the perils facing the socially marginalized but does not dwell enough on how those same people can come to take sadistic glee in wielding power. Dworkin sees Bryant as a victim of an overbearing, abusive husband, and she was; she does not grapple with the sincere cruelty of Bryant’s homophobia. She sees Schlafly as a genius whose sex led her to be overlooked by the chauvinistic Reagan administration, and she was; she may allow the unfairness of this insult to eclipse her full reckoning with Schlafly’s misogyny. Dworkin also makes linguistic choices that I cringe from: she charges into comparisons to the Holocaust and American chattel slavery without thinking of the specific meaning of these historical comparisons, instead seeming to simply grasp at their moral authority. These are careless choices.
They are also, it should be said, the sorts of failures that she was able to decipher in others. Perhaps the best way to approach Dworkin now is to try to interpret her own missteps with the generosity that she gave to her own subjects—to read her, that is, in an effort to understand, rather than to discipline or excuse. There is, after all, quite a bit of pain involved in trying to navigate misogyny—a system of oppression so pervasive and intimate that it makes its victims complicit in ways that can be shaming to acknowledge.
In Right-Wing Women’s chapter on abortion politics, Dworkin writes that right-wing women want abortion to be illegal so that they will not have to see women living differently, and so will not have to grapple with their own choices to conform. “No one has to be confronted with another woman making a choice, choosing not to be a mother,” Dworkin writes. “No one must face women openly with priorities other than marriage and conformity…. The women who rebel against their function must do it secretly, not causing grief, embarrassment, or confusion to other women.” Dworkin’s own stridency, her confidence, her determination—all of these can cause us grief, embarrassment, and confusion. But that is no reason not to read her. We prefer our feminists to be humble, uncertain. We like them to merely pose questions. But that’s not Andrea Dworkin. She was a woman who had answers.
