“All women are.”īut I also discovered that the way she shared intimate, sometimes shocking details of her sexual and romantic life - rife with domestic abuse, molestation, and rape - came off as brave and poignant.

The collection contains Dworkin’s more outrageous assertions, the ones that repelled me as a young woman and concerned critics like my mom and other pro-sex feminists fighting for women’s desires to be acknowledged and accepted - that men need to forgo their “precious erections” and “make love as women do together.” That pornography “incarnates male supremacy” and is “the DNA of male dominance.” That all intercourse, while not literally rape, violates the integrity of a woman’s body, that women who want it are “experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority.” What women really want, she argues, is “a more diffuse and tender sexuality.” (Speak for yourself!) Her lens was dark as hell: “We are very close to death,” she said in a speech about rape. After years of dismissing the angry, incendiary texts that I felt gave feminism a bad rap, I girded myself for an intellectual assault. Reading Last Days at Hot Slit, a new collection of Dworkin’s work edited by Amy Scholder and Johanna Fateman, was the first time I truly confronted her most infamous writing - from books like Woman Hating, Intercourse, and Pornography: Men Possessing Women, along with lesser-known memoir, fiction, and speeches.

The only problem was, until very recently, I’d never read any of her work. I parroted the (false) assertion that Dworkin thought “all sex was rape.” I’d also absorbed the misogyny lobbed at her, because photos of her repulsed me: fat, dowdy, unsmiling.

When I learned about the Second Wave I disavowed her as a man-hating killjoy and stayed loyal to sexual liberationists like my mother, feminist writer and activist Ellen Willis, who thought the pursuit of happiness and pleasure was key to feminism since the early days of the women’s movement, and was diametrically opposed to Dworkin’s dark absolutism in the 1980s. I grew up in the ’90s and embraced my sexual freedom, while Dworkin’s stance was dogmatic about wanting to ban porn and sex work. Andrea Dworkin was never my kind of feminist.

Pornography by Andrea Dworkin