“We will know that we are free when the pornography no longer exists,” Andrea Dworkin concludes in her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, originally released in 1981 and rereleased this year by Picador. It is easy to read the book nearly 45 years later as a well-meaning but quixotic and doomed quest. Even Dworkin seems to agree: “In the United States, the pornography industry is larger than the record and film industries combined. … [T]echnology itself demands the creation of more and more porneia to meet the market opened up by the technology.” Which is to say that she could at least have foreseen her descendants answering Andrew Tate and PornHub with OnlyFans. However, it’s curious what she would have thought of the complex fictions of Mary Gaitskill and Elfriede Jelinek, let alone the mainstreaming and diversifying of what it means to be feminist. What remains is less a vision of womanhood, whether totally enslaved or totally liberated, than an invitation for everyone to think, read, and speak against constricting conventions and misuses of progress.
In the feminist movement of the 1970s and the 1980s, Dworkin was seen as a voice of conscience rather than one of reason. Dworkin conveyed the movement’s mission with a moral force that sympathizers compared to an “Old Testament prophet.” It was a double-edged observation, as it carried with it a stubbornness that bordered on inertia and a willful detachment from political reality and strategic sense. Dworkin spent the prime of her career trying to pin the movement down on principles that, if ignored, made progress impossible, as she understood both. By the 1990s, she appeared to have failed. She’d burned bridges taking Juanita Broaddick’s side over former President Bill Clinton’s, and her scorched-earth rhetoric became outmoded. More importantly, she never wavered from the framing belief of her work: that feminists were wrong about sex.
The feminist movement came out of the 1960s in a mood of cautious optimism. The enemy had seemingly given enough ground to allow for the revolution to simmer down to reform and gender war to give way to a kind of gender detente. The ERA stalled, to be sure, but personal liberty was becoming the norm and feminist writers such as Ellen Willis and Susie Bright were pointing the way forward, which was through bodily autonomy. For Dworkin, this trend was based on a fundamental misunderstanding about how sex worked and whose interest sex most served. “Men have claimed the human point of view,” Dworkin says in Pornography. “[W]omen battle to be let into the category ‘human’ in imagination and reality … . [W]omen battle to change the meaning that men have given the word, to transform its meaning by suffusing it with female experience.” It is a battle, Dworkin contends, that women have continued to lose.
Pornography, like many of Dworkin’s books, has been in and out of print since its original appearance. It is coming out once again this year, along with Dworkin’s 1974 debut Woman Hating and 1983’s Right-Wing Women, which includes a foreword by Moira Donegan. It is a gesture that demonstrates the shift by which political reality is trying to keep pace with Dworkin’s earlier pronouncements that the battle goes on and detente is far off. Indeed, each work combines into a kind of scripture for an age of reckoning. Yet Pornography on its own poses certain challenges to the 21st-century situation that finds her words easier to embrace than her deeds. Pornography is a book with unfinished business.
Dworkin wrote Pornography between 1977 and 1980. It was brought out in 1981 after several publishers either passed on it or “reneged on contractual agreements.” They hoped, perhaps, for a more fact-based exposé of the industry itself rather than what they got: A panoramic depiction of the female condition under male supremacy for which pornography is a helpful metaphor and its chief propagandistic vehicle. “This book asks how power, sadism, and dehumanization work in pornography … to establish the sexual subordination of women to men. This book is distinguished from most books on pornography by its bedrock conviction that … the political crime against women is real.” It is not “a liberal book about how pornography hurts all of us.” Nor is it a book about the First Amendment, as pornography is a speech suppressant rather than a speech enabler. Pornography is not an expressive medium. It is a human rights violation.
This basic thesis is expressed using a method that Dworkinists know well. Though its endnotes and bibliography make up a combined 58 pages, Dworkin eschews the clinical and the sober mode of the scholar. In fact, scholars with a literal-minded bent could probably walk right through the holes in statements such as, “Through most of patriarchal history, which is estimated variously to have lasted (thus far) five thousand to twelve thousand years, women have been chattel property.” To say that Dworkin is subjective is accurate but also limited. She follows something like a collage method that weaves pure, repetition-heavy rhetoric with cultural criticism, biographical sketch, mordant sarcasm, and punishingly prose-poetic expositions of pornographic works. In isolation it can exhaust, even repel, the modern reader, having more in common with John Milton and Edmund Burke than with Gloria Steinem or Kate Millett.
Dworkin’s structural and tonal versatility invites versatile methods of reading. The total, immersive reading borrows the crude structure, the sensory overload, and the numbing repetition of pornography to give it a black mass inversion. Men and women are reduced more candidly into predators without conscience and prey without desires. Quoted out of context, as it often is, it can embody the epitome of a “feminazi” camp wherein pornography is “Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated.” And cliché: “Cruelty is the essence of sexual action; fucking is the most significant masculine act; the penis is the source and symbol of real manhood.” The penis is to Dworkin what the corn laws were to Carlyle, and the storm cloud was to Ruskin.
But through the immersion, Dworkin leaps almost gleefully through different subjects and source materials. The anger she heaps on all mankind turns, for instance, into an almost chauvinistic delight of demolishing the cult of the Marquis de Sade critics and biographers as she takes the side of the 18th-century writer’s long-maligned female victims (including Rose Keller, to whom the book is dedicated). A more fragmentary reading offers incisive, acerbic critiques of orbiting topics, such as the malaise of masculinity: “In the mid-twentieth century, the post-Holocaust world, it is common for men to find meaning in nothing: nothing has meaning; Nothing is meaning. … Nihilism, like gravity, is a law of nature, male nature.”
At the time of its publication, the book was read more like a Trojan horse by which the Moral Majority subverted the feminist agenda. Dworkin does scorn predominantly male hypocrisy on the Left and gives passive approval for the Meese Commission’s having “listened to the testimony of women hurt by pornography.” Yet the practical outcomes that Dworkin pushed throughout the 1980s leave neither political side entirely satisfied. The legislation she developed with Catherine MacKinnon was designed to allow women (and men and children) affected by pornography to sue for civil rights violations. One version even included prophetic revenge pornography protection. These were taken to multiple cities and gained significant, sometimes majority, popular support but failed against liberal mayors, hamstrung judges, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Though not, at least in the explicit sense, a censorship or ban attempt, the amendments functioned on a thinking for which her movement was not fully prepared to accept: that sexual freedom harms rather than assures a just society.
Chris R. Morgan writes from New Jersey. His X handle is @cr_morgan.
