Obsession

The words of Andrea Dworkin

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

There was a time when I was obsessed with Andrea Dworkin. I was heavily involved in the sex workers’ rights movement and the words of the feminist famous for her ferocious commitment to eradicating pornography spun all around me, slung at me by feminists who idolised her. “Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power”; “Rape and prostitution negate self-determination and choice for women”; “I’m a feminist: not the fun kind”. These pithy assertions were shouted at demos, scrawled on placards at Reclaim the Night marches, spit in my face by women who thought that – well, that it’s OK to spit at other women in the name of feminism.

The sloganisation of Dworkin’s speeches and writing sealed my ears and eyes against her work. I knew about the sexism that underwrote the construction of Dworkin as a manhating monster. I’d heard she experienced domestic abuse and rape as a younger woman. But I couldn’t get interested in her or her writing, could never get beyond the caricature of her that was so fervently embraced not only by misogynist men, but by her loyal army of anti-pornography supporters.

These days I don’t think much about Dworkin, who died in 2005. I’m committed as ever to the rights of sex workers, but I’m no longer on the front lines of that struggle. So when my partner suggested last week that we go to see the new Pratibha Parmar film at the Genesis Cinema in East London, I was genuinely surprised to learn that its subject was Andrea Dworkin. I knew Parmar’s work from queer film festivals in my baby dyke days. Why, I wondered, was this lesbian of colour, who had documented the lives, writing and activism of Black American feminists including Angela Davis, June Jordan, and Alice Walker, turning now to one of the most divisive figures in contemporary Western feminism?

It turns out that Parmar had asked herself that question. As she explained in the A&Q following the screening, she came to Dworkin in a roundabout way and was as surprised as anyone to find herself making a movie about “a white Jewish radical feminist”. The result, My Name is Andrea, is not a conventional biopic. Nor am I a film critic, so I’ll spare you my clunky analysis. But as Parmar explained, in the process of researching her subject she was surprised at the poetry in Dworkin’s writing. Parmar shaped the film around her subject’s words, sometimes in footage of the activist speaking, but mostly read by a series of actors.

I too was moved by Dworkin’s words as recited in the film. I was also intrigued by Parmar’s wry confession that she’d been influenced by two white men: John Berger, who once called Dworkin “the most misrepresented writer in the western world"; and Leonard Cohen, who described the arguments in Dworkin’s book Intercourse (1987) as “radical and complex and beautiful”. Those are words that one might well use to describe Cohen’s songs. So I decided to have a go: to try reading Dworkin at length in her own words.

Intercourse is not about sex in any abstract way. Not only is the book not remotely romantic; it’s unabashedly physical in its description of heterosexual penetration – Dworkin’s take on the smells and colours and fluids of coitus.

There is philosophical insight:

Sometimes, the skin comes off in sex. The people merge, skinless. The body loses its boundaries. We are each in these separate bodies; and then, with someone and not with some­ one else, the skin dissolves altogether; and what touches is unspeakably, grotesquely visceral, not inside language or con­ceptualization, not inside time; raw, blood and fat and muscle and bone, unmediated by form or formal limits.

And there is occasional poetry:

Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an other­wise perfect picture.

But then there is this:

There are dirty words, dirty laughs, dirty noises, dirty jokes, dirty movies, and dirty things to do to her in the dark. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime. 

This kind of description sets Dworkin’s work apart from much feminist theoretical writing on sex, which can read as oddly prudish. To describe women’s body fluids as “slime” can be interpreted as misogynist, and indeed arch pornographers might envy Dworkin’s colourful prose. But I think Dworkin knew what she was doing. What effect she hoped to achieve is less clear – to make it impossible to ignore her conviction that intercourse is inherently violent, or perhaps to gross the reader out, to turn them off?

Dworkin certainly manages to make the point that many male writers are astonishingly unimaginative in their descriptions of male-female sex. It’s not sex per se that Intercourse rails against; it’s the reduction of male-female relations to the act of copulation. For sex not to be violent, we need to get beyond intercourse as constructed by men, by entire civilisations, religions and ideologies, throughout the ages.

But Dworkin doesn’t take us to that beyond. And it’s not just that she shows little interest in the possibility of women reinventing sex in ways that give us pleasure, feelings other than those of being engulfed, dominated, subsumed, violated.

She’s not very interested in other women’s writing.

In the main, Intercourse consists of lengthy descriptions of male authors’ descriptions of heterosex. In Dworkin’s words: “I use them; I cut and slice into them in order to exhibit them”. As clever a trick as this is – turning the male writers’ pen/knife against him, as it were – it means that men’s words – those of Tolstoy, Mann, Lawrence, Baldwin and many others – dominate Intercourse. Women writers are scattered here and there – Collette, Lessing, Murdoch; even Anaïs Nin gets a short sentence in, albeit stripped of the erotica for which she is famous. But these are asides amidst the lengthy citations from men.

There’s a chapter dedicated to Joan of Arc, venerated as a virgin. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating celibacy; indeed, today asexuality is celebrated as its own sexual orientation. But why not write about how women write about abstinence? Why give the Inquisitors so much space on the page? Why waste words on these vicious men who in their own time quite literally had a monopoly on public speech? Why extend that privilege into the present? While she has some interesting things to say about the relationship between sexual and racial violence, Dworkin shows a strange lack of interest in the politics of repetition: of continuing to give power to the proverbial dead white men who burned witches and entire civilisations.

But it’s the short shrift Dworkin gives to Mexican artist Frida Kahlo that finally gets to me. Following in the footsteps of Kahlo’s (male) biographer, Dworkin claims that Kahlo’s paintings are “the most vivid renderings by any woman of the female screwed, gashed, wounded, precisely the chingada” – a Mexican swearword literally meaning “she who is fucked”, most (in)famously described in Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude. There’s lots to be said – indeed, many have said much – about Paz’s rendition of la chingada in the context of the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the rape of Indigenous women. What strikes me is Dworkin’s belief that the only thing worth writing about Kahlo is that she was screwed by the macho communist painter Diego Rivera.

I won’t quibble with Dworkin’s one-dimensional portrait of Rivera – there’s enough out there to fill in the gaps. But to reduce Kahlo to an object who spends her life painting herself as “the screwed one” is perverse. Where is the Kahlo who paints herself into Mexican history through her mestizaje, her European Jewish and Indigenous roots, her body, broken not by screwing but by the tragedy of illness and accident, her complex gender identity, signified in her paintings by the dark moustache and suits that appear alongside her traditional dresses and long hair?

Is it that the permanent, universal experience of being screwed by men renders women incapable of creating great art? Is it that Dworkin saw herself, her writing, as above that of other women, mere screwed ones?

My heart races as I write these words. I feel anger at Dworkin’s reductive interpretation of Kahlo, and of sex. Is this similar to the anger that Dworkin feels when she writes about misogynist men? Writing about the enemy can be thrilling, become an obsession.

Dworkin’s writing is so furious, moves so fast, it doesn’t allow the reader to pause, step back. This is writing that doesn’t breathe. It may be this, the breathlessness, the choking suffocation of men’s violence against women, that Dworkin seeks to reproduce on the page. I don’t like this sensation of not being able to breathe while I read: not because I resent being reminded of male violence against women, but because I sense that the writer is not writing for me, not writing for women – or at least women like me, women who resist a life lived in the missionary position.

Dworkin wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. In the Preface to Intercourse she wrote:

For me, the search for truth and change using words is the meaning of writing; the prose, the thinking, the journey is sensuous and demanding. I have always loved the writing that takes one down deep, no matter how strange or bitter or dirty the descent. As a writer, I love the experience of caring, of remembering, of learning more, of asking, of wanting to know and to see and to say. Intercourse is search and asser­tion, passion and fury; and its form— no less than its content— deserves critical scrutiny and respect.

I think Dworkin knew that that to be taken seriously as a writer she needed to write about men, and for men. In the end I can’t help but wonder whether men like Berger and Cohen were her best audience: liberal lettered men who loved and desired women and wanted to believe there was a way to fuck them free from the legacy of centuries of violence that Dworkin describes in such gory detail.

By the end of the book I’m flipping through the pages, speedreading, because it’s all, depressingly, the same. For this lesbian reader, who loves some men and some men’s words but is not obsessed with them, Intercourse does not bring promises of truth and change, of new worlds created through women’s words. The poetry and the insight get lost in the repetition and tedium. I’m no longer obsessed, or angry.

I’m bored.

Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.