Nicely written piece, but ultimately for me unsatisfying. I don’t care much about Dworkin’s past, whether real, embellished, or made up completely. What I want is a calm, concise, intelligent take down of Dworkin’s arguments, acknowledging, however fanatically exaggerated they are, their kernels of truth, but then, acknowledgement granted, taking her arguments apart. The essential stance here is that their hysterical exaggeration speaks for itself and we all nod, “right.” But better it would be if her ideas were confronted head on and their wild exaggeration explicitly demonstrated.
Dworkin's pathologically inaccurate polemics on men helped make books with negative titles like Are Men Necessary, and The End of Men enter the public sphere and into the hands of converted, misandrist readers.
Had you read Dworkin, it might have come through clearly that she was mentally unbalanced and was morbid in her hatred of men, but I am not recommending the self-abuse entailed in doing so.
I tried to post a reply but it looks like didn’t take. Shorter version. Why write about her at all if she’s just a head case or her ideas are self evidently absurd? I say her prominence, obviously what prompts writing about her in the first place, demands that what she has to say be taken seriously enough to be engaged head on. That means taking apart her arguments and not excusing failing to do so by calling her mentally ill or just saying her arguments refute themselves. So, maybe, either take her on substantively or just be quiet about her.
"One woman’s traits may be as unpredictable as ripples on a pond, but women as a group are as predictable as a river’s current. They move in one direction, molding the institutions they enter to their social logic of equity, care and consensus, creating a gradual shift from hierarchy and competition toward harmony and inclusion."
"What history is not replete with, however, are examples of female coalitions devoted to truth or impartial justice. Men can create such institutions; women cannot."
Intellectually, Dworkin raised important concepts about pornography. Still, it is difficult to claim that she wasn't a misandrist (which is highly relevant for this page) and that this hasn't had wide influence on others to this day. In any case, you understand more about these matters than I supposed at first. Therefore, I now see that you've made a useful contribution.
Thank you for saying that. I read all the comments here and I’m amazed that so many people are congratulating Janice on her “takedown”. Not a word in Janice’s article refutes or even addresses any argument that Dworkin ever made. All this article does is say that Andrea Dworkin was an angry person. That hardly proves that she was wrong! Where is the point by point refutation? And why are so many people seemingly content that it hasn’t been provided?
Point #1: Men despise women. Point #2: Sex is an expression of men's hatred of women. Point #3: Women are so powerless in society as to be incapable of consenting to sex. Point #4: Even when women think they are consenting to loving sex, they are really consenting to their own degradation and humiliation.
If you're under the illusion that Dworkin was correct in any of the above statements, you need a lot more help than I could ever provide in a refutation.
Well said Janice. Anyway, I agree with you, I don’t think Dworkin put forward arguments per se so much as mere assertions born of her own weird mentality. There is nothing to refute.
Is all that, in all her writing, in all the extolling of her, what Dworkin comes down to saying? I wouldn’t have thought so. If it were just that, then why did she have such a sizeable impact? Perhaps she needs someone else more fully to characterize her arguments and to refute them.
PAndrea Dworkin’s accomplishment lay not in moderation or tact but in moral clarity pushed to its breaking point. Writing in an era when liberal feminism increasingly emphasized choice, sexual freedom, and individual empowerment, Dworkin insisted—often ferociously—that these concepts could not be understood apart from power. For her, the central fact of women’s lives was male dominance, and any cultural practice that eroticized that dominance, especially pornography, had to be confronted as political reality rather than defended as private preference. What made her work unsettling, and therefore enduring, is that she refused to soften this claim even when it made her unpopular with allies as well as opponents.
Dworkin’s brilliance was diagnostic. She read law, literature, sex, and everyday behavior as parts of a single system, and she had an extraordinary ability to expose the hidden assumptions that made that system feel natural. In books like Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Intercourse, she argued that pornography was not merely representation but instruction—a training manual in which inequality was sexualized and cruelty rendered arousing. Whether one accepts this claim or not, the force of her argument came from her insistence that ideas have consequences, that what a culture masturbates to cannot be neatly separated from how it governs, punishes, or ignores suffering.
She was also a profoundly literary thinker. Dworkin wrote about the Bible, fairy tales, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Baldwin with the conviction that stories shape the limits of moral imagination. Her prose—angry, repetitive, incantatory—was not careless but deliberate, designed to batter through complacency. Critics often mistook her intensity for hysteria, yet her style was part of her method: she wrote as someone describing an emergency to people who preferred to believe nothing was on fire. In that sense, her work resembles prophetic writing more than academic theory.
What particularly marks Dworkin as a genius is her refusal to trade truth for palatability. She openly acknowledged her own trauma and vulnerability, not to claim authority but to reject the fiction of detached analysis in matters of violence and sex. Long before such ideas were fashionable, she understood that neutrality often disguises allegiance to the status quo. She also grasped, with rare consistency, that free speech arguments can function as moral alibis when they ignore who is harmed and who benefits.
Finally, Dworkin’s relevance has only sharpened with time. Debates about consent, sexual representation, online abuse, and the commodification of intimacy echo her questions even when they reject her answers. Many who bristle at her conclusions nonetheless find themselves using her framework—asking not just what is chosen, but under what conditions and to whose advantage. That enduring pressure on our thinking is the mark of her genius: Andrea Dworkin forces readers to confront what they would rather leave unexamined, and she does so with a moral seriousness that refuses to age into irrelevance.
———-
Essays or pieces that positively engage with Andrea Dworkin’s work — either by arguing for her relevance, framing her impact, or recommending her reading. Some are explicitly praising her contributions; others are scholarly reinvestigations that treat her work with seriousness rather than dismissal:
1) MA Pagnattaro, The Importance of Andrea Dworkin’s “Mercy” (JSTOR article)
This is a scholarly essay published in a peer-reviewed journal that analyzes and argues for the importance of one of Dworkin’s major works, treating her arguments as serious contributions to feminist theory rather than dismissing them.
• Pagnattaro, MA. The Importance of Andrea Dworkin’s “Mercy.” Journal Article. 1998. This piece is often cited in academic feminist scholarship and focuses on Dworkin’s reasoning and its value within feminist discourse.
Use in citations:
MLA: Pagnattaro, MA. “The Importance of Andrea Dworkin’s ‘Mercy.’” Journal Title, 1998.
APA: Pagnattaro, M. A. (1998). The importance of Andrea Dworkin’s “Mercy”. Journal Title.
Chicago: Pagnattaro, MA. 1998. “The Importance of Andrea Dworkin’s ‘Mercy.’”
2) Roberta Arnold, Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary (Ms. Magazine)
This essay in Ms. Magazine re-evaluates Dworkin’s life and work positively, contextualizing her contributions and arguing that she deserves serious recognition for them. It’s not dismissive but rather reframes her as a “groundbreaking feminist” whose work merits respect despite controversy.
Use in citations:
MLA: Arnold, Roberta. “Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary.” Ms. Magazine, Feb. 7, 2021.
APA: Arnold, R. (2021, Feb 7). Andrea Dworkin: The feminist as revolutionary. Ms. Magazine.
Chicago: Arnold, Roberta. 2021. “Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary.” Ms Magazine, February 7.
3) Contemporary Reappraisal Essay — Freak Feminism: On Andrea Dworkin
This recent piece argues that Dworkin’s work still matters and is being re-engaged and appreciated by feminist thinkers today as part of a renewed interest in her radical critique of misogyny and cultural norms. Although not a peer-review journal article, it is scholarly in its engagement and context and cites her influence and continued relevance.
Chicago: “Freak Feminism: On Andrea Dworkin.” 2025. clereviewofbooks.com, September 18.
4) Guardian/Steinem Contextual Praise (for citations on legacy)
While not an academic essay, there is credible commentary noting that feminist icons like Gloria Steinem referred to Dworkin as a kind of “Old Testament prophet,” underscoring her influence and the seriousness with which at least some key feminist thinkers regarded her work.
Use in citations:
MLA: Guardian. “Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Prophet.”
APA: The Guardian. (2015). Andrea Dworkin: The feminist as prophet.
Chicago: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Prophet, The Guardian, 2015.
Quick Summary of Why These Are Credible
• Academic journal/peer-review: Pagnattaro’s JSTOR article is citable in academic contexts.
• Reputable feminist magazine: The Ms. Magazine essay engages Dworkin seriously, not dismissively.
• Contemporary scholarly reappraisal: Modern feminist blogs/reviews contextualize her relevance and influence in feminist discourse.
• Historical contextual praise: References to figures like Steinem show that respected feminists have acknowledged her seriousness.
Bravo to you. You found someone who likes Dworkin's writing. I've read all that nonsense a thousand times, and I disagree.
Her wild hatred can be praised in an enthusiastic and sophisticated-seeming manner. That doesn't make it any more true. No, she did not have "an extraordinary ability to expose the hidden assumptions that made that [pornographic] system feel natural." She didn't expose anything. In her febrile and over-wrought writings, she misrepresented, exaggerated, lied, accused, damned, and made things up out of her own tortured and sick mind. She pretended to know what all or the vast majority of men are thinking--ordinary, loving, respectful, human men who never laid a finger on any woman except with gratitude and joy--and she presented them not as human beings but as depraved abusers, unthinking beasts, genocidal maniacs, and self-congratulatory destroyers. Big deal. One can shout it 100 times from the rooftops in tones of adulation and denunciatory pleasure, as the feminists have so often done, but that does not make it true that pornography is "a training manual in which inequality was sexualized and cruelty rendered arousing." How ludicrous. Do you have any idea how many women willingly participate in pornography? Have you ever heard of gay male pornography or lesbian pornography? Pornography doesn't depend on a man exercising power over a woman, and it certainly doesn't expose something particular to heterosexuality. I'm sure Dworkin would have an answer to these as well, but that does not make her answers true or helpful.
I have spent years answering feminist arguments. I didn't do it in this case because I don't believe in arguing with madness, no matter how often our culture has endorsed and celebrated the madness. But if you want to dip into her fervid prose, you can buy one of the new Picador books--have at it. Enjoy!
You misread me. I didn’t come here to praise her. I randomly came across your piece and found it more breathless than substantive and, so, I thought I’d briefly say why. Plus, in what it took me 45 seconds to find, it’s clearly more than one person who takes her seriously. Maybe, for your next piece about her, go to some ostensibly serious essay on her like, say, the one noted in JSTOR, and confront it. In that you’ll be dealing with “sophisticated-seeming” claims for her, giving you the opportunity then to unwind them. Hell, in just answering my note, you’ve been forced to begin to begin to outline a few arguments. Imagine the opportunity laid out for you fully to do so in a serious way while at the same time concretely exposing what belies all the “sophisticated-seeming.”
The person making the claim has to prove it. Nobody needs to make any kind of effort to disprove or counter unsubstantiated claims. And these include fallaciousness wrt what is used as "evidence", in case. You're right. The person asking for some refutation bears the burden to prove why any of such claims should even be taken seriously. Though they can be criticised for impact, if they did end up getting taken seriously.
Once again, you have made exactly zero refutation of any of her arguments. Merely stating what she said is not the slightest rebuttal. Yet you seem unaware that the arguments do not defeat themselves.
Personally, I think Dworkin made some very compelling points. For instance, she points out the language that we use for sex, and how that language is also used to describe expressions of hatred, aggression and harm. Getting screwed, or getting shafted mean being mistreated, harmed. Giving someone the middle finger is an expression of hatred. How is a woman supposed to hear that and want to engage sexually when the meaning of sex is degradation by the very language? And Janice, please try to be better than to end an argument by insinuating that anyone who asks a question is crazy and beyond help. That’s beneath us all
I did not say that "anyone who asks a question is crazy and beyond help." I said that if you can't see what is obviously false in the statement that sex is "the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women,” then I wouldn't even try to convince you. And I see that I was correct in my assessment.
"Personally, I think Dworkin made some very compelling points"
Well, the one you made would seem "compelling" only to a person with a rather weak command of the English language, to someone who is unaware that words can have nuances.
Yes, "getting screwed, or getting shafted mean being mistreated, harmed" but that's because "screw" or "shaft" are not exact synonyms of "having sex", but carry the additional connotation of sex in either a 1) morally reprehensible context or at least 2) an amoral, recreational context.
Congratulations, you have begun to engage with the argument. Still, making the point without needing to resort to insults would make you appear less petty and insecure
My own vote for Noxious Feminist of Our Time must go to one Judith Butler. As I wrote on my own 'stack:
As with other intelligentsia fads, ‘Third Wave’ feminism’s ‘deconstruction’ of the realities of sex and gender first germinated in the groves of academe, supercharged by the tendency of feminism to disproportionately attract lesbian and otherwise sexually dysphoric academics into its fold - most notably its high priestess Judith Butler.......that celebrated grand American dame of militant androgyny.
Had her ‘socially constructed gender’ theorising and joyless attacks on human sexuality entered directly into the public mainstream, they would have been met with the widespread derision they richly deserved. But as I have argued in so much of my writings, an academia/media nexus has been a powerful feature of our intellectual ecosystem. It operates like a huge agricultural spreader, spraying hyper-progressive fertiliser across the culture but in a concentration initially dilute enough for its toxicity to not be immediately obvious to a wider audience of educated women. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-androgyny-syndromehttps://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
Thank you for this. I won't argue about the obnoxiousness of Butler, who has written far less clearly and profited more, at least financially, than Dworkin ever did--and had an extremely baleful influence on contemporary understandings of gender and 'trans.' I made it all the way through *Gender Trouble* (I have a strong memory of reading it on the bus on the way home from UBC, and trying to explain it to someone who asked), but faltered at *Bodies That Matter.*
I wonder if Dworkin and Butler ever talked to each other. Guess they probably did at some point, both being celebrated feminist 'icons'. That conversation, if it took place, must have been quite something...an ulimate essay in paranoia and personal hang-ups dressed up as intellectual heft.
They certainly did overlap, but I suspect their milieus were quite different. Though Dworkin was a highly intelligent woman, she was not very interested in academic theory. And I don't think Butler was very interested in 'Take Back the Night' marches and in anti-pornography and anti-rape advocacy. I could be wrong. It is possible that they did meet.
You're probably right....and my question was mostly a rhetorical one. But in terms of great personal hang-ups dressed up as intellectual heft they were very much two of a kind.
Hi Graham, Dworkin and Butler had different agendas (Butler was into a sex&gender free pandemonium of self-expression, Dworkin figured as an anti-heterosex campaigner). Their intellectual capacities are also on a different level. While Butler did post-doctoral work in Heidelberg and is by today's academic standards a top notch international star (she has a huge following in Germany where she delivers her lectures in German), Dworkin was a street-level harpie and a shit-disturber, and a pathetic ignoramus. She admitted herself she was not into "academic horseshit" (in preface to Woman Hating).
Neither of them had any "intellectual capacity" (not in any meaningful sense) that's the sick joke of their huge fame. Don't know about Dworkin but Butler couldn't string two coherent thoughts or sentences together. Academic horseshit is putting it nicely (there's some quotes of it in my Androgyny Syndrome essay).
I've made it halfway through and stalled...It pitched me into a study of postmodernism, which is astonishing in and of itself. I thought I understood it to some degree but was wrong...
And thank you too Janice. Hope you will have a read of the two essays I linked to (both are in similar territory to The Flamingo File). And if you like them, maybe reciprocate my own suscription?
Tom - I have the great good fortune of living in a small southern town. On the increasingly rare times that I watch Lamestream news, sometimes it feels like all is lost, but then I repair to the bosom of my friends here - calm, ordinary, Christian men and women of all ages who love each other, love their families, love their communities and their God - good, solid people, and that includes young marrieds in their early twenties - and I think to myself, "Ya know, we just may make it."
Let's hope your experience is the norm! There are many who say the media is inflating the numbers of the far left and that actually most of the nation is as you describe.
It is surely a higher percentage of women, but it is also many men as well.
Young leftists who have so bought into oppressor-oppressed ideology that they are pro-Hamas (not merely pro-Palestinian, but actually pro-Hamas) are still more evidence.
Dworkin was living proof that most, if not all, ideologies are merely justifications for the believer’s psychology—in her case self hatred and shame projected onto men in the form of feminism.
I just stopped watching Broadchurch on (of course) Netflix. Season 1 was bad enough, but Season Two could have been written by Andrea Dworkin. Every man but one is depicted as some sort of sexual predator, liar, cheater, rapist, etc. The exception is the one man who isn't sexual, i.e., seems to have no interest in women as romantic partners or sex at all. No surprise there. For good measure, there's an adolescent boy who's portrayed as some sort of sexual creep-in-waiting. Dworkin is dead, and yet not.
It would seem we are in another cycle of feminist propaganda,
Articles are appearing on social media that seem deliberately aimed at "Stoking Female Rage".
For example, WW11 ended 80 years ago, and images of French Women who collaborated with the Germans having their heads shaved—no mention of the male collaborators who were shot.
There is also a fresh round of "The Burning Times" and emotive distortions of details attributed to the reasons why.
Then there is the erroneous claim about "Women being denied Credit Cards".
Reading the comments section, those who claim to be female almost unanimously take the position that women are shamed, humiliated and abused and denied equal rights. Male commentators who challenge the narrative are attacked, claiming they have "hurt Feelings" .
It becomes clear "When Emotions are Driving, Logic and Rational thought are not backseat passengers, they are locked in the trunk (car-boot)" Brene' Brown.
As a male, not previously familiar with the corpus of feminist theory, when you meet a feminazi pre-loaded with this material, it is simultaneously disturbing shocking, a revelation and a danger.
One of the universal consistencies of feminists, regardless of their strain, is their refusal to disavow the inequalities that men suffer, even when the context that they are complaining about should make it obvious. This is why I always laugh when feminists claim that it is only the radical feminists that give the majority of 'good' feminists a bad name, and that MRAs are being disingenuous by tarring all feminists with the same brush. Really ?!
Well you see, they clever though. If you go through the decades since Friedan you'll find they have managed to convince the mainstream that everybody who loves and cares for women is in fact a "feminist", i.e. that among humans there are only two possible attitudes towards the fair sex - feminism and misogyny. You know, you taught at university.
Well I suppose given that "reason" in the sense of logical thought is some sort of patriarchal plot designed to be a false ideological consciousness that hides women's oppression. One couldn't be a feminist and reasonable at the same time!
Somehow it sounds like a sort of crazed version of the English (maybe North American too? Wasn't Mr. Kellogg obsessed with cooling sexual drives with bland food? ) mid and high Victorian rejection of human sexuality (well biology really given sexual reproduction is hardly unique to Homo Sapiens sapiens). Partly a reaction to the perception of the libertine behaviour of the aristocracy, the previous 3 centuries. On the plus side deciding that a perfectly natural and essential act for reproduction is literally devilish is likely to bring such believers "line" to an abrupt end, hopefully reducing their legacy for future generations ( of cultures less enamored of such anxiety about life itself). Even the parade of "where have all the good men gone?" articles give some hope as such apostles of feminists find they'd rather like a future after all. As do the constant drip of similar women writing pieces about how very very happy they are, yes really they are, to be childless and un partnered (the clue is that there are no one writing about the joys of children because of course they are busy with actual life) "protesting too much". There was a rather sad documentary about Germaine Greer, following her as she sorted through her house and books in preparation to downsize, alone but for some hired help. She wasn't self pitying but all the same it was a sad scene.
Maybe, like many of our natural bodily functions, its a bit unsophisticated and messy (frankly sometimes comical) but there it is. Why we'd listen to people like Dworkin, De Beauvoir, Foucault and well any of the "icons" whose personal lives were riven with confusions, "closets" perversions and bizarreness I do not know.
I understand the appeal of a Foucault or a Derrida to intellectuals. They are impressed and attracted by the clever obfuscation and contrariness to common sense. The appeal of an Andrea Dworkin is another matter; it is visceral rather than intellectual. I think there is a deep exhilaration to hating as intensely as she did, and to feeling oneself a victim of a monstrous masculinity. Dworkin's feverish prose excites that in a significant number of women.
I do think Melanie Phillips hit the nail on the head with the observation that feminism is being a perpetual teenager, as a means of evading the rather scary prospect of becoming an adult with all that entails. Hence the obsessions with contraception and abortion and the fear of "sex" as in the sort that holds the possibility of of conception and the rigor of actual relationships with a someone very unlike you. After all teenagers are natural "narcissists" they are the centre of their own universe, no one understands their complexity and genius, no one has suffered like they do, nor felt so deeply, or been so right. All things that real life gradually challenges as it turns out you are one of billions who are not remotely as special, unique, all knowing, certain or tragic as that 15 year old you. The adolescent "I hate you !" when their genius is denied or their tragedy is denied its Shakespearian depth. As rather than indulge them the adults entreat them to have chicken soup or get a good nights sleep. Because weirdly those parents/adults were teenagers too and realise you can't actually die of embarrassment, that life goes on and tomorrow is another day. The adolescent rails against their parent's ability to "ruin my life" as the feminist declares the same for "men" or the "patriarchy" , while he or they actually provide everything that allows them to live. As I say it was sad to see elderly Greer have to let go of the things she had a relationship with, her books.
How seductive at first to have all the self righteousness and self absorption of the teen carried on into your 20s then 30s then 40s then perhaps realise your stuck and you've stuck .... and just maybe the boring normal folk, the ordinary ones without your special and special insight ..... well maybe they weren't so dumb .
At University in the late 70s I recall the rather heretical thought that the reason that various French philosophers were so popular had less to do with their ideas and more to do with the romance of France and Paris and the fact that they were treated as stars in France. Somehow I couldn't imagine the same excitement had they hailed from Newcastle upon Tyne , Dortmund, Belfast or Gary Indiana.
Blimey, having graduated and worked in an artistic/political milieu in central and north London in the ‘70/80 this was almost a step back in time, Lesbian groups I encountered were almost Dworkin clones, I had torrid affairs with women who claimed to be lesbians. An almost nostalgic account, definitely accurate account, thank you! Later of course I came across Paglia and Fiamengo for a reset, thankfully.
No, no, no, Janice. Don't you know: all feminists are lovely peace-loving people and if the world was ruled by them, there would be no violence at all! That's why we have no wars in the world now that the United Nations is feminist.
Feminists Attack Catholic Churches in Mexico and South America:
It is indeed. When I wrote to complain and suggest that even if the music was good (it wasn't) the narrator should at least have added some caveats. Instead it was suggested that Solanas's words might have been 'playful or ironic'. One composer was said to be 'intrigued by the egalitarian principles of the SCUM manifesto' what these egalitarian principles were was never disclosed.
To be fair to Solanas, I believe she was a paranoid schizophrenic and perhaps not in control of herself, the producers and narrators of this program had no excuses.
Having read Das Capital (hard work, for Marxist Economics course) I understand the still current "problem" for all the branches of Marxist thought. The theory states the revolution will happen in the most advanced and globalist capitalist economies, yet the reality is that they occur in the poorest often barely subsistence economies.
So what perplexes me is how did the often most extreme forms of feminism take root so rapidly in what was then far and away the most affluent developed countries on the planet (USA and Canada)? In which women had, because of this affluent consumerist society, by far the most choices freedoms and opportunities of any women on the globe. Certainly far more than men and women in the "industrial north" of England till the early 1980s. It is genuinely puzzling to me. I get the de Beauvoirs, Greers, etc here in europe and their Engelsian Marxism stuff, but the sheer venom of some of the North American feminists and its misandry (rather than we're all just puppets of the system) seems to be a particularly north American thing in origin?
Look, the feminists did not invent women hating men, and wanting to switch places. The fantasy of women dominating men is as old as humanity. When Zeus wanted to cut Hercules to size for freeing Prometheus, he made him a slave to the queen Omphale. She amused herself by making the Superman wear women's clothes, and do women's chores for her.
You are helpfully right to point out that misandry is very old. Even some Byzantine texts (as far as they are understood at all) indicate some of it - if not hatred of men, disdain at least.
As far as I am aware, feminism is the first sociopolitical organisation (with a top-down ideology) that has formulated misandry and even normalised it so well that many adherents to feminism don't even see it as misandric.
That they did this starting in the days of steamships, holding international conferences in the late 19th century, says a lot about the wealth, freedom and influence of those early women.
There have been MANY evil nations down through history.
But none of those nations ever were so thoroughly vile that they -- by policy -- attempted to wipe-out fatherhood, sonship, and even masculinity itself.
That level of malevolence can only be answered in one way, and it is not by argument.
I am in Kerala right now. They just had elections and the Communist party was projected to win! Very poor people though. The Communists promise them things. I should find out soon enough if they did.
Misandry is mainstream. Unlike Misogyny one does not have to delve into the darker reaches of the "manosphere" to find it. It is there daily in the BBC, Times etc. etc.....
It’s really impossible to overstate how little consideration and how much resentment and disdain these people have for men, as individuals and especially as a category.
The short definition of feminism states: "Feminism...making ugly women equal since xxx". Dworkin is the example of the unattractive, in this case obese, woman who projects all her own unhappiness and refusal to take steps to improve her OWN life on men. That such women often embrace lesbianism is not surprising...and it accounts for lesbian relationships having the most domestic violence of any pairing of 2 humans. Dworkin is a prime example of why Men are Good...and Women...It Depends!
This article helps me understand the roots of the hatred that permeates the left. I'm starting to think that hatred is the only thing that holds them together.
Yes, women can have an even tougher time than men being heard. There are few people who really believe that feminism speaks for men (on the rare occasions they care about men at all) yet most of the world erroneously believes that women's interests are represented by feminism.
Thanks for another excellent critique, concise and beautifully written as usual!
Dworkin's writing appears to reflect a more general issue, that of women blaming men for the burdens that biology has placed on women. Somebody must be to blame for periods, body-distorting and body-depleting pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, the sleep deprivation and drudgery of breastfeeding, the theft of personal time and development by childcare responsibilities. So blame men. In addition to these burdens either directly or vicariously experienced, Dworkin's resentment likely arose from her own failure to have children. So project it all on to men and especially on to what is (naturally anyway) required for insemination and reproduction. So little self insight.
In unfairly directing their resentment about female biological reality on to men, feminists ignore the separate burdens biology places on men. Men are afflicted with overwhelming sexual drive due to much higher testosterone levels than women have on average. They can get it wrong when responding to those drives. Men die younger than women. Men are driven to engage in both productive and foolish physicality that causes body damage and risk of worse. Men are especially bothered by a sense of responsibility to the group and to solve problems and risks facing the group. Men go bald and develop enlarged prostates. Men are not about to blame women for male biology and social contribution, but we would appreciate some recognition and empathy.
Quite possibly life is indeed unfair. And I do think since "God is dead" ,the one that placed on women "the curse of Eve" (Adam's was to "toil"), "Men" or "the Patriarchy" must now get the blame. The most commonplace version is "if men had the babies there'd be no children" or variations. Now current in conversations in my family as we await the birth of my nephew's first baby. Nonsense of course because they a. wouldn't then be men in the sense of a male animal but b. would have all the physically necessary to be female and then be a woman anyway. But we get the reality, life is indeed unfair and by design or evolution male and female are, well, different. In truth feminism is indeed complaining about the curse of Eve and an ideology that puts off becoming adult Eve for as long as possible. Of course in reality the gynocentrism which has driven men to create all sorts of aids, helps and "cures" for this unfairness, then blames the men anyway! Specially now we can't blame God, or Gods.
"feminists ignore the separate burdens biology places on men"
That is complete horseshit and I think you know it. Compared to women, men suffer no biological burden whatsoever. You were right the first time when you said feminism is rooted in women's resentment of men for the biological injustice inflicted upon them.
My post outlined some of the biological burdens men deal with. I don't need to reiterate but you're welcome to ignore what might be inconvenient to your preferences.
"Men are afflicted with overwhelming sexual drive"
If high sex drive is an affliction, why have humans since antiquity sought all kinds of aphrodisiacs to INCREASE sex drive? Like I said, you're talking nonsense. Perhaps you mean that men are more sexually frustrated than women, but that's not a biological burden, it's simply a lack of opportunity in modern society.
Nicely written piece, but ultimately for me unsatisfying. I don’t care much about Dworkin’s past, whether real, embellished, or made up completely. What I want is a calm, concise, intelligent take down of Dworkin’s arguments, acknowledging, however fanatically exaggerated they are, their kernels of truth, but then, acknowledgement granted, taking her arguments apart. The essential stance here is that their hysterical exaggeration speaks for itself and we all nod, “right.” But better it would be if her ideas were confronted head on and their wild exaggeration explicitly demonstrated.
Dworkin's pathologically inaccurate polemics on men helped make books with negative titles like Are Men Necessary, and The End of Men enter the public sphere and into the hands of converted, misandrist readers.
Had you read Dworkin, it might have come through clearly that she was mentally unbalanced and was morbid in her hatred of men, but I am not recommending the self-abuse entailed in doing so.
I tried to post a reply but it looks like didn’t take. Shorter version. Why write about her at all if she’s just a head case or her ideas are self evidently absurd? I say her prominence, obviously what prompts writing about her in the first place, demands that what she has to say be taken seriously enough to be engaged head on. That means taking apart her arguments and not excusing failing to do so by calling her mentally ill or just saying her arguments refute themselves. So, maybe, either take her on substantively or just be quiet about her.
The following may be relevant:
"One woman’s traits may be as unpredictable as ripples on a pond, but women as a group are as predictable as a river’s current. They move in one direction, molding the institutions they enter to their social logic of equity, care and consensus, creating a gradual shift from hierarchy and competition toward harmony and inclusion."
"What history is not replete with, however, are examples of female coalitions devoted to truth or impartial justice. Men can create such institutions; women cannot."
Aporia
Genius, her arguments ARE the culture and legal system of modern America. We don't have to 'study' anything. We are LIVING it.
Get a clue. Buy a vowell. Something.
Intellectually, Dworkin raised important concepts about pornography. Still, it is difficult to claim that she wasn't a misandrist (which is highly relevant for this page) and that this hasn't had wide influence on others to this day. In any case, you understand more about these matters than I supposed at first. Therefore, I now see that you've made a useful contribution.
Thank you for saying that. I read all the comments here and I’m amazed that so many people are congratulating Janice on her “takedown”. Not a word in Janice’s article refutes or even addresses any argument that Dworkin ever made. All this article does is say that Andrea Dworkin was an angry person. That hardly proves that she was wrong! Where is the point by point refutation? And why are so many people seemingly content that it hasn’t been provided?
Point #1: Men despise women. Point #2: Sex is an expression of men's hatred of women. Point #3: Women are so powerless in society as to be incapable of consenting to sex. Point #4: Even when women think they are consenting to loving sex, they are really consenting to their own degradation and humiliation.
If you're under the illusion that Dworkin was correct in any of the above statements, you need a lot more help than I could ever provide in a refutation.
Indeed, Dworkin's premises are absurd on their face which makes it only more risible that it's treated as serious scholarship in the first place.
Well said Janice. Anyway, I agree with you, I don’t think Dworkin put forward arguments per se so much as mere assertions born of her own weird mentality. There is nothing to refute.
Is all that, in all her writing, in all the extolling of her, what Dworkin comes down to saying? I wouldn’t have thought so. If it were just that, then why did she have such a sizeable impact? Perhaps she needs someone else more fully to characterize her arguments and to refute them.
Didn’t take long:
PAndrea Dworkin’s accomplishment lay not in moderation or tact but in moral clarity pushed to its breaking point. Writing in an era when liberal feminism increasingly emphasized choice, sexual freedom, and individual empowerment, Dworkin insisted—often ferociously—that these concepts could not be understood apart from power. For her, the central fact of women’s lives was male dominance, and any cultural practice that eroticized that dominance, especially pornography, had to be confronted as political reality rather than defended as private preference. What made her work unsettling, and therefore enduring, is that she refused to soften this claim even when it made her unpopular with allies as well as opponents.
Dworkin’s brilliance was diagnostic. She read law, literature, sex, and everyday behavior as parts of a single system, and she had an extraordinary ability to expose the hidden assumptions that made that system feel natural. In books like Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Intercourse, she argued that pornography was not merely representation but instruction—a training manual in which inequality was sexualized and cruelty rendered arousing. Whether one accepts this claim or not, the force of her argument came from her insistence that ideas have consequences, that what a culture masturbates to cannot be neatly separated from how it governs, punishes, or ignores suffering.
She was also a profoundly literary thinker. Dworkin wrote about the Bible, fairy tales, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Baldwin with the conviction that stories shape the limits of moral imagination. Her prose—angry, repetitive, incantatory—was not careless but deliberate, designed to batter through complacency. Critics often mistook her intensity for hysteria, yet her style was part of her method: she wrote as someone describing an emergency to people who preferred to believe nothing was on fire. In that sense, her work resembles prophetic writing more than academic theory.
What particularly marks Dworkin as a genius is her refusal to trade truth for palatability. She openly acknowledged her own trauma and vulnerability, not to claim authority but to reject the fiction of detached analysis in matters of violence and sex. Long before such ideas were fashionable, she understood that neutrality often disguises allegiance to the status quo. She also grasped, with rare consistency, that free speech arguments can function as moral alibis when they ignore who is harmed and who benefits.
Finally, Dworkin’s relevance has only sharpened with time. Debates about consent, sexual representation, online abuse, and the commodification of intimacy echo her questions even when they reject her answers. Many who bristle at her conclusions nonetheless find themselves using her framework—asking not just what is chosen, but under what conditions and to whose advantage. That enduring pressure on our thinking is the mark of her genius: Andrea Dworkin forces readers to confront what they would rather leave unexamined, and she does so with a moral seriousness that refuses to age into irrelevance.
———-
Essays or pieces that positively engage with Andrea Dworkin’s work — either by arguing for her relevance, framing her impact, or recommending her reading. Some are explicitly praising her contributions; others are scholarly reinvestigations that treat her work with seriousness rather than dismissal:
1) MA Pagnattaro, The Importance of Andrea Dworkin’s “Mercy” (JSTOR article)
This is a scholarly essay published in a peer-reviewed journal that analyzes and argues for the importance of one of Dworkin’s major works, treating her arguments as serious contributions to feminist theory rather than dismissing them.
• Pagnattaro, MA. The Importance of Andrea Dworkin’s “Mercy.” Journal Article. 1998. This piece is often cited in academic feminist scholarship and focuses on Dworkin’s reasoning and its value within feminist discourse.
Use in citations:
MLA: Pagnattaro, MA. “The Importance of Andrea Dworkin’s ‘Mercy.’” Journal Title, 1998.
APA: Pagnattaro, M. A. (1998). The importance of Andrea Dworkin’s “Mercy”. Journal Title.
Chicago: Pagnattaro, MA. 1998. “The Importance of Andrea Dworkin’s ‘Mercy.’”
2) Roberta Arnold, Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary (Ms. Magazine)
This essay in Ms. Magazine re-evaluates Dworkin’s life and work positively, contextualizing her contributions and arguing that she deserves serious recognition for them. It’s not dismissive but rather reframes her as a “groundbreaking feminist” whose work merits respect despite controversy.
Use in citations:
MLA: Arnold, Roberta. “Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary.” Ms. Magazine, Feb. 7, 2021.
APA: Arnold, R. (2021, Feb 7). Andrea Dworkin: The feminist as revolutionary. Ms. Magazine.
Chicago: Arnold, Roberta. 2021. “Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary.” Ms Magazine, February 7.
3) Contemporary Reappraisal Essay — Freak Feminism: On Andrea Dworkin
This recent piece argues that Dworkin’s work still matters and is being re-engaged and appreciated by feminist thinkers today as part of a renewed interest in her radical critique of misogyny and cultural norms. Although not a peer-review journal article, it is scholarly in its engagement and context and cites her influence and continued relevance.
Use in citations:
MLA: “Freak Feminism: On Andrea Dworkin.” clereviewofbooks.com, Sept. 18, 2025.
APA: Freak Feminism: On Andrea Dworkin. (2025, Sept 18). clereviewofbooks.com.
Chicago: “Freak Feminism: On Andrea Dworkin.” 2025. clereviewofbooks.com, September 18.
4) Guardian/Steinem Contextual Praise (for citations on legacy)
While not an academic essay, there is credible commentary noting that feminist icons like Gloria Steinem referred to Dworkin as a kind of “Old Testament prophet,” underscoring her influence and the seriousness with which at least some key feminist thinkers regarded her work.
Use in citations:
MLA: Guardian. “Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Prophet.”
APA: The Guardian. (2015). Andrea Dworkin: The feminist as prophet.
Chicago: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Prophet, The Guardian, 2015.
Quick Summary of Why These Are Credible
• Academic journal/peer-review: Pagnattaro’s JSTOR article is citable in academic contexts.
• Reputable feminist magazine: The Ms. Magazine essay engages Dworkin seriously, not dismissively.
• Contemporary scholarly reappraisal: Modern feminist blogs/reviews contextualize her relevance and influence in feminist discourse.
• Historical contextual praise: References to figures like Steinem show that respected feminists have acknowledged her seriousness.
Bravo to you. You found someone who likes Dworkin's writing. I've read all that nonsense a thousand times, and I disagree.
Her wild hatred can be praised in an enthusiastic and sophisticated-seeming manner. That doesn't make it any more true. No, she did not have "an extraordinary ability to expose the hidden assumptions that made that [pornographic] system feel natural." She didn't expose anything. In her febrile and over-wrought writings, she misrepresented, exaggerated, lied, accused, damned, and made things up out of her own tortured and sick mind. She pretended to know what all or the vast majority of men are thinking--ordinary, loving, respectful, human men who never laid a finger on any woman except with gratitude and joy--and she presented them not as human beings but as depraved abusers, unthinking beasts, genocidal maniacs, and self-congratulatory destroyers. Big deal. One can shout it 100 times from the rooftops in tones of adulation and denunciatory pleasure, as the feminists have so often done, but that does not make it true that pornography is "a training manual in which inequality was sexualized and cruelty rendered arousing." How ludicrous. Do you have any idea how many women willingly participate in pornography? Have you ever heard of gay male pornography or lesbian pornography? Pornography doesn't depend on a man exercising power over a woman, and it certainly doesn't expose something particular to heterosexuality. I'm sure Dworkin would have an answer to these as well, but that does not make her answers true or helpful.
I have spent years answering feminist arguments. I didn't do it in this case because I don't believe in arguing with madness, no matter how often our culture has endorsed and celebrated the madness. But if you want to dip into her fervid prose, you can buy one of the new Picador books--have at it. Enjoy!
You misread me. I didn’t come here to praise her. I randomly came across your piece and found it more breathless than substantive and, so, I thought I’d briefly say why. Plus, in what it took me 45 seconds to find, it’s clearly more than one person who takes her seriously. Maybe, for your next piece about her, go to some ostensibly serious essay on her like, say, the one noted in JSTOR, and confront it. In that you’ll be dealing with “sophisticated-seeming” claims for her, giving you the opportunity then to unwind them. Hell, in just answering my note, you’ve been forced to begin to begin to outline a few arguments. Imagine the opportunity laid out for you fully to do so in a serious way while at the same time concretely exposing what belies all the “sophisticated-seeming.”
The person making the claim has to prove it. Nobody needs to make any kind of effort to disprove or counter unsubstantiated claims. And these include fallaciousness wrt what is used as "evidence", in case. You're right. The person asking for some refutation bears the burden to prove why any of such claims should even be taken seriously. Though they can be criticised for impact, if they did end up getting taken seriously.
Once again, you have made exactly zero refutation of any of her arguments. Merely stating what she said is not the slightest rebuttal. Yet you seem unaware that the arguments do not defeat themselves.
Personally, I think Dworkin made some very compelling points. For instance, she points out the language that we use for sex, and how that language is also used to describe expressions of hatred, aggression and harm. Getting screwed, or getting shafted mean being mistreated, harmed. Giving someone the middle finger is an expression of hatred. How is a woman supposed to hear that and want to engage sexually when the meaning of sex is degradation by the very language? And Janice, please try to be better than to end an argument by insinuating that anyone who asks a question is crazy and beyond help. That’s beneath us all
I did not say that "anyone who asks a question is crazy and beyond help." I said that if you can't see what is obviously false in the statement that sex is "the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women,” then I wouldn't even try to convince you. And I see that I was correct in my assessment.
"Personally, I think Dworkin made some very compelling points"
Well, the one you made would seem "compelling" only to a person with a rather weak command of the English language, to someone who is unaware that words can have nuances.
Yes, "getting screwed, or getting shafted mean being mistreated, harmed" but that's because "screw" or "shaft" are not exact synonyms of "having sex", but carry the additional connotation of sex in either a 1) morally reprehensible context or at least 2) an amoral, recreational context.
Congratulations, you have begun to engage with the argument. Still, making the point without needing to resort to insults would make you appear less petty and insecure
"making the point without needing to resort to insults"
That can be arranged easily, I think. Just forget about the first paragraph in my answer and concentrate on the second.
Ok Hillary, whatever you say. Goddess knows you wouldn't lie.
To have as a spokesperson very clearly damaged instead of the most enlightened and goodness-centric people is still the problem.
My own vote for Noxious Feminist of Our Time must go to one Judith Butler. As I wrote on my own 'stack:
As with other intelligentsia fads, ‘Third Wave’ feminism’s ‘deconstruction’ of the realities of sex and gender first germinated in the groves of academe, supercharged by the tendency of feminism to disproportionately attract lesbian and otherwise sexually dysphoric academics into its fold - most notably its high priestess Judith Butler.......that celebrated grand American dame of militant androgyny.
Had her ‘socially constructed gender’ theorising and joyless attacks on human sexuality entered directly into the public mainstream, they would have been met with the widespread derision they richly deserved. But as I have argued in so much of my writings, an academia/media nexus has been a powerful feature of our intellectual ecosystem. It operates like a huge agricultural spreader, spraying hyper-progressive fertiliser across the culture but in a concentration initially dilute enough for its toxicity to not be immediately obvious to a wider audience of educated women. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-androgyny-syndrome https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
Thank you for this. I won't argue about the obnoxiousness of Butler, who has written far less clearly and profited more, at least financially, than Dworkin ever did--and had an extremely baleful influence on contemporary understandings of gender and 'trans.' I made it all the way through *Gender Trouble* (I have a strong memory of reading it on the bus on the way home from UBC, and trying to explain it to someone who asked), but faltered at *Bodies That Matter.*
I wonder if Dworkin and Butler ever talked to each other. Guess they probably did at some point, both being celebrated feminist 'icons'. That conversation, if it took place, must have been quite something...an ulimate essay in paranoia and personal hang-ups dressed up as intellectual heft.
They certainly did overlap, but I suspect their milieus were quite different. Though Dworkin was a highly intelligent woman, she was not very interested in academic theory. And I don't think Butler was very interested in 'Take Back the Night' marches and in anti-pornography and anti-rape advocacy. I could be wrong. It is possible that they did meet.
You're probably right....and my question was mostly a rhetorical one. But in terms of great personal hang-ups dressed up as intellectual heft they were very much two of a kind.
Hi Graham, Dworkin and Butler had different agendas (Butler was into a sex&gender free pandemonium of self-expression, Dworkin figured as an anti-heterosex campaigner). Their intellectual capacities are also on a different level. While Butler did post-doctoral work in Heidelberg and is by today's academic standards a top notch international star (she has a huge following in Germany where she delivers her lectures in German), Dworkin was a street-level harpie and a shit-disturber, and a pathetic ignoramus. She admitted herself she was not into "academic horseshit" (in preface to Woman Hating).
Neither of them had any "intellectual capacity" (not in any meaningful sense) that's the sick joke of their huge fame. Don't know about Dworkin but Butler couldn't string two coherent thoughts or sentences together. Academic horseshit is putting it nicely (there's some quotes of it in my Androgyny Syndrome essay).
I've made it halfway through and stalled...It pitched me into a study of postmodernism, which is astonishing in and of itself. I thought I understood it to some degree but was wrong...
And thank you too Janice. Hope you will have a read of the two essays I linked to (both are in similar territory to The Flamingo File). And if you like them, maybe reciprocate my own suscription?
Julie Bindel is way worse.
She is truly noxious in her hatred of men.
Seriously, Julie Bindel makes Amanda Marcotte looks like Karen DeCrow.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/16/why-andrea-dworkin-is-the-radical-visionary-feminist-we-need-in-our-terrible-times
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-i-love-this-feminist-who-hit-nuns-and-shot-andy-warhol/
Meghan murphy is also worse.
She is right about Taylor Swift.
https://www.meghanmurphy.ca/p/why-i-wont-shut-up-about-taylor-swift
Big deal. Lots of people dislike Swift.
Big deal you.
She's not wrong about everything. I don't dislike Swift - her music is shite.
Not being wrong about some stupid pop star doesn't make murphy any better. In all important issues she is an enemy.
We’re living in a time when many women — and some men — admire and absorb the rantings of the mentally ill, and take it as gospel.
Thanks for this, Janice. It’s good to know about these unhinged rantings. I was aware of some of it, but this really helps me understand.
Tom - I have the great good fortune of living in a small southern town. On the increasingly rare times that I watch Lamestream news, sometimes it feels like all is lost, but then I repair to the bosom of my friends here - calm, ordinary, Christian men and women of all ages who love each other, love their families, love their communities and their God - good, solid people, and that includes young marrieds in their early twenties - and I think to myself, "Ya know, we just may make it."
Let's hope your experience is the norm! There are many who say the media is inflating the numbers of the far left and that actually most of the nation is as you describe.
All nutters
It is surely a higher percentage of women, but it is also many men as well.
Young leftists who have so bought into oppressor-oppressed ideology that they are pro-Hamas (not merely pro-Palestinian, but actually pro-Hamas) are still more evidence.
It is far more than merely “some” men.
Dworkin was living proof that most, if not all, ideologies are merely justifications for the believer’s psychology—in her case self hatred and shame projected onto men in the form of feminism.
I just stopped watching Broadchurch on (of course) Netflix. Season 1 was bad enough, but Season Two could have been written by Andrea Dworkin. Every man but one is depicted as some sort of sexual predator, liar, cheater, rapist, etc. The exception is the one man who isn't sexual, i.e., seems to have no interest in women as romantic partners or sex at all. No surprise there. For good measure, there's an adolescent boy who's portrayed as some sort of sexual creep-in-waiting. Dworkin is dead, and yet not.
It would seem we are in another cycle of feminist propaganda,
Articles are appearing on social media that seem deliberately aimed at "Stoking Female Rage".
For example, WW11 ended 80 years ago, and images of French Women who collaborated with the Germans having their heads shaved—no mention of the male collaborators who were shot.
There is also a fresh round of "The Burning Times" and emotive distortions of details attributed to the reasons why.
Then there is the erroneous claim about "Women being denied Credit Cards".
Reading the comments section, those who claim to be female almost unanimously take the position that women are shamed, humiliated and abused and denied equal rights. Male commentators who challenge the narrative are attacked, claiming they have "hurt Feelings" .
It becomes clear "When Emotions are Driving, Logic and Rational thought are not backseat passengers, they are locked in the trunk (car-boot)" Brene' Brown.
There would seem to be a lynch mob mentality.
Feminist behaviour lead to atrocities such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit
I think that Emmett Till's behaviour had something to do with it as well.
I recommend reading "The Losers" by David Eddings.
As a male, not previously familiar with the corpus of feminist theory, when you meet a feminazi pre-loaded with this material, it is simultaneously disturbing shocking, a revelation and a danger.
One of the universal consistencies of feminists, regardless of their strain, is their refusal to disavow the inequalities that men suffer, even when the context that they are complaining about should make it obvious. This is why I always laugh when feminists claim that it is only the radical feminists that give the majority of 'good' feminists a bad name, and that MRAs are being disingenuous by tarring all feminists with the same brush. Really ?!
Yes, I've searched high and low, like Diogenes with his lamp, for the majority reasonable feminists.
Well you see, they clever though. If you go through the decades since Friedan you'll find they have managed to convince the mainstream that everybody who loves and cares for women is in fact a "feminist", i.e. that among humans there are only two possible attitudes towards the fair sex - feminism and misogyny. You know, you taught at university.
Well I suppose given that "reason" in the sense of logical thought is some sort of patriarchal plot designed to be a false ideological consciousness that hides women's oppression. One couldn't be a feminist and reasonable at the same time!
Feminism is like cigarettes; there are dozens of brands, but they all cause cancer.
Feminism has neither logic or empathy.
Somehow it sounds like a sort of crazed version of the English (maybe North American too? Wasn't Mr. Kellogg obsessed with cooling sexual drives with bland food? ) mid and high Victorian rejection of human sexuality (well biology really given sexual reproduction is hardly unique to Homo Sapiens sapiens). Partly a reaction to the perception of the libertine behaviour of the aristocracy, the previous 3 centuries. On the plus side deciding that a perfectly natural and essential act for reproduction is literally devilish is likely to bring such believers "line" to an abrupt end, hopefully reducing their legacy for future generations ( of cultures less enamored of such anxiety about life itself). Even the parade of "where have all the good men gone?" articles give some hope as such apostles of feminists find they'd rather like a future after all. As do the constant drip of similar women writing pieces about how very very happy they are, yes really they are, to be childless and un partnered (the clue is that there are no one writing about the joys of children because of course they are busy with actual life) "protesting too much". There was a rather sad documentary about Germaine Greer, following her as she sorted through her house and books in preparation to downsize, alone but for some hired help. She wasn't self pitying but all the same it was a sad scene.
Maybe, like many of our natural bodily functions, its a bit unsophisticated and messy (frankly sometimes comical) but there it is. Why we'd listen to people like Dworkin, De Beauvoir, Foucault and well any of the "icons" whose personal lives were riven with confusions, "closets" perversions and bizarreness I do not know.
I understand the appeal of a Foucault or a Derrida to intellectuals. They are impressed and attracted by the clever obfuscation and contrariness to common sense. The appeal of an Andrea Dworkin is another matter; it is visceral rather than intellectual. I think there is a deep exhilaration to hating as intensely as she did, and to feeling oneself a victim of a monstrous masculinity. Dworkin's feverish prose excites that in a significant number of women.
I do think Melanie Phillips hit the nail on the head with the observation that feminism is being a perpetual teenager, as a means of evading the rather scary prospect of becoming an adult with all that entails. Hence the obsessions with contraception and abortion and the fear of "sex" as in the sort that holds the possibility of of conception and the rigor of actual relationships with a someone very unlike you. After all teenagers are natural "narcissists" they are the centre of their own universe, no one understands their complexity and genius, no one has suffered like they do, nor felt so deeply, or been so right. All things that real life gradually challenges as it turns out you are one of billions who are not remotely as special, unique, all knowing, certain or tragic as that 15 year old you. The adolescent "I hate you !" when their genius is denied or their tragedy is denied its Shakespearian depth. As rather than indulge them the adults entreat them to have chicken soup or get a good nights sleep. Because weirdly those parents/adults were teenagers too and realise you can't actually die of embarrassment, that life goes on and tomorrow is another day. The adolescent rails against their parent's ability to "ruin my life" as the feminist declares the same for "men" or the "patriarchy" , while he or they actually provide everything that allows them to live. As I say it was sad to see elderly Greer have to let go of the things she had a relationship with, her books.
How seductive at first to have all the self righteousness and self absorption of the teen carried on into your 20s then 30s then 40s then perhaps realise your stuck and you've stuck .... and just maybe the boring normal folk, the ordinary ones without your special and special insight ..... well maybe they weren't so dumb .
At University in the late 70s I recall the rather heretical thought that the reason that various French philosophers were so popular had less to do with their ideas and more to do with the romance of France and Paris and the fact that they were treated as stars in France. Somehow I couldn't imagine the same excitement had they hailed from Newcastle upon Tyne , Dortmund, Belfast or Gary Indiana.
France is the idjit capitol of the universe. Their Jacobins proved that.
You nailed it, Janice.
I remember her well including saying to myself at the time ‘and women not only read this vile slobs outbursts but listen and repeat it as well’.
They still quote her and treat her as an icon, almost worthy of finding that beastly countenance on a feminist Mt Rushmore
She should have been put down like the rabid dog she was.
Feminist: "Where have all the good men gone?"
Answer: "They are with good women, which is why you can't find them."
Sometimes they have been canceled, imprisoned, or suicided…
Gone, baby. We ain't with nobody and we ain't coming back.
Blimey, having graduated and worked in an artistic/political milieu in central and north London in the ‘70/80 this was almost a step back in time, Lesbian groups I encountered were almost Dworkin clones, I had torrid affairs with women who claimed to be lesbians. An almost nostalgic account, definitely accurate account, thank you! Later of course I came across Paglia and Fiamengo for a reset, thankfully.
Beggars belief that the likes of Dworkin and Solanas are celebrated. BBC Radio 3 even had a program of music celebrating the life of Valerie Solanas!
Wow. She attempted to murder Andy Warhol and two other men. Warhol's life was ruined as a result of her homicidal mania. That is so sick and sad.
No, no, no, Janice. Don't you know: all feminists are lovely peace-loving people and if the world was ruled by them, there would be no violence at all! That's why we have no wars in the world now that the United Nations is feminist.
Feminists Attack Catholic Churches in Mexico and South America:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvH13P89eO8
Feminist Revolutionary Who Shot Andy Warhol:
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/who-was-valerie-solanas-andy-warhol-1202689740/
"How Many Men Do We Need to Kill?"
https://yandex.com/video/preview/10426807307086222337
The founder of domestic violence shelters reveals some of her horrific experience of feminism:
https://youtu.be/AlFk-zRNDA4?si=hsWwJc4rjPU3QwM5&t=120
Feminist Death Threats: The Anti-Equality Revolution - A Conversation with Erin Pizzey:
https://yandex.com/video/preview/7306883065990980019
Indeed. Thank you for the links!
It is indeed. When I wrote to complain and suggest that even if the music was good (it wasn't) the narrator should at least have added some caveats. Instead it was suggested that Solanas's words might have been 'playful or ironic'. One composer was said to be 'intrigued by the egalitarian principles of the SCUM manifesto' what these egalitarian principles were was never disclosed.
To be fair to Solanas, I believe she was a paranoid schizophrenic and perhaps not in control of herself, the producers and narrators of this program had no excuses.
Having read Das Capital (hard work, for Marxist Economics course) I understand the still current "problem" for all the branches of Marxist thought. The theory states the revolution will happen in the most advanced and globalist capitalist economies, yet the reality is that they occur in the poorest often barely subsistence economies.
So what perplexes me is how did the often most extreme forms of feminism take root so rapidly in what was then far and away the most affluent developed countries on the planet (USA and Canada)? In which women had, because of this affluent consumerist society, by far the most choices freedoms and opportunities of any women on the globe. Certainly far more than men and women in the "industrial north" of England till the early 1980s. It is genuinely puzzling to me. I get the de Beauvoirs, Greers, etc here in europe and their Engelsian Marxism stuff, but the sheer venom of some of the North American feminists and its misandry (rather than we're all just puppets of the system) seems to be a particularly north American thing in origin?
Look, the feminists did not invent women hating men, and wanting to switch places. The fantasy of women dominating men is as old as humanity. When Zeus wanted to cut Hercules to size for freeing Prometheus, he made him a slave to the queen Omphale. She amused herself by making the Superman wear women's clothes, and do women's chores for her.
You are helpfully right to point out that misandry is very old. Even some Byzantine texts (as far as they are understood at all) indicate some of it - if not hatred of men, disdain at least.
As far as I am aware, feminism is the first sociopolitical organisation (with a top-down ideology) that has formulated misandry and even normalised it so well that many adherents to feminism don't even see it as misandric.
That they did this starting in the days of steamships, holding international conferences in the late 19th century, says a lot about the wealth, freedom and influence of those early women.
There have been MANY evil nations down through history.
But none of those nations ever were so thoroughly vile that they -- by policy -- attempted to wipe-out fatherhood, sonship, and even masculinity itself.
That level of malevolence can only be answered in one way, and it is not by argument.
I am in Kerala right now. They just had elections and the Communist party was projected to win! Very poor people though. The Communists promise them things. I should find out soon enough if they did.
The ultimate proof that the main stream media is gynocentric, misandrist, feminist in its ideology!
Misandry is mainstream. Unlike Misogyny one does not have to delve into the darker reaches of the "manosphere" to find it. It is there daily in the BBC, Times etc. etc.....
It’s really impossible to overstate how little consideration and how much resentment and disdain these people have for men, as individuals and especially as a category.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/feminism-as-entitlement-pt-5
The short definition of feminism states: "Feminism...making ugly women equal since xxx". Dworkin is the example of the unattractive, in this case obese, woman who projects all her own unhappiness and refusal to take steps to improve her OWN life on men. That such women often embrace lesbianism is not surprising...and it accounts for lesbian relationships having the most domestic violence of any pairing of 2 humans. Dworkin is a prime example of why Men are Good...and Women...It Depends!
Actually Rush Limbaugh in 1992 wrote…’ feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream".
Variations on a theme!
Andrea Dworkin is the prefect personification of the pure evil that feminism is capable of.
Julie Bindel does her bit. See her substack masquerading as concern for women. It's actually about something else.
This article helps me understand the roots of the hatred that permeates the left. I'm starting to think that hatred is the only thing that holds them together.
Absolutely!
Feminism is not about equality
It is an ideology based on nothing but hatred of men and boys and is really all about power and SPECIAL STATUS FOR WOMEN IN ALL THINGS
Feminism is the largest hate movement the world has ever seen
They hate 1/2 of world’s entire population
They hate the other half too. Their war is really against all natural states and proclivities.
Yes, women can have an even tougher time than men being heard. There are few people who really believe that feminism speaks for men (on the rare occasions they care about men at all) yet most of the world erroneously believes that women's interests are represented by feminism.
Thanks for another excellent critique, concise and beautifully written as usual!
Dworkin's writing appears to reflect a more general issue, that of women blaming men for the burdens that biology has placed on women. Somebody must be to blame for periods, body-distorting and body-depleting pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, the sleep deprivation and drudgery of breastfeeding, the theft of personal time and development by childcare responsibilities. So blame men. In addition to these burdens either directly or vicariously experienced, Dworkin's resentment likely arose from her own failure to have children. So project it all on to men and especially on to what is (naturally anyway) required for insemination and reproduction. So little self insight.
In unfairly directing their resentment about female biological reality on to men, feminists ignore the separate burdens biology places on men. Men are afflicted with overwhelming sexual drive due to much higher testosterone levels than women have on average. They can get it wrong when responding to those drives. Men die younger than women. Men are driven to engage in both productive and foolish physicality that causes body damage and risk of worse. Men are especially bothered by a sense of responsibility to the group and to solve problems and risks facing the group. Men go bald and develop enlarged prostates. Men are not about to blame women for male biology and social contribution, but we would appreciate some recognition and empathy.
Quite possibly life is indeed unfair. And I do think since "God is dead" ,the one that placed on women "the curse of Eve" (Adam's was to "toil"), "Men" or "the Patriarchy" must now get the blame. The most commonplace version is "if men had the babies there'd be no children" or variations. Now current in conversations in my family as we await the birth of my nephew's first baby. Nonsense of course because they a. wouldn't then be men in the sense of a male animal but b. would have all the physically necessary to be female and then be a woman anyway. But we get the reality, life is indeed unfair and by design or evolution male and female are, well, different. In truth feminism is indeed complaining about the curse of Eve and an ideology that puts off becoming adult Eve for as long as possible. Of course in reality the gynocentrism which has driven men to create all sorts of aids, helps and "cures" for this unfairness, then blames the men anyway! Specially now we can't blame God, or Gods.
We won't get it.
"feminists ignore the separate burdens biology places on men"
That is complete horseshit and I think you know it. Compared to women, men suffer no biological burden whatsoever. You were right the first time when you said feminism is rooted in women's resentment of men for the biological injustice inflicted upon them.
My post outlined some of the biological burdens men deal with. I don't need to reiterate but you're welcome to ignore what might be inconvenient to your preferences.
"Men are afflicted with overwhelming sexual drive"
If high sex drive is an affliction, why have humans since antiquity sought all kinds of aphrodisiacs to INCREASE sex drive? Like I said, you're talking nonsense. Perhaps you mean that men are more sexually frustrated than women, but that's not a biological burden, it's simply a lack of opportunity in modern society.