Making Peace with Andrea Dworkin

I just finished reading Andrea Dworkin's memoir, Heartbreak, which was published a few years before her death in 2005… and I liked it. 

While I don’t agree with everything Andrea Dworkin has ever written, she’s an immensely entertaining writer, and even when she’s wrong, she’s wrong with absolute conviction. I have to admire that. But I cannot be a “cafeteria feminist” and pick and choose only the pieces I agree with. Radfem’s history of transphobia — and Dworkin is a part of that — is enough to make me feel really conflicted because I do enjoy her work. Especially when she says something like this:

It happens so often that I, at least, cannot keep track of it. A woman is only believed of and when other women come forward to say the man or men raped them too. The oddness of this should be transparent. If I am robbed and my neighbor isn’t, I’m still robbed — there is no legal or social agreement that in order for me, the victim of a robbery, to be believed, the burglar has to have robbed my neighbors.

Granted, Heartbreak is far from a theory-laden pedantic tome, and her prose itself makes me want to start a riot of my own, but I know her history. Or rather, I know her often contentious history with contemporary (as in late 20th-century and beyond) feminism. I'm supposed to vilify her, or at least admit that her brand of feminism is at odds with today's feminists. Maybe I should provide a bit of my own background.

Unlike a lot of women in their twenties and thirties, I didn't come to feminism though the predictable channels: punk rock, riot grrrl or a women's studies class at college. My feminism came straight from my library's limited selection of second-wave feminist literature. I'm not going to pretend that our mothers' feminism has well as they've should, but I don't want to deny that there's still truth in their words. If I sound like I'm making excused, it's because, as I said, I can't pick and choose, but I don't want to deny that there's still good to be had in those old feminist classics, at least for a lot of us who can't get it anywhere else. (And if I'm being completely honest, the current wave of sex-positive feminists, some of the most vocal critics of Dworkin's antediluvian attitude toward sex, leave me cold anyway. I see sex-positive feminism as another facet of the same movement that prioritizes the needs of some women over others.)

I think it's possible -- if not advisable -- to read through the feminist "canon" with a critical eye, while still acknowledging what got us here. And it's also naive to assume we've solved all the problem's of feminism's past.