This essay appears in Soble, Alan. (2006).

Sex From Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical

Encyclopedia, 2 vols., Greenwood Press, 241-48.
DWORKIN, ANDREA (1946-2005)

Born to secular Jewish parents and raised in Camden, New Jersey, Andrea Dworkin
became a radical Asecond-wave@ feminist. By Dworkins own account (Life and Death,
3-38), her work is informed by a series of negative personal experiences, including
sexual assault at age nine, again by doctors at the Women's House of Detention in New
York in 1965 (after an arrest for protesting the Vietnam War), work as a prostitute, and
marriage to a battering husband whom she left in 1971. While Dworkin self-identified
as a lesbian, since 1974 lived with a gay male partner, writer John Stoltenberg, whom
she married in 1998. Understandably, the main theme of Dworkin's work is male
violence against women. This violence is a defining feature of our male-supremacist
culture, in which rape, prostitution, and pornography are inevitable expressions of
gender norms.
Dworkin's writings are primarily aimed at social change rather than
intellectualizing. She describes her first book as Aa political action where revolution is
the goal@ (Woman Hating, 17). What one finds in her writings is not so much
philosophical theorizing as calls to action. Thus it is difficult to summarize the abstract
theory to which she is committed and from which she draws arguments against the
sexism she finds in our culture. What is clear is her desire to eliminate binary concepts
of gender and their oppressive effects. (This perhaps dissolves the apparent tension in
identifying as lesbian yet having a man as life-partner.) In particular, Dworkin urges the
destruction of a female gender role that involves masochism, self-hatred, and passivity.
She sees male supremacy constructed and reinforced in our culture through the sexist
structuring of public institutions and private interactions, locating three crucial foci of
male supremacy in action: pornography, sexual intercourse, and rape. These are her
central concerns. Her work includes seven monographs, three collections of essays and
speeches, a memoir (Heartbreak), two novels (Ice and Fire; Mercy), and a book of
short stories (New Woman=s Broken Heart), all of which explore these themes.
Pornography. Dworkin is well known for her anti-pornography writing and
activism. This began with her analysis of pornography in Woman Hating and continued
with a series of essays in Our Blood and Letters from a War Zone and her first fulllength treatment, Pornography: Men Possessing Women. In Woman Hating she actually
had positive things to say about the pornography of the 1960s and early 1970s, pointing
out that its graphic depictions and celebrations of oral sex and female genitals helped
Abreak down barriers to the realization of a full sexuality@ (79). But in Right-wing
Women she asserted that all feminists, to be feminists, had to be anti-pornography.
Dworkin's campaign against pornography with lawyer Catharine MacKinnon has drawn
much attention. In 1983, they drafted an ordinance for the Minneapolis City Council
that treated pornography as a form of sex discrimination, making its production and
distribution a ground for civil rights action. The ordinance defines pornography as the
graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women (Pornography and Civil Rights, 36).

This contrasts with the standard legal framework, which Dworkin and MacKinnon view
as a mistaken in its focus on obscenity as pornography's problematic feature. Dworkin
identifies the wrong of pornography in the harm it does to women. Women who
participate in its production are coerced, entrapped, and exploited. In her view these
women are working as prostitutes and are, like prostitutes, being objectified and
dehumanized merely for the pleasure of men. Consumption of pornography also causes
harm through its involvement in rape, battery, sexual harassment, abuse, and
reinforcement of women's second-class status. Dworkin views pornography as one of,
perhaps the, central means by which male supremacy in our society is constructed and
perpetuated (Right-wing Women, 226-27).
The Minneapolis ordinance was twice passed by the City Council but vetoed by the
mayor. Civil libertarians, including many feminists, vigorously opposed the ordinance.
The basis of their objection was the claim that freedom of speech is fundamental in free,
democratic societies. Curtailment of this freedom is justifiable only when some variety
of speech can be shown to be sufficiently harmful and when the limits imposed on it are
not vague or overbroad. The ordinance, they argued, failed on both grounds. Indeed, the
unconstitutionality of the ordinance was upheld by the Seventh Circuit Court of
Appeals in American Booksellers, Inc. v. Hudnut, and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme
Court (see MacKinnon and Dworkin, In Harm=s Way, 462-82).
Dworkin finds these arguments unpersuasive, believing that the free speech rights of
men must not be treated as more important than the rights of women to be free from
sexual abuse. She is equally unmoved by the claim that insufficient evidence exists
establishing the harms of pornography, asserting that the hearings conducted about the
ordinance provided compelling evidence (see In Harm=s Way). Certainly the hearings
revealed that some women who participated in the production of pornography were
harmed by intimidation and violence. The hearings also established that some women
have been abused and sexually assaulted by men who consume pornography and that
pornography is sometimes incorporated into this abuse itself (see also Russell,
APornography and Violence@). What this establishes about a causal connection between
pornography and harm is not clear. Correlation alone does not demonstrate causation
(see Soble, 144-50).
Dworkin replies that pornography is not like many other factors frequently present
in abuse and rape, saying of men who perpetrate these crimes that Athe directions [they]
followed are found in pornography. . . . [T]hey are not found anywhere else@
(Pornography, xxvi). Dworkin does not, however, merely assume that pornography
causes men to assault women sexually through a simple process of mimicking
pornography's content. Dworkin's model is more sophisticated: pornography
purportedly affects men's attitudes, through its coupling of sexual pleasure with
objectifying, degrading, or violent images of women, such that men become more likely
to abuse women. Pornography Aplays a big part in normalizing the ways in which
[women] are demeaned and attacked@ (Life and Death, 133). The mechanisms through
which this alleged normalization occurs are those proposed by, among others,
sociologist Diana Russell, who argues that exposure to pornography predisposes some
men to desire rape and undermines inhibitions against acting on rape fantasies

(Dangerous Relationships, 121). The status of the empirical evidence here is

contentious, though Dworkin clearly accepts Russell's interpretation.
In addition to being accused of navet about the sexual assault-pornography
connection, Dworkin has also been accused of reinforcing sexist norms by portraying
women, in and out of pornography, as passive victims. However, Dworkin is not antisexual nor does she assume male sexuality is intrinsically harmful. She condemns
pornography because it expresses objectionable views of women and sexuality, but she
believes that merely intellectually rejecting those views is not enough. We cannot reject
these views yet continue to produce and consume the pornography that expresses them;
we must eliminate pornography, not just read it in light of nonsexist beliefs. But
Dworkin does not advocate the abolition of all sexually explicit material. Her own
fiction contains graphic, sometimes violent, descriptions of sex. This, of course, raises
the question of the distinction between pornography and unobjectionable sexual
material. The ordinance defines pornography as sexually explicit subordination of
women, so what must be distinguished are depictions that subordinate and those that
don't. Dworkin understands subordination to be the Aactive placing of someone in an
unequal position or in a position of loss of power@ (Pornography and Civil Rights, 39).
This might be uncontroversial, but the guidance it provides seems weak. Dworkin does
not think that drawing the distinction is difficult in practice: no Apornographer has any
trouble knowing what to make@ (Pornography and Civil Rights, 36). Her optimism in
the face of the complexity of the issue seems unwarranted.
Dworkin's perception of pornography stems from the analysis of cultural gender
norms she presents in Woman Hating. There she approaches pornography as cultural
material from which we can discern the principles that structure our gendered concepts
of sexuality. But her analysis also starts with another form of material: fairy tales. These
contain the gender roles that children learn and adults never overcome. Fairy tales, as
she reads them, tell us that only two kinds of women exist. Good women (Sleeping
Beauty, Cinderella) are passive, sleeping, innocent, helpless victims, while bad women
(the Queen, the Wicked Stepmother) are active, devouring, awake, powerful. Men in
fairy tales, on the other hand, are all heroes, all good, even when they do bad. Fairy
tales, then, tell us that men and women are Adifferent, absolute opposites@ (47). In
women, beauty, passivity, and victimization are desirable. In women, action and power
are evil and must be destroyed. Whatever men do is good, because men do it. The moral
of fairy tales is that Ahappiness for a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or
asleep@ (49).
The link for Dworkin is that A[p]ornography, like fairy tales, tells us who we are@
(Woman Hating, 53; see Stoltenberg, 120-21). But its ideas are not confined to books
and magazines; they structure the real world of human relations. To establish this,
Dworkin discusses cultural practices that play out the sexist messages she has
perceived, such as European witch-burning and Chinese foot binding. Witch-burning
manifests the principles that ugliness, knowledge, action, and independence are
dangerous in women, in need of punishment, worthy of death. Foot binding shows the
value and beauty of women identified with disability, dependency, and passivity. These
are clear examples of misogynist cultural practices. According to Dworkin, however,

they are continuous with contemporary female beauty practices, the result of the
glorification of culturally mandatory and continual body modification that requires
tolerance, even the romanticizing, of self-inflicted pain. This is one source of the
masochism Dworkin finds in the constructed feminine personality. More generally,
women become masochistic as the result of conforming to social rules of femininity that
degrade them as persons. This is especially noteworthy because women's masochism is
Athe mechanism which assures that the system of male supremacy will continue to
operate as a whole even if parts of the system itself break down or are reformed . . . . [It]
must be rooted out from the inside before women will ever know what it is to be free@
(Our Blood, 61).
Another theme appears in Dworkin's analysis of Suck, a countercultural
pornographic magazine of the 1960s. The depiction of sexuality she finds there contains
the same gender principles encoded in fairy tales. Dworkin argues that the sexual
revolution was not revolutionary but reactionary in its reinforcement of masculinist
culture and binary gender roles. This analysis is extended in her essay, AWhy So-Called
Radical Men Love and Need Pornography@ (Letters, 214-21). Dworkin argues that men
rightly fear the sexual violence they recognize in each other; to ensure their own safety,
they arrange things so that sexual violence is directed against women as a class.
Traditional sexual prohibitions against homosexuality and female promiscuity reinforce
this class system. Weakening them therefore weakens the gender class system. The
male radicals of the 1960s thus endangered their own social superiority by promoting
sexual freedom. Faced with the choice between continuing the fight for freedom and
shifting allegiance back to male supremacy, they chose the latter. This accounts for the
subsequent proliferation of pornography and its increasing misogyny. Pornography only
looks like it promotes women=s sexual freedom; in fact, it contains the same sexist
messages as fairy tales. It functions as propaganda to keep women in their place and is
thereby backlash against feminism. This thesis is, of course, debatable. The
proliferation of pornography is unlikely an effect of a small group of men reacting to
feminism. Pornography is also unlikely to be effective against women's liberation, since
the messages it expresses are ambiguous; to what extent woman-hating messages are in
pornography, and whether they are understood to be there by consumers, is difficult to
decide. Further, much pornography does not depict fairy-tale women, but celebrates
women who are independent, active, and powerful.
Sexual Intercourse. Dworkin generally doubts the contribution of the sexual
revolution to the liberation of women. She claims that neither oral contraception nor
promiscuity help liberate women but, instead, perpetuate women's oppression. They
make women Amore accessible, more open to exploitation@ (Woman Hating, 81; see also
MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 144-45, and Toward a Feminist Theory, 190). The
possibility of pregnancy and prohibitions against promiscuity gave women some power
to refuse men=s sexual demands. Removing them without making more fundamental
changes only further disempowers women. Their accurately perceiving this, according
to Dworkin, explains why right-wing women embrace traditional gender roles. They
recognize that the liberation offered by the Left is no liberation at all. These women

Asee that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own,
but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were@ (Rightwing Women, 69). Even though this response will not promote the liberation of women
either, the sexual revolution does not go far enough in its recommendation that women
adopt a male pattern of sexuality free of commitment and in its valorization, for both
men and women, of a promiscuous, objectifying sexual style (see Callahan).
Furthermore, for Dworkin, behaving like men makes women oppressors. Liberation
requires more fundamental changes.
A change in our model of sexuality is necessary. Dworkin therefore suggests that
sexual intercourse itself is a politically suspicious practice in our current cultural
context. Her analysis of intercourse categorizes it as a central experience of
objectification and oppression endured by women and through which male supremacy
is taught and learned. Our culture's concepts of gender and sexuality make penetration
an act of conquering, possession, and violation that turns women into objects for men's
ownership and control. This objectification is at the same time Athe normal use of a
woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a violative abuse@ (Intercourse, 122).
So long as men have power over women and male sexuality is constructed as
dominating and controlling, heterosexual coitus will have this negative character.
The meaning of intercourse is, for Dworkin, independent of the meaning individual
acts of intercourse might have for the participants. Even feminist men dominate and
control women when they have intercourse with them; even women who experience
coital pleasure and not violation or domination are violated and dominated. Social
power relations determine the negative meaning of intercourse, not the individual's
intentions or feelings. AIntercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is
pervasive and incontrovertible@ and, moreover, Amost men have controlling power over
what they call their women--the women they fuck@ (Intercourse, 125-26). The social
power of men is enacted in and reinforced through coitus, and is a central aspect of its
meaning, despite what we experience. Whatever one makes of the claim that social
context solely determines the meanings of actions (surely there is much to worry about
here), a weaker reading of Dworkin has her saying only that individuals do not have
complete freedom to fix the meanings of their actions. In sex, as in language, we must
fashion meaning out of the materials at hand. Still, the cultural materials related to
coitus might not be as univocal as Dworkin believes and her pessimism about
intercourse might not be fully justified.
Dworkin entertains the idea that intercourse must be abandoned to break the hold
that the model of dominance, invasion, and possession has over us, arguing men may
have to Agive up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together@
(Our Blood, 13). As early as Woman Hating, she extols androgynous sexuality:
Aandrogynous fucking requires the destruction of all conventional role-playing . . . and
of the personality structures dominant-active ('male') and submissive-passive ('female')@
(185). The philosophy of sexuality Dworkin advances, then, makes genuine human
sexuality depend on genuine human freedom--freedom from arbitrary and oppressive
gender roles. Until these are eradicated, coitus will retain its negative meaning and
function as a classroom of male supremacy. Ethical and humane intercourse might be

possible in the future, but only after we achieve real freedom.

Rape. Calls for freedom occur repeatedly in Dworkin's writings: not only freedom
from gender roles and pornography, but also from rape. For Dworkin, rape is, along
with pornography and intercourse, one of three focal elements of male supremacy. The
prominence of rape in the history of Western culture (see Brownmiller) is important in
Dworkin's thoughts about intercourse: the violation and possession of intercourse is
only a short step from rape. Dworkin's blurring the line between consensual intercourse
and rape is intentional (Intercourse, 136-38; see MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist
Theory, 146, 174-75). It derives from her belief that women have been socially and
legally unable to give or withhold sexual consent through much of human history. This
inability does not derive from some deficit in women but from the social and legal
negation of their autonomy and personhood. If women are not afforded the same rights
as men, if they are legally chattel, if economic and social circumstances curtail their
choices, and if they are socialized to be passive and masochistic, then women will
hardly be in a position to grant or withhold genuine consent.
Unified by men=s right of access to women=s bodies, consensual intercourse and
violent rape are thereby points on the same continuum. All Aconsensual@ heterosexual
sex is for women some form of sexual-economic bargain. This is clear in prostitution,
which vividly expresses the economic exploitation of women. Dworkin asserts that
prostitutes are coerced by the system of male supremacy, even when they are not
intimidated or forced into particular acts of prostitution. Women cannot voluntarily
prostitute themselves any more than they can genuinely consent to Anormal@ intercourse.
Indeed, Dworkin connects prostitution and rape: prostitution Ain and of itself is an abuse
of a woman's body@ and Ais more like gang rape than it is like anything else@ (Life and
Death, 141).
Dworkin's writings on rape concentrate on the meanings and implications of
historical and contemporary laws about rape, sexual assault, and marriage. She also
argues that rape is the inevitable expression of masculine sexuality as constructed in
Western culture. Rape and sexual assault are not merely acts done by Apsychopaths or
deviants from our social norms@ but are Acommitted by exemplars of our social norms@
(Our Blood, 45). Rape and assault are caused by our normative definitions of men as
aggressive, dominant, and powerful and women as passive, submissive, and powerless.
Thus, we must eliminate these cultural definitions. Again, Dworkin unearths the
problems our gender norms generate.
Dworkin points out that women have been treated in law and by custom as the
property of their fathers or husbands. This remained in the law of rape until only quite
recently. Marital rape became criminal in all 50 states only in 1993, and thirty-three
states still retained some exceptions to their marital rape laws in 2003 (Bennice and
Resick). Previously, men had a legal right of sexual access to their wives. Wives did not
have the power to refuse. On Dworkin's view, this situation was just part of a pattern of
regulation of sexual conduct that normalized coercive relations between the sexes, a
pattern that included treating compliance as consent, admitting victims' sexual history in
defense of a rape charge, and requiring physical injury as proof of rape. A cultural

belief that women want to be raped, which is often expressed in pornographic and
mainstream portrayals of women as deserving, inviting, and enjoying rape, also
normalizes sexual violence. Perhaps novelistic and cinematic depictions of a woman's
enjoying rape should not be read uncritically as endorsements. Even so, Dworkin insists
that in our culture Arape becomes the signet of romantic love@ and so Aremains our
primary model for heterosexual relating@ (Our Blood, 29). In her early work, she argued
that the solution to the problem of rape lay in part in the revision of rape laws. Progress
has been made on this front and Dworkin should get some credit. Her writing as a
revolutionary act has had an effect.
Critics of Dworkin do recognize that accusing her of Aman-hating@ in her opposition
to pornography and intercourse misunderstands her, however natural the accusation is,
given her strong convictions and the force of her expression (compare the careful
Nussbaum with the less careful Mullarkey). The real targets of Dworkin's contempt are
the norms of masculinity and femininity we have constructed in our commitment to
binary concepts of gender and the violent, misogynist sexuality both men and women
inherit as a result. This perspective fuels her campaigns against rape and pornography
and her pessimistic analysis of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

See also Consent; Firestone, Shulamith; MacKinnon, Catharine; Objectification;

Polysemicity; Pornography; Prostitution; Rape; Rape, date and acquaintance; Work, sex
as.
REFERENCES

Bennice, Jennifer A., and Patricia A. Resick. AMarital Rape: History, Research, and
Practice.@ Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 4:3 (2003), 228-46.
Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1975.
Callahan, Sidney. AAbortion and the Sexual Agenda,@ Commonweal (25 April 1986),
232-38.
Dworkin, Andrea. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant. New York:
Basic Books, 2002.
-----. Ice and Fire: A Novel. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987.
-----. Intercourse. New York: The Free Press, 1987.
-----. Letters from a War Zone: Writings, 1976-1987. London: Secker & Warburg, 1988.
-----. Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War against Women.
New York: The Free Press, 1997.
-----. Mercy. London: Secker & Warburg, 1990.
-----. The New Woman=s Broken Heart. San Francisco, Calif.: Frog In The Well, 1980.
-----. Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics. New York: Harper and
Row, 1976.
-----. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
-----. Right-wing Women. New York: Perigee Books, 1983.

-----. Woman Hating. New York: Dutton, 1974.

Dworkin, Andrea, and Catharine A. MacKinnon. Pornography and Civil Rights: A New
Day for Women's Equality. Minneapolis, Minn.: Organizing Against
Pornography, 1988.
-----, eds. In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1997.
MacKinnon, Catharine A. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
-----. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1989.
Mullarkey, Maureen. AHard Cop, Soft Cop.@ The Nation 244:21 (30 May 1987), 720-26.
Nussbaum, Martha. ARage and Reason.@ The New Republic 217:6-7 (11 August 1997),
36-42.
Russell, Diana E. H. Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny, and Rape.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1998.
-----. APornography and Violence: What Does the New Research Say?@ In Laura
Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. New York: William
Morrow, 1980, 218-38.
Soble, Alan. Pornography, Sex, and Feminism. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2002.
Stoltenberg, John. Refusing To Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. Portland, Ore.:
Breitenbush Books, 1989.

Sarah Hoffman