Content warnings: discussion of sexual violence against women; references to transphobia and anti-sex work perspectives.

Unless you’re interested in feminist theory, most people haven’t heard about Andrea Dworkin or why she might be any more controversial than other feminist figures speaking out against patriarchal violence.

Starting from surround the 1970s, radical feminism in the US was a movement responding to a system that, for example, had zero sexual harassment laws for workplaces, barred women from having their own credit cards, and the legal right for employers and landlords to refuse to work with or rent to women. Many younger people today can hardly imagine the limitations forced on women even just forty or fifty years ago, and when taken in its historical context, radical feminism no longer seems so extreme after all.

Unfortunately, radical feminism has become something different today. The original solidarity between radical feminist women of all kinds (cis, trans, and gender-nonconforming alike) began to fall apart when some prominent radical feminists highlighted women who they felt were doing their womanhood and activism the “wrong way”: most notably, women who were trans, women who were sexually attracted to men, and sex workers and porn performers. One of these radical feminists included Andrea Dworkin.

This post isn’t going to address the wider phenomenon of contemporary radical feminism, although Dworkin’s work has been so influential to the shaping of contemporary radical feminist thought that it will necessarily come up. Instead, the purpose here is to acknowledge the personal complexities of Andrea Dworkin as a person while explaining why her legacy has caused harm to many of the marginalized survivors we support every day.

The survivors and families we serve must always come first in our priorities at Walnut Avenue.

Who is Andrea Dworkin?

Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was a Jewish American radical feminist who began publishing as a writer in 1974. Much of her work is focused on sexual violence against women under patriarchy. She’s probably most well-known for her anti-pornography and anti-sex work perspectives.

Dworkin was a survivor of multiple gender-based violences. At nine years old, she was molested by a man, and as an adult in Europe, she was married to an abusive man who was sexually and physically violent. After escaping and divorcing her husband, he stalked her and continued the abuse whenever he found her again. For a time, Dworkin engaged in sex work for survival.

On a less personal level, her writing also describes her frustration at the cultural limitations placed on women, such as being restricted from certain careers and opportunities based solely on gender rather than individual merit.

The personal traumas she experienced are both very real and also, unfortunately, not unique. And the systemic misogyny she describes is also well-documented, in peer-reviewed research as well as the anecdotal experiences of millions of women and other gender minorities. None of those things are in question.

So then why is she controversial?

Part of the controversy about Dworkin comes from the general pushback that all activists, feminist or otherwise, experience to one degree or another. Anyone who speaks up against the status quo about violence, oppression, and other forms of harm inevitably gets pushback from people whose power relies on upholding that status quo. Many feminists, radical or otherwise, have often been represented as “crazy,” “hysterical,” or “fallen” (i.e. sinful or immoral) women by mainstream sources.

A lot of the Dworkin controversy, however, comes from other feminists because of the way she frames the relationship between misogyny, sexuality, and violence.

Anti-Sex Work & Anti-Pornography

Sex work: a form of labor in which sexually stimulating services are exchanged for material compensation between consenting adults. By definition, sex work does not include sex trafficking, child sexual exploitation, or other forms of assault, exploitation, slavery, or coercion.
Pornography: any variety of media involving the portrayal of sexual material for the primary purpose of causing sexual arousal or stimulation.

Dworkin vehemently denounced sex work and pornography. Her writing posits that these two things are inherently violent against women because they normalize the sexual dehumanization of women, thereby encouraging men to continue regarding women not as fellow human beings but as passive objects of sexual gratification. The social effects of this, Dworkin said, would include increased rates of sexual coercion and rape, sex trafficking, and other forms of exploitation of women and girls. Repeated exposure to sexually violent pornography, Dworkin and others claimed, also impacts the sexual dynamics within couples by normalizing an unrealistic and often violent perspective. Sex work and pornography, in essence, reinforce a man’s inherently violent nature against women.

However, not all feminists agree with her, then or today. Many feminists point out that sex work and pornography can be beneficial to women when it’s fully consensual and presents women’s sexuality in a positive light, especially in an American mainstream culture which still tries to control whether or not women are ‘allowed’ sexual expression at all and, if so, what that’s ‘allowed’ to look like. Sex work and pornography offer opportunities for women (and other marginalized identities) to express their sexuality on their own terms, in their own ways, and often in defiance of oppressive puritanical values that attempt to stifle or control their sexual expression and intimacy.

The exploitation, feminists argue further, isn’t innate to sex work itself, but rather that exploitation comes from censorship and illegalization because they prevent systemic change and legal protections in these industries by forcing sex workers and pornography actors to operate in unsafe conditions. After all, exploitation against women and other marginalized people occurs in every industry, whether or not that industry has anything to do with sexuality. It’s about how an industry does or doesn’t address abuse of authority, not the industry itself.

Feminists point to the fact that sex work is defined by being between consenting adults. A person who is coerced into providing sexual services out of fear, intimidation, threats, or manipulation, or who is underage, would be an exploited person, not a sex worker. Often, it’s sex workers who are the first to recognize when trafficking is actually occurring.

And by blaming sex workers and pornography actors for sexual violence against women, the actual cause of the violence - that is, the system of gender-based oppression that we call patriarchy - is no longer the primary target of feminism’s efforts. It creates a strawman and causes feminists to attack their own for “not doing feminism right.” It assumes victimhood where there may be none, which, ironically, is a method of removing agency from women.

By framing men as “inherently violent,” too, it simultaneously:

Absolves harmful men of their choice to cause harm by saying that the violence is in their nature and not a choice at all;
Invalidates the harm that male survivors experience at the hands of men;
Ignores the harm caused to survivors of any gender who are harmed by women (since only men are inherently violent and womanhood is defined by victimization).

This focus on sex work and pornography as the cause of violence against women led anti-pornography feminists, including Dworkin, to begin working with conservative groups to ban pornography (although conservative groups framed the fight as “protecting children and families”). By the 1990s, the radical feminist movement fractured: one major school of thought retained the focus on anti-sex work and anti-pornography and kept the term radical feminism, where other schools of feminist thought did not.

Today, radical feminism has become a very different perspective from its historical roots.

Women’s Sexual Consent Under Patriarchy

Dworkin’s work also questions whether or not women are ever able to fully consent to sex with men when living in a patriarchal society. When women are born into a society in which they grow up being taught that their value is in their sexual availability and appeal, in which their life choices are limited simply because of their gender, in which saying ‘no’ to a man can result in murder…can it ever be said that a woman can truly consent to sex with a man? Or has she been ‘trained,’ by a lifetime of sexual objectification, to consent because she’s been taught that her value as person is in her sexual availability and attractiveness?

Other feminists argue that this is a reductive conclusion that oversimplifies social issues and also, again ironically, takes agency away from individual women. And by asserting that women can’t truly consent under patriarchy, this perspective has caused many women who are sexually attracted to men to feel guilt for their natural sexual orientation. “If I’m attracted to my oppressor, does that make me complicit in my own victimization?” they wonder. “If I’m attracted to men, am I a traitor to the rest of womanhood?”

This is, in the end, fundamentally and simply victim-blaming.

Anti-Trans

While Dworkin herself didn’t write much about people who are trans, many of her contemporaries spoke extensively about trans men being “women with internalized misogyny” and trans women as “male sexual predators in dresses.” The framework developed by Dworkin and her contemporaries around womanhood as victimhood and manhood as violence has become a keystone in contemporary radical feminism’s violence against trans people and other queer identities.

Whether or not Dworkin herself ever intended this particular outcome, her work is now simply too deeply tied into the broader radical feminist worldview to be considered outside of it. With anti-trans violence and rhetoric currently at an all-time high, this specific type of transphobia is directly fueling a variety of newly passed “anti-trans” laws and violent hate crimes in the UK and US.

How This Relates to Walnut Avenue

Today, radical feminism has become associated with ideology that is TERF (trans-exclusive radical feminism), SWERF (sex work-exclusive radical feminism), anti-queer, anti-asexual, and often anti-bi/pansexual (because of the way it condemns a woman’s attraction to men as ‘a woman’s participation in her own oppression’).

Because many contemporary radical feminists, or “radfems,” use inaccurate science to enforce their perception of a strict sex binary, it’s become anti-science as well as racist in the ways that it attempts to enforce a sex binary based on predominantly white perspectives. A good example of this is the way in which Olympic women athletes will be scrutinized on social media for ‘masculine features’ to “prove” that they’re “actually men,” even when these athletes are cis women, and it’s not a coincidence that an overwhelming majority of the scrutinized athletes -- which includes Serena Williams -- have been women of color.

At Walnut Avenue, all of our domestic violence services are free and fully voluntary to all survivors, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, economic status or insurance. We also don’t require photo IDs or legal names. Together, this all means that we often serve survivors who may not be able to safely access services elsewhere because of stigma against certain behaviors (e.g. substance use, mental illness), professions (e.g. sex work), or personal identities (e.g. being trans).

Prioritizing the well-being of our participants, in this context, means that we do not endorse perspectives, events, or initiatives which contribute to their marginalization.

Sex work is work, and it is no more or less inherently exploitative than any other form of labor within a capitalist economy;
Pornography is no more or less inherently exploitative than any other form of performance, as long as it’s done free of coercion and is fairly and appropriately compensated by the consumer (rather than stolen or pirated), like any other service;
Womanhood is not inherently defined by the experience of misogyny, victimization, and trauma, nor manhood defined as violence against women;
“Women” as a term automatically includes women who are trans or women who are gender-nonconforming;
A person has the right to feel however they feel about their own experiences of violence, whether or not other people agree or understand, but they don’t have the right to tell others how to feel about their experiences of violence;
A person has the right to define and express their own gender in whatever ways they choose, but they do not have the right to define those things for other people.

Andrea Dworkin was clearly a woman who experienced many of the ways in which women were, and continue to be, harmed by a world in which patriarchy remains in power. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to draw a connection between her critical perspective on sex work and pornography and her personal traumatic experiences. We can recognize the injustice of the violences committed against her, violences which no one deserves to experience regardless of who they are or what they’ve said or done, while also acknowledging that the legacy of her work contributed to the fracturing of the radical feminist movement and the ongoing harm from contemporary radical feminists against people who are trans, queer, and sex workers.

Is this in response to the local film showing of “My Name Is Andrea”?

Partially, yes. The film is new and none of our staff have seen it yet, but regardless of the perspective that the film takes on Andrea Dworkin, we anticipate it sparking some conversation about Dworkin’s work and different theories of feminism more generally. We want to be clear on our stance at the outset, which is that the first priority with any form of theory is its practical impact on the most marginalized of people and making sure that people’s real-world, immediate needs are being centered over abstracted, more generalized schools of thought.

Additional Support

If you would like to talk to someone about gender and sexuality, our local Diversity Center of Santa Cruz County is an excellent resource!

If you would like to talk to someone about domestic violence, our advocates are available by appointment (831-426-3062) or through our 24-hour hotline (1-866-269-2559). We provide support for all survivors regardless of gender, sexual orientation, profession, and family and relationship models (including queerplatonic, polyamorous, and/or kinky relationships).

From Our Teachers & Advocates

Feminist theory: Let’s talk about Andrea Dworkin.