Even so, progressive feminists saw her anti-pornography activism as an irredeemable position. Dworkin’s cross-cultural analysis of misogyny held a battle cry for total revolution. I then purchased an old copy of Woman Hating for a few bucks.
But I began to read bits and pieces of her work online, intrigued by her untouchability and our overlapping South Jersey background – my father graduated Cherry Hill High School West one year after her. At the time of her death in 2005, I had not read her writing. Fat, serious, and railing against objectification, Dworkin represented the polar opposite of the third-wave feminist fusion of desire and capitalism. As queer theory ascended in the academy and Sex and the City transformed TV narratives about female desire, seedier entrepreneurs marketed empowerment in more or less cynical ways, from the Girls Gone Wild franchise, to post-Spice Girls promises of “Girl Power” and pole dancing in gyms. The cultural moment urged us to own our sexuality – maybe even to turn a profit from it. When I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s, Andrea Dworkin’s “anti-sex” writing was anathema to the prevailing discourse of feminism.
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