A Guest Post From Jack Seney

Mr Seney reviews a recent biography of Andrea Dworkin, the radical Left-wing feminist and revolutionary. There are a few facts about her life that surprised me.

By Jack Seney

Martin Duberman's book Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary, from 2020 is a biography of the radical feminist known for her corpulent frame, hillbilly overalls and straggly hair. What was I doing reading it? Dworkin was an interesting person despite my disagreeing with her on some matters. What more reason is needed?

Born a shy Jewish Jersey girl with strict parents, Dworkin's radicalization started as it often does - in her college years, in her case in Vermont in the late 1960s. Dworkin then traveled to Greece and lived in the Netherlands, writing poetry and hanging out with left-wing crowds while having affairs with men and women alike. This always surprises those who were sure she was strictly a lesbian, or even asexual due to her weight issues.

Dworkin tried to write her first feminist book while married to an "anarchist" Dutch man. She regularly wrote her parents for survival money despite her radicalism, but was homeless for some periods anyway.

Dworkin's husband became highly abusive, and once again many will be surprised to see her as an entirely beaten and crushed wife who still tried to please her sociopathic spouse.

Dworkin rallied, however, coming back to the U.S. with her pets and settling in New York where she began to be published. Her feminist books and journalism, embrace of protest and angry public speeches soon made her famous on the radical circuit.

My favorite photo of Dworkin is of her in debate with Alan Dershowitz, and giving him the middle finger. Such a response to the insufferable Dershowitz is something that I am surely okay with.

I agree with Dworkin's anti-pornography views, which I believe have been proven correct over the decades with even mainstream researchers now admitting the harmfulness of porn addiction. I agree with her anti-war stance as well. And she was instrumental in helping me to realize just how many women and girls have been abused by men throughout the ages, with the numbers increasing rather than decreasing under liberalism. She also condemned the sleazebag William Clinton and supported his victims at a time when other "radical feminists" refused to.

On other things, especially her pro-abortion position, Dworkin was the opposite of me. And also of feminists like Susan B. Anthony who opposed abortion, being fully aware of the fact that abortion, you know, often kills female babies! And Dworkin's "ground-breaking" ideas on "transgenders" and "multiple possibilities concerning sex" make no more sense to me today than when she first spewed them as radical bromides.

Dworkin ended up marrying a man again, and this time the union was a success. He supported her continuous writing and her spirits in the midst of numerous health problems, and was with her when she died of cardiomyopathy at age 58 in 2005.

This biography is absorbing and well-researched while moving at the exciting pace of a novel. It will give Dworkin disagreers a new and entirely more human view of her even as differences remain, and one can hope for little more than that.