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Andrea Dworkin and the Social Construction of Gender: A Retrospective Author(s): Judith Grant Source: Signs, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Summer 2006), pp. 967-993 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/500603 Accessed: 29-05-2017 02:13 UTC

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J u d i t h G r a n t

Andrea Dworkin and the Social Construction of Gender: A

Retrospective

D econstructions of “Woman,” a second second Bush presidency, and the massive destruction of civil liberties that is the post-9/11 world are some of the things that make it nearly impossible to believe that just

over thirty years ago feminists rallied for abortion on demand and wrote and spoke without irony about a coming feminist revolution. In that early moment, the terms women’s liberation and patriarchy were used as if they were unproblematic. In fact, they were part of a radical lexicon of revo- lutionary terms bent on renaming, reclaiming, and transforming the world. Manifestos with names like “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (Koedt 1973) or “The Bitch Manifesto” (Joreen 1973) were not written for tenure committees or as parts of dissertations. Rather, they had the passionate rhetorical flourishes characteristic of words intended to incite. As theoretically and politically naive as they may now sound, they spoke with unmediated authenticity from a place of women’s pain and anger that is sometimes made invisible by the jargon and glitz of much theo- retically richer and more sophisticated academic prose.

Andrea Dworkin was never accused of being theoretically sophisticated. She was a magnificent anachronism. Though not well known in the early years of radical feminism, Dworkin became a major figure in feminist theory, and she wrote in the spirit of radical feminism until her death on April 9, 2005. She was a freelance writer, not an academic. She did not engage in academic debates but was the subject of more than a few. Some dismissed her as a victim feminist, an unreconstructed radical feminist whose rhetoric was an embarrassment to a movement now established in universities, with members who wrote for prestigious journals and were courted to publish with top university presses. Often journalists wrote about her weight or her ubiquitous overalls when they could not figure out how to write about what she was saying. Andrea Dworkin made people angry.

In fact, Dworkin made me angry. In the 1980s, during the sexuality debates, I aligned on the side of those who called themselves prosex. It was hard to hear and understand what Dworkin had to say in the din of all the

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shouting back and forth about whether one was prosex, antisex, or pro- censorship.1 The fact is, I have been reading and thinking about Dworkin’s work ever since I discovered her, as so many others did, in the early 1980s during her crusade with Catharine MacKinnon against pornography. Over the years, I have found that I simply could not get Dworkin’s work out of my head. Her idea that pornography and the sexual trade in women is a crucial marker of women’s oppression seems more true to me now than it did then. So does her idea that violence and hierarchy are sexualized. How could I think otherwise when I saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib and heard about the sexualized torture of prisoners there, a sexual torture that used the always already eroticized bodies of female soldiers as weapons? Dworkin wrote that violence was sexualized and that all sexuality was based on vi- olence. This second part is the more troubling part for many feminists. How can it be that sexual pleasure, whatever its form, is always about male domination and violence? Dworkin devoted her life to answering this ques- tion. Feminists had addressed this before, but never by placing the sex act itself at the center of their analyses. None had insisted, as Dworkin did, that sexual lust as we now know it is inalterably determined in every one of its manifestations by male domination—that under conditions of patri- archy, sex, gender, and sexuality are always linked with violence and dom- ination. I do not write now as a true believer or a fan but as someone who, in the end, respects Dworkin as one of the most important voices of the second wave. Dworkin deserves a second look.

Many feminist theorists have dismissed Dworkin. Since the passion of her work is well known, I will concentrate here on what I understand to be the underlying theoretical assumptions in her corpus. Often read as the quintessential essentialist, Dworkin can, I will argue, be read as a social constructivist. Her work begins from sexuality and gender rather than from woman. In that sense, it is more phenomenology than epistemology. Dworkin was interested in the structure of consciousness and began from an analysis of women’s reality in this structure rather than from an epis- temological foundationalism based on women’s experiences. This helps to explain why Dworkin did not believe that all female points of view are equally valid. The structure she describes is a binary one where the most hegemonic forms of masculinity and femininity figure as two socially con- structed poles against which all human beings are judged and into which we are all socially constructed as male and female. Her argument is that,

1 The term antisex has been used as a derogatory characterization of Dworkin and Dworkin- like feminists. It has its origins in the 1980s in what have been dubbed the sexuality debates. See Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson 1983; Assiter and Carol 1993; Segal and McIntosh 1993.

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while some are captured by this patriarchal structure of consciousness, others are resistant to it. Some, feminists and nonfeminists alike, remain colonized by patriarchy, supporting and reproducing its main prop, pa- triarchal sexuality.

Sadomasochism as framework

For Dworkin, all oppressions are fundamentally linked in that they exist within the confines of a binary sex-gender-sexuality system in which all humans are divided into male and female and then hierarchicalized. The hierarchy is based on a principle of domination, and that domination is made to be romantic and sexy. Men and women are acculturated into the structure and reproduce it through their daily life practices, including, crucially, sexual intercourse. Dworkin’s claim is that gender as sexualized domination can be seen most keenly in sexual intercourse because of its dependence on the male-female dyad.

Often overlooked is the fact that Dworkin called for the creation of a truly human being who moves beyond gender completely. She writes that true androgyny is based on multisexual models that go well beyond bi- sexuality as we now know it. They suggest scenarios for building com- munity and “for realizing the fullest expression of human sexual possibility and creativity” (1974, 153). The two strictly separated, hierarchicalized, sexualized genders are not the truth of gender. Humans could be multiple and shifting but are harshly disciplined into the binary structure of pa- triarchy. Dworkin’s analysis is reminiscent of that of poststructuralists and deconstructionists. However, she is crucially different in that, for her, the way out does not lie in the free play of desire but in political resistance grounded in the creation of subjects with feminist consciousness of the relationship between sex and violence.

John Stoltenberg, Dworkin’s partner and an underrated feminist writer in his own right, has claimed similarly that “if you look at all the variables in nature that are said to determine human ‘sex’ you can’t possibly find one that will unequivocally split the species into two. . . . Either human ‘male’ and human ‘female’ actually exist in nature as fixed and discrete entities and you can credibly base an entire social and political system on those absolute nature categories, or else the variety of human sexedness is infinite” (1990, 28). He goes on to quote Dworkin to the effect that “man” and “woman” are themselves fictions: “The discovery is, of course, that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductivist, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female

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both” (Dworkin 1974, 174). Dworkin concludes, “We are, clearly, a multi- sexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete” (1974, 183). For Dworkin, the move away from fixed dualistic gender will not be reform but revolution in which the patriarchal man and woman will both be abol- ished. It is the gender structure, an ideological construct, not actual human beings, that is fixed and binary. Dworkin contends that “the real core of the feminist vision, its revolutionary kernel if you will, has to do with the abolition of all sex roles—that is, an absolute transformation of human sexuality and the institutions derived from it. In this work, no part of the male sexual model can possibly apply. Equality within the framework of the male sexual model, however that model is reformed or modified, can only perpetuate the model itself and the injustice and bondage which are its intrinsic consequences” (1976d, 12–13).

Cindy Jenefsky writes correctly that Dworkin’s “notion of multisex- uality promote[s] models of human behavior based upon sexual fluidity rather than polarization into fixed identities. . . . Anticipating by almost twenty years the claims of transgenderism, she argues that polar biological delineations drawn between so-called males and females are as fictive and arbitrary as the assignation of gender roles” (1998, 40).

Dworkin names the relationship of male-over-female sadomasochistic. In the current gender arrangement, sexual pleasure for men and women, gay and straight, is dependent on domination and is structurally repro- duced through fucking. In this violent and sexualized structure, men, masculinity, and the male systematically occupy the position of the sadist, while women, femininity, and the female are in the structural position of the masochist. She writes, “Our sexual definition is one of ‘masochistic passivity’: ‘masochistic’ because even men recognize their systemic sadism against us; ‘passivity’ not because we are naturally passive, but because our chains are very heavy and as a result we cannot move” (1976b, 47).

Dworkin argues that the patriarchal system is rife with sadomasochistic institutions and “social scenarios of dominance and submission . . . all based on the male-over-female model” (1976c, 72). This wretched system is kept in place, she contends, by male terrorism, female fear, and collusion. Fear is the primary sustaining element of “female masochism” (1976f, 60), whereas it is “sexual sadism” that “actualizes male identity” (1976e, 102). She writes that though femininity (e.g., passivity, nurturance, co- quettishness) is kept alive through fear, this does not excuse women’s acceptance of their own subordination. Feminist consciousness allows one to change one’s interpretation of the world.

Like many early second-wave feminists (Shulamith Firestone and Ti-

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Grace Atkinson come to mind), Dworkin makes no attempt to disguise her dislike of the archetypical forms of femininity that she characterizes as ideo- logical practice. She writes bluntly that “femininity is roughly synonymous with stupidity” (1976e, 101). This negative view of femininity and her willingness to criticize female behavior separates Dworkin’s work from other feminist readings of femininity, such as Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice (1982), that see it as having such positive qualities as nurturing, con- cern for relationships, and a positive connection to nature.

Dworkin is close to early second-wave radical feminism in problematizing femininity as a survival response to male rule and oppression. In Right- Wing Women, she writes, “There are two models that essentially describe how women are socially controlled and sexually used: the brothel model and the farming model” (1978, 174). It is only romantic love and religion that keep the average woman from realizing the ideological nature of these allegedly natural and universal female roles (sexual or maternal servant). Thus, Dworkin argues, the promotherhood stance of women on the ideo- logical right is merely a rational response to the fact that motherhood is one of the few things valued in patriarchy. In contrast, Dworkin argues that motherhood is fundamentally oppressive and linked to female sexual slavery.

For Dworkin, the end result of the valorization of the female as mother or idealized love or sex object is the obliteration of woman as human agent: “Women are kept from [this] moral agency not by biology, but by a male social system that puts women above or below simple human choice. . . . The spiritual superiority of women in this model of ludicrous homage isolates women from the human acts that create meaning” (1978, 207). Finally, this valorization is fundamentally linked to female maso- chism. It is worth quoting Dworkin at length on this point:

This dynamic of fear as I have described it, is the source of what men so glibly, and happily, call “female masochism.” And, of course, when one’s identity is defined as a lack of identity; when one’s survival is contingent on learning to destroy or restrain every impulse toward self-definition; when one is consistently and exclusively rewarded for hurting oneself by conforming to demeaning or degrading rules of behavior; when one is consistently and inevitably punished for ac- complishing, or succeeding, or asserting; when one is battered and rammed, physically and/or emotionally, for any act or thought of rebellion, and then applauded and approved of for giving in, recanting, apologizing; then masochism does indeed become the cornerstone of one’s personality. And, as you might already know, it is very hard for masochists to find the pride, the strength, the inner freedom, the

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courage to organize against their oppressors. The truth is that this masochism, which does become the core of the female personality, is the 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. (1976f, 60–61)2

So, for Dworkin, romantic love and sexuality are key players in the socialization of humans into a hierarchicalized dualism. One of Dworkin’s most powerful essays on this point is her analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuth- ering Heights in the collection Letters from a War Zone (Dworkin 1988c). In it, Dworkin argues that almost more than any other in the modern period, Brontë’s novel provides an accurate description of the social origins of sadomasochism. The novel shows how “men learn hate as an ethic,” how “sadism is created in men through physical and psychological abuse and humiliation by other men,” and how “femininity [is] a betrayal of honor and human wholeness” (69). Dworkin applauds Brontë for then going on to provide a model for the way men and women should relate to one another in love relationships, namely, as human beings. Dworkin understands the goal of being human to be an androgynous being with sex differences that, if they exist in a meaningful way at all, are not based on hierarchy. She writes, “The love story between Catherine Earnshaw and the outcast child, Heathcliff, has one point: they are the same, they have one soul, one nature. Each knows the other because each is the other. . . . Together, they are human, a human whole, the self twice over; apart, each is insanely, horribly alone, a self disfigured from separation, muti- lated” (1988c, 69). She argues that their maleness and femaleness (i.e., their gendered selves) become important to them only when they are separated and when they develop into sexual beings. In this adult sepa- ration, Heathcliff becomes a sadist (i.e., a man), and Catherine becomes a “shadow of herself” (i.e., a masochistic, feminine-ized woman). The alternative ideal Dworkin presents is one based on love and humanism, based on “sameness not difference” (1988c, 70).

The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff also operates on the axis of their difference(s) as a privileged white woman and an im- poverished, orphaned gypsy, that is, on their differences vis-à-vis class and race. Brontë describes Heathcliff as a dark gypsy foundling. In short, he

2 Dworkin’s link to early radical feminism is most clearly evident in her 1974 book, Woman Hating, which has the tone and ferocity of the early radical feminist manifestos. The book begins, “This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. . . . It is not . . . academic horseshit” (1974, 17). For examples of early radical feminist manifestos of the second wave, see Koedt, Levine, and Rapone 1973.

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is a racially coded character: “Being dirty, dark, a gypsy, black-haired, having a black humor, all are synonyms for a virtually racial exclusion, a lower status based on skin and color: this racism is the reason for Heathcliff’s exile from the civilized family” (Dworkin 1988c, 71). Evi- dence for this is found in the many references in Brontë’s book contrasting Heathcliff’s darkness and Catherine’s whiteness. It is important to note that not only is Cathy implicated for acquiescing to Heathcliff’s demise but that his demise is also her demise: “In betraying Heathcliff, she betrays herself, her own nature, her integrity; this betrayal is precisely congruent with becoming feminine, each tiny step toward white, fair, rich, a step away from self and honor. . . . The gowns, the gloves, the whitened, useless, unused skin, are emblems of her contempt for honor, self-esteem” (1988c, 73). Dworkin finishes, “Cathy’s femininity is a slow, lazy, spoiled abandonment of self” (73). In surrendering to femininity, Cathy surren- ders her humanness. In becoming a woman befitting the requirements of the gender structure, Cathy must abandon the higher love she once felt for Heathcliff, a love that transcended race, class, and gender.

We might expect Dworkin to be very hard on the sadistic and sexual Heathcliff. But what is interesting to me is her analysis of the Earnshaw women. Dworkin points to the moral culpability of the women in the Earnshaw household insofar as they repeatedly watch—even preside over—the abuse of others more vulnerable than themselves and remain silent. While it is the men of the novel who actually engage in various forms of abuse directed toward children and animals, Dworkin clearly regards the female silence as complicitous (1988c, 75). Though sympa- thetic to the pain and fear of the women at the hands of male authority, she views their collaboration with contempt. It is for her a sign of the “basic immorality of feminine love . . . no conscience to stop the brutality against others just so one is exempt from it—that underlines the meaning of femininity: there is no integrity, no wholeness, no honor” (1988c, 82–83). Rather than a knee-jerk man hater, Dworkin emerges here as a critic of gender itself and shows how the gender structure connects male to female in a relation of eroticized dominance and subordination.

Dworkin does not mean to say that women in love are immoral but that feminine love is immoral (as is masculine). The problem is not love per se but the kind of love practiced from the subject position of the gendered sadomasochistic structure of patriarchy, which gives rise to the “moral bankruptcy familiar to women in love” (1988c, 83).3 She continues

3 Dworkin argues that the pitfalls of feminine love are most starkly portrayed by Brontë

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on to say that this socially constructed patriarchal model of feminine love automatically places one in the position of the masochistic coward. Since the ideological point of view structured by gender is a subject position, not a particular body type, it can be rejected by women. It can also be occupied by men. This will become important in understanding Dworkin’s views on pornography, discussed below.

The real, profound tragedy of the abuse of women and children (and, she argues, of animals) is that the sadism exercised in families under the silent gaze of feminine-ized women is one of the major ways in which patriarchy reproduces itself. For Dworkin, the brilliance of Brontë’s novel is that it shows how Heathcliff’s subjecthood is constructed in the context of abuse he undergoes as a child at the hands of men, under the watchful gaze of women. Dworkin argues that Heathcliff is uniquely situated and self-conscious about the roots of his own sadism by virtue of his status as other, that is, as a person of color in a privileged white household. However, this does not prevent him from growing up to be sadistic and abusive himself. In youth, Heathcliff and Cathy have a relationship that is close to Dworkin’s ideal human androgynous relationship. But this is quickly destroyed by the rigors of their socialization into sexual and thus gendered beings. The initial androgynous relationship is one of human oneness where differences based on class, race, ethnicity, and gender are simply not at issue. Importantly, the eradication of this idyllic relation is eventually effected not only through Heathcliff ’s transformation into a sadistic adult man but also through Cathy’s transformation into a feminine-ized adult woman with class and race privileges. Thus Dworkin reads Brontë’s book as illustrating her own theories about sadomaso- chism; the social construction of the gender structure; the sadomaso- chistic aspects of masculinity, femininity, gender, love, and lust; and the ideal of pure, genderless human equality based on a higher love.

This analysis is repeated in many places in Dworkin’s work. For ex- ample, in her short essay “Mourning Tennessee Williams” (1988a) she writes approvingly that Williams never imagined that “men and women had different natures, only different lives” (66). What was extraordinary about him, she continues, was “the remarkable, unique way he used gen- der—mythically, hauntingly—to get to the root of what is simply and absolutely human: fear of love that takes up time while death comes closer” (67). Elsewhere she lauds Williams for portraying women as beings who understand that sex should be about “tenderness and sensitivity” (1987,

in the character of Isabella, Heathcliff’s wife, who first sentimentalizes her husband’s dark nature and then is repeatedly and cruelly abused by him.

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44). As her remarks about Brontë and Williams indicate, Dworkin is equally, if differently, critical of both masculine and feminine. Heathcliff represents the sexual sadism of men and the ways men use romantic love and sex to further female domination. However, Dworkin’s analysis of gender in Wuthering Heights also explicates the moral failings of women who support sadism in men. She finds Cathy culpable, even stupid, for capitulating to the norms of feminine ideology, writing that Cathy is a collaborator in the furtherance of male domination.

This critical view of femininity is complicated, however, by views such as the one Dworkin took on a case that achieved wide press coverage in the United States in the late 1980s, the case of Hedda Nussbaum and Joel Steinberg. In this essay, “Living in Terror, Pain” (1997), Dworkin discusses the case of the battered, crack-addicted Nussbaum, a New York City woman who stood by and watched while her attorney husband, Steinberg, beat their adopted daughter to death. It is challenging to ac- count for the difference in her analysis of Cathy, on the one hand, and her public defense of Nussbaum, on the other. Dworkin claims that Nuss- baum should not be held accountable for the murder of her daughter on the grounds that as a battered woman Nussbaum was living in fear and could not be considered rational. She was not innocent, Dworkin hedges, but neither was she guilty. In the case of Catherine Earnshaw, Dworkin argues that women who capitulate to fear and unquestioningly accept their feminine roles are culpable in the reproduction of patriarchy. But in the essay on Nussbaum, she takes the rather different view that women are to be excused from moral and legal culpability when they are abused by men. Since Dworkin believes that women are nearly always in a state of coercion, abuse, and fear simply by virtue of their subject positions in patriarchy, it is difficult to imagine how they might ever give meaningful consent or be held accountable for anything. At some point, it would appear, the masochist loses agency. This can be illuminated by under- standing Dworkin’s analysis of the key role of sexual intercourse itself in the maintenance of the patriarchal system.

Intercourse as power and the (im)possibility of choice

The blurb on the paperback edition of Dworkin’s 1987 book Intercourse touts it as “the most shocking book any feminist has yet written.” This is perhaps overstated since Intercourse owes so much to early radical feminist consciousness about sexuality and romance. At the time of its publication, U.S. feminists were engaged in the revalorization of femininity best ex- emplified by what is now sometimes referred to as care theory. At the same

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time, discussions of sexuality in feminist theory were morphing into queer theory. Dworkin represents a third prong of the discourse wherein sexuality was being discussed in the context of debates about pornography, debates in which Dworkin was, of course, a major player. Because she actively as- sociated herself with the highly controversial antiporn side of the sexuality debates, her analysis of sexual intercourse as a world historical instrument of female domination has escaped serious consideration.

The attention Dworkin pays to sexuality is not as far away from insights in queer theory as one might suppose, as both center on sexuality. It will be protested at once that Dworkin’s puritanical views about sexuality are surely very different from, say, Gayle Rubin’s sexual libertarianism. Still, Dworkin was among the first to argue against what was later termed het- eronormativity, the idea that heterosexuality is the ideological norm against which all other sexualities appear as deviant. Dworkin does not follow queer theory in arguing that heteronormativity can be fought by engaging in alternative sexual practices. Rather, she contends that all sexual practices are imbued with patriarchal values and meaning such that their use as resistant practices is impossible. Since the patriarchal structure contaminates all sex- ualities with the male-female sadomasochistic domination scheme, the ques- tion becomes, what would sexuality feel like if there were no gender hi- erarchy? Dworkin argues that lust as we now know it is not possible absent a power imbalance. If we knew that sex would lose its sexiness, would we still want to abolish patriarchy and other systems of domination?

Dworkin further contends that the act of intercourse as we now know it is linked to death through power and domination. Sex is able to effec- tively masquerade as life affirming because it is linked to birth and mother- hood, economies of power that Dworkin says also redound to the det- riment of women. By the same token, desire and pleasure in sex mask their dependence on power, domination, and possession. In fact, Dworkin concludes, sex is an expression not of men’s love for women but of “the pure sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” (1987, 138). Contrary to the views of some feminists, loving one’s sexuality is, therefore, far from liberating. It is “diversion into complicity and igno- rance” (1987, 125).

While Intercourse explores many of the same themes that appear in Dworkin’s previous nonfiction, going all the way back to her 1974 book, Woman Hating, Intercourse is arguably her most clear and powerful state- ment on the topic. It is here that Dworkin makes the case that sexual intercourse, male domination, and pornographic representation are three moments of the same event. Intercourse is antisex in the sense that Dworkin

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maintains that sexual intercourse in patriarchy cannot be anything other than a force used to dominate women.

Dworkin turns to the words of male writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Wil- liams, James Baldwin, and the authors of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles to paraphrase Sigmund Freud’s question, asking, “What do men want?” By their own admission, Dworkin claims, what men want is unfettered access to sex, most often with women. Dworkin uses texts by men to show that they understand on some level that intercourse is inherently violent and that, in the context of male domination, such violence is inherently sexual. More difficult is Dworkin’s claim that while men are driven to have sex and to dominate, sex with women is also in some sense revolting to them. This follows, she claims, because, since lust is funda- mentally about domination and possession, it is by extension a way to annihilate women both metaphorically and literally. In short, not only does Dworkin fail to see the liberatory possibilities in desire; she sees a straight line of progression from desire of the other to objectification of the other and finally to annihilation of the other. For Dworkin, sexual desire is the desire to conquer, to possess, and finally to kill. Therefore, she concludes, woman-as-feminized-subject is a being who experiences pleasure in the moment of her own annihilation, since her participation in patriarchal sexuality is simultaneously the abdication of her authentic human agency. Until she reclaims this, she cannot give meaningful consent to anything. And if she allows the abuse to continue long enough, her metaphysical death as a subject becomes a permanent condition, and the possibility of future subjecthood, freedom, and consent is dubious.

As long as a woman chooses from the structural point of view of fem- inized woman, Dworkin argues, her choices will be ideologically tainted by patriarchy and in reality will not be choices but only charades that reinforce and reproduce her own submissiveness. Only by making the ultimate choice to be human can she meaningfully choose anything at all. Of course, it is not possible to merely choose human agency in a system where one is systematically objectified. One can, however, choose to choose to be human. That is, by being a feminist (in Dworkin’s terms), one rejects the principles and validity of femininity and patriarchy, thus damaging the constitutive power of patriarchy. It is from this perspective that women can begin to reclaim their humanhood, create a new woman, and join in the creation of the future possibility of an androgynous human being.

Like women, men who live under patriarchy and do not attempt to raise their consciousnesses lack human being (hence the title of Stolten- berg’s Refusing to Be a Man [1990]). The problem for men is a different

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one, however. It is not that they lack power and agency but that they have too much. What it means to be a man is precisely that one can make choices, enforce one’s preferences, and get others to submit to those choices. Still, Dworkin argues, this version of being human is also mu- tilated. While man acts, he does not act from the moral point of view of universal justice and equality. Rather, he acts from the point of view of one who wishes to retain his own power and agency; that is, he acts from the subject position of man. Thus, men who voluntarily remain identified with the patriarchal version of maleness (and most men will, because it is a position of power and influence) can be said to be making choices, though not completely free choices. Only men who renounce their priv- ileges as men can be said to be human in the way Dworkin means when she talks about androgyny, since androgyny is, for her, a state of being beyond the bounds of gender.

Feminists are only one example of female resistance to patriarchy. For Dworkin, complete rejection of and nonparticipation in the institution of sexual intercourse are key components of this resistance. These have been effected by nonfeminist women as well. For instance, Dworkin writes compellingly about several saints, including St. Catherine, the patron saint of unmarried girls, and St. Margaret, the patron saint of women in child- birth. But it is her retelling of the story of Joan of Arc that is most instructive. St. Joan, the young warrior and martyr, was a literate peasant, a cross-dresser, and a virgin who by the age of nineteen had been tried and convicted of witchcraft. Dworkin reads her story against the grain and sees it not as a story of Christian martyrdom but as a parable of female resistance. In Dworkin’s words, “she refused to be fucked” (1987, 85). Refusing to be married at sixteen, she won a breach of contract case against the man to whom she was promised. After having been accused of a myriad of crimes against both church and state, Joan was sentenced to life in prison “in women’s clothes” (1987, 91). Though warned that it would cost her her life, Joan defiantly dressed in men’s clothes until some three to four days later, when she was burned at the stake (1987, 92). “Each of these women fought off a rapist who used the apparatus of the state— prison and torture—to destroy her as if she were an enemy nation,” Dwor- kin writes. “Each refused the male appropriation of her body for sex, the right to which is a basic premise of male domination” (1987, 94). Dworkin labels this “rebel virginity” (1987, 94). By retelling the story of St. Joan in this way, Dworkin lays claim to her as an antipatriarchal heroine, just as Bertolt Brecht once tried to claim the saint for socialism.

Intercourse presents arguments about the meaning of intercourse in

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patriarchy. It is a male-defined meaning that Dworkin thinks is inescapable and daunting. She writes,

In a world of socially sanctioned sexual possession, the meaning of possession escalates to include being passed from man to man, or being dumped then used again; and each time a woman is possessed inside this social dynamic, she is pushed into a deeper level of coma, the aggregate effect of possession being to turn her into a thing of sex . . . she becomes social pornography; an impersonally possessed female used as female with no remnant of a human life animating or informing the use of her in sex. She is used by men impersonally with no reference to her as human and no comprehension of her as an individual. As social pornography, she is a living corpse, existing for sexual use. (1987, 76)

Intercourse is also the means by which women become, literally and fig- uratively, occupied people, as men literally occupy women’s bodies during the sex act. Because of this material reality, women will never have real sexual self-determination as long as men have anything to say about when, how, or under what circumstances sexual intercourse occurs. The reality of male and female bodies means that rape is a male crime. For Dworkin, this accident of biology puts intercourse and rape forever on a continuum of violence and warlike occupation. It is a “measure of women’s oppression that we do not take intercourse—entry, penetration, occupation—and ask or say what it means; to us as a dominated group or to us as a potentially free and self-determining people” (1987, 133). As an instrument of social control, intercourse can be reformed, but these reforms do not answer the question of whether intercourse itself can ever express an authentic female sexuality.4 Dworkin wonders,

Can intercourse exist without objectification? Would intercourse be a different phenomenon if it could, if it did? Would it be shorter or longer, happier or sadder; more complex, richer, denser, with a ba- roque beauty or simpler with an austere beauty; or bang bang bang? Would intercourse without objectification, if it could exist, be com- patible with women’s equality—even an expression of it—or would it still be stubbornly antagonistic to it? Would intercourse cause orgasm in women if women were not objects for men before and during intercourse? Can intercourse exist without objectification and can ob-

4 These reforms might include deference to female sexual needs, less romanticizing of rape, less verbal abuse, economic equality, good role models, etc. (Dworkin 1987, 126–27).

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jectification exist without female complicity in maintaining it as a perceived reality and a material reality too: can objectification exist without the woman herself turning herself into an object—becoming through effort and art a thing, less than human, so that he can be more than human, hard, sovereign, king? Can intercourse exist with- out the woman herself turning into a thing, which she must do because men cannot fuck equals and men must fuck: because one price of dominance is that one is impotent in the face of equality? (1987, 140)

At the time of the book’s publication, commentators ridiculed her sug- gestion that only something like what sexologist Shere Hite suggested might be acceptable: heterosexuality with no thrusting, where couples simply lie together in pleasure with “vagina-covering-penis” where the only penile stimulation is provided by the female orgasm (Dworkin 1987, 128–29). While this is mere caricature, it is nonetheless clear that Dworkin believes that intercourse would change dramatically were it not an insti- tution of male domination. What is more problematic for most feminists is the question of whether, absent its function as a system of domination, sexual intercourse would exist at all. Certainly, Dworkin is at the very least suggesting that we simply do not know what sex would look or feel like if it did. Her claim is that whenever there is lust, there is power and therefore the deployment of the male-female hierarchy, as these are linked in the patriarchal structure.

There is a tentative vision of another possible kind of sexuality in Dworkin’s book Intercourse. It would be one that occurs on a human level outside the confines of sadomasochistic gender arrangements. It would be more radical than the reforms (such as homosexuality) that she derides, and one that would take into consideration the whole sit- uation of women and the integral role that sexuality plays in maintaining it. Apropos of this, one can contrast Dworkin’s antisex view to her brief discussion of postpatriarchal sexuality in Woman Hating (1974). In that book, she muses about an expansive human sexuality and envisions some very un-Dworkinesque practices. Instead of the basically sadomasochistic institution of heterosexuality, women would be encouraged to have the full range of erotic impulses. Women and men could have sex, but the sex would not be genitally centered, she suggests, and the types of possible erotic practices would increase dramatically. For instance, ev- eryone who wanted one would be guaranteed a transsexual operation. Likewise, the taboo against cross-dressing would be obliterated. How- ever, the need for both would soon disappear as both are predicated on fixed gender identities. She writes further and more brazenly that the

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incest taboo would also disappear as it assumes the nuclear family and the repression of children’s sexual feelings. Bestiality too would be more common, but it would not be based on the abusive, sadomasochistic model that currently defines human-animal relations. Instead, animals and humans would be part of the same community. Reproductive tech- nologies of the type imagined by Firestone in her feminist classic The Dialectic of Sex (1970) would relieve women of some of the burdens of childbirth, but women themselves would control the technology (Dwor- kin 1974, 183–92). Remarkably, when read in the context of her entire corpus, far from antisex, Dworkin sounds like a sexual libertine.

Conceptualizing Dworkin as an antisex feminist glosses over some im- portant points in an otherwise notoriously indelicate series of polemics against sexuality. One of these is the idea that sexuality is always experi- enced as a gendered activity and that it is always about power. Even gay and lesbian relations are, for her, entirely structured by the patriarchal heterosexual ethic. Unlike many feminists, Dworkin does not see lesbi- anism as a way out of the problems created by sadomasochistic hetero- sexuality. Lesbianism is merely a “transgression of rules, an affront” (1978, 224) to the dominant system of heterosexuality and cannot change the structure of women’s exploitation. For Dworkin, gay and straight men alike are privileged by phallocentric identity and subject location. Indeed, she argues, prohibitions against male homosexuality are, in effect, pro- tections of male power, as they maintain heterosexuality by keeping men sexually inviolate and women sexually vulnerable.

According to Dworkin, sadomasochism as a sexual practice is not an ironic or playful way to resist power, as some have argued. It is not a perversion of “normal” heterosexuality but a dramatization of it. Sado- masochism as a sexual practice makes the dramatic power-based subtext of all sexuality explicit. Likewise, rape as forced sex is, for Dworkin, vir- tually indistinguishable from intercourse. Both are coerced. She writes that “the uses of women in intercourse are permeated by the reality of male power everywhere else. We need their money; intercourse is fre- quently how we get it. We need their approval to be able to survive inside our own skins; intercourse is frequently how we get it. They force us to be compliant, turn us into parasites, and then hate us for not letting go. Intercourse is frequently how we hold on: fuck me. How to separate the act of intercourse from the social reality of male power is not clear” (1987, 127). Importantly, she does not argue that intercourse is rape, as has sometimes been said. Rather, intercourse and rape are connected for her in that they are both coerced sex.

Likewise, prostitution is indistinguishable from gang rape and marriage.

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Prostitution is a kind of rape in that it is based in force; women only sell their sexual services because patriarchy sets up the demand and sex be- comes the most valuable thing many women have to sell. By extension, prostitution, as Dworkin defines it, is gang rape since a variety of men “have” the prostitute repeatedly and by force. Again, Dworkin seems to argue that it is not possible for women to give meaningful consent to any sexual activity under conditions of patriarchy insofar as all forms of desire are contained by the structure of patriarchy, which forms the very meaning of women as sexually subordinate. Sexuality is prior to gender in that a dualistic, hierarchical gender structure is necessary for it to be sexy. As we now understand and define it, the erotic is inherently about the power of men over women.

In participating in sexual relations, one acts out an ideological practice that only gendered beings can enact. This is true whether one is hetero- sexual, transsexual, into sadomasochism, and so on. Sexuality is always a gendered practice because gender is an intrinsic part of the erotic under patriarchy. One is always either resisting or playing out the rules of the subject position of man or woman in patriarchy, and it is in sexual inter- course that lust and gender are most connected, because intercourse is the nexus of power, gender, and lust.

Sex is often and correctly written about as a form of possession, Dwor- kin contends: “In other words, men possess women when men fuck women because both experience the man being male. This is the stunning logic of male supremacy. In this view, which is the predominant one, maleness is aggressive and violent; and so fucking, in which both the man and the woman experience maleness, essentially demands the disappearance of the woman as an individual; thus in being fucked, she is possessed: ceases to exist as a discrete individual: is taken over” (1987, 64). Again, Dworkin makes the point that sexuality “works,” that is, is erotic, because it is gendered. A woman’s capacity to “feel sexual pleasure is developed within the narrow confines of male sexual dominance. . . . Women feel the fuck—when it works, when it overwhelms—as possession; and feel possession as deeply erotic; and value annihilation of the self in sex as proof of the man’s desire or love, its awesome intensity” (1987, 67). For Dworkin, the logic of sex is not eros but Thanatos. Since patriarchal sex is fundamentally linked to violence and domination, its logic is death. Death comes either in the form of the man discarding the body of the woman by using it up psychologically or by his actually murdering her. These are on a continuum. Dworkin thus views intercourse not as a private act but as a profoundly political one with great social significance since it is always the central ideological practice in the reproduction of patriarchy.

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The logical extension of lust and romantic love into death and the romanticization of loss so evident in popular culture provide opportu- nities to return to the contradiction I pose earlier in this essay between Dworkin’s analysis of Wuthering Heights and her analysis of the moral culpability of an American battered woman, Nussbaum. For Dworkin, the case of Nussbaum provides an example of how romantic love and sex lead to death and sheds light on Dworkin’s understanding of female agency and subjectivity. As I note above, Dworkin writes provocatively that Nussbaum was neither guilty nor innocent. Women are not guilty when their choices are constrained by patriarchy because female agency appears to be limited to acts of resistance. Women have agency and bear guilt insofar as they are able to resist patriarchy by embracing a posited human, androgynous identity rather than a gendered one. Only from this new human vantage point does Dworkin acknowledge the possibility of meaningful choice and consent. It is this that allows Dworkin to simultaneously apologize for Nussbaum and criticize Cathy in Wuthering Heights for embracing her own femininity and race and class privileges. Cathy’s is a femininity that embraces lust and romance. In a life with Heathcliff, it is possible that Cathy might have become more like Nuss- baum, broken by battery and past all hope of human agency. In fact, Cathy does die in the novel, annihilated by her love affair with Heathcliff. Dworkin’s argument then is that at some point female subordination erases human agency. Being battered, or rather occupying the episte- mological position of one who is battered, locates one in a space where consent is not possible. The epistemological question of how one can move from this space to feminist consciousness is murky. Cathy’s is essentially the subject position of one who actively participates in her feminine role and thus colludes in male sadism against others. Nussbaum also colluded in male sadism (i.e., in her husband’s murder of their child). But Nussbaum is treated as different by Dworkin, as if her moral agency was constrained, perhaps even removed, by extreme physical abuse. While the abuse initially stemmed from Nussbaum’s commitment to feminine romantic love and sexuality, that very commitment even- tually erased the possibility to resist. Nussbaum could no more stand up for her daughter than she could for herself.

Sex, death, and pornography

Dworkin’s arguments about heterosexuality and the sadomasochistic nature of male-female relations lead her to ever more ominous con- clusions about the dangers of men. Indeed, bloodletting, a favorite

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theme of Dworkin’s, is reflected in the title of her collection of essays Our Blood (1976a). An interesting way to trace the link she makes between sexuality and violence, heterosexuality and bloodletting, is to look once again at the book Intercourse (1987). Dworkin is interested in how changes in what it means to be a virgin point to attendant changes in the meaning of intercourse itself. Virginity, she claims, no longer really refers to the state of not having had intercourse. Rather, it now refers to the state of not having had one’s blood spilled, because intercourse has come to be fundamentally associated with violence and bloodletting. Moreover, intercourse no longer merely refers to the act of penis thrusting inside vagina. Intercourse, she argues, is now tied to humiliation and can take place in other parts of the female body. The vagina is the privileged site for intercourse only because it on- tologically defines what it means to be a woman under conditions of male domination. This does not mean that other holes cannot and do not stand in for the vagina.

To understand the importance of blood and the “hole” for Dworkin, I turn to her readings of The Story of O and Dracula. The Story of O is a classic in the genre of erotic novels, made all the more interesting because it was written by a woman, Pauline Reage.5 The novel tells the story of Claire, a woman who chooses to become known as “O” and who submits to sadistic sex acts for the man she loves. He eventually turns her over to be used in a house of sadism by Sir Stephen, where she submits to a variety of erotic indignations. The story culminates in her being taken to a party wearing nothing but an owl mask and being led on a leash hooked to a metal hoop that pierces her labia.

According to Dworkin, The Story of O is the archetypical pornographic narrative, mixing as it does sex and death. It is a story of “psychic can- nibalism” (1974, 63) illustrating that men and women are complete op- posites and that the one can survive only by destroying the other. The “O” represents the female genitals where the character is scarred and marked as if with a wedding ring. The narrative annihilates the woman (i.e., as owl, as hole, as merely an empty ontological category) and re- fashions her into a fantasy where the woman wants exactly what she gets:

5 For a fascinating story about Reage, see de St. Jorre 1994. A very old Reage denies that the novel depicts a male fantasy, though she now acknowledges that she wrote the novel as a way to win back a lover who was intended as the book’s only audience. In a strange way, this does bear out Dworkin’s points about women having to engage in masochism for men, in this case, in a fantasy written by a woman for her lover. Dworkin has called Reage a “Stalinist of female equality” (1991, 226).

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absolute powerlessness. Pornography, for Dworkin, is fundamentally char- acterized by this fantasy depicted in the Story of O.

Sexual intercourse, then, is transforming as an institution, becoming more dependent on female subordination and violence, less centered on the vagina and more connected to representation. A major illustration of this change in the nature of sexual intercourse is found in Dworkin’s reading of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. For her, this is a pivotal story in the history of the discourse of intercourse because it shows the trans- formation of the categories intercourse, virginity, and oral sex in terms of the sex-violence matrix. Stoker’s famous vampire story about an undead man who lives by feasting on the blood of the living has been read as a tale of erotic mayhem. When the vampire preys on young women, they are most often virgins, and they are referred to as the vampire’s brides. Dracula centers around two virgins, Lucy and Mina, both of whom fall prey to the vampire. Other major characters, all male, include a doctor and Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur. Dworkin is taken with the saga because it illustrates the way that death stands in for sex while annihilation becomes romance. For her the story shows, further, that violence against women is central to the bonding relationship among men and that voyeurism and oral sex have become central to contemporary male sexuality. Dworkin’s argument that in Dracula vampirism becomes a metaphor for intercourse is probably a suggestion with which few would disagree. However, she is interested in it as a story that goes beyond metaphor and reflects a change in the cultural meaning of intercourse, which is now understood as vio- lence and bloodletting.

Vampirism reflects the “appetite for using and being used . . . the submission of the female to the great hunter; the driving obsessiveness of lust . . . the great craving” (1987, 118). The act also becomes, as Dworkin puts it, a pun on blood and intercourse as the source of life. The story is a narrative where the “great wound, the vagina, moved to the throat,” where the throat is as soaked in blood as the vagina is in menstruation and childbirth. Thus the story is also an allegory about oral sex, or what Dworkin calls “throat rape” (119). Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the story is about male bonding via the spectacle of the eroticization of female pain and death.

Thus, in the story, when Arthur tries to save the life of his fiancée, Lucy, by giving her blood, he remarks idly that he likes to think that this makes them truly married. The other men decide not to tell Arthur that they too have been married to Lucy in this way, having also given her blood. Dworkin concludes that this is a kind of gang rape in the sense that “by this standard, Lucy had been had and had and had: by all the

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men in the story, including Dracula” (1987, 115).6 Not insignificantly, it is Arthur who finally kills Lucy by driving a stake through her heart. When reflecting on the murder of his fiancée, Dworkin notes Arthur’s peculiar remark that “the feeling was not so strong as I had expected” (115). Dworkin concludes that Dracula is a story of gang rape, male bonding, and voyeurism (pornography) and that it culminates in this “snuff” scene, where Arthur actually kills his beloved.7

In sum, Dracula is a story in which we see “the throat as a female genital; sex and death as synonyms; killing as a sex act; dying as sensuality; men watching the slow dying, and the watching as sexual; mutilation of the female body as male heroism and adventure; callous, ruthless, pred- atory lust as the one-note meaning of sexual desire; intercourse itself needing blood, someone’s, somewhere, to count as a sex act in a world excited by sadomasochism, bored by the dull thud thud of the literal fuck” (1987, 119). The new era of intercourse, then, is marked by the ability of other holes in the body to stand in for the vagina, the explicit linking of sex to violence, and the advent of voyeurism as a bona fide component of the sex act for men. This analysis is clearly very much informed by Dworkin’s ideas about sadomasochism as well as by her well-known cri- tique of pornography. Dworkin’s interpretation of Dracula is also notable in that it illustrates how central oral sex is in her overall analysis. In fact, her view is that oral sex has become the primary example of male sexual violence and exploitation.

The emphasis on the transformed role of oral sex in the maintenance of patriarchy explains Dworkin’s interest in the hard-core pornographic film classic Deep Throat and its star Linda Lovelace. In Dworkin’s novel Mercy (1991), the central character describes the film Deep Throat, the plot of which revolves around a woman whose clitoris is in her throat:

Then there’s this guy with the world’s biggest penis and he fucks her throat . . . he fucks her in the throat to cure her, he fucks her hard in the throat but slow so you can see the bottom of her throat . . . you choke, you vomit, you can’t breathe, and if he goes past it with a big penis he stretches muscles that can’t be stretched and he pushes your throat out to where it can’t be pushed out . . . you’d rather have a surgeon drill holes in the sides of your throat than have him push it down, the pain will push you down to hell, near death, to

6 The theme of the conjoining of sex and murder is present even in Dworkin’s earliest work. See, e.g., her Right-Wing Women (1978, 55).

7 Snuff films are pornographic films in which a woman is actually killed on-screen.

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coma, to the screamless scream, an agony, no voice, a ripped muscle, shreds swimming in blood in your throat thin ribbons of muscle soaking up blood. (1991, 301–2)

Seen this way, Dracula emerges as a nineteenth-century version of Deep Throat. Both rely on a narrative wherein blood is linked to sex, the throat becomes a sex organ, men watch for pleasure, and sex is linked to death. For Dworkin, Dracula emerges as one of the first pornographic repre- sentations of orality. In reading Dworkin’s work as a whole we can, per- haps, come to a fuller understanding of the critique of heterosexuality expressed in Intercourse and elsewhere. Dworkin makes the critique in the context of an alternative and far-reaching humanist vision where she imag- ines the possibility of a vast array of egalitarian sexual practices. This context does not change the fact, however, that she believes that the current difference between rape and intercourse is virtually nominal. Both, she contends, are built on sadomasochistic principles of male domination. Intercourse as it now exists is antiwoman and universally devastating to women across class, culture, race, and ethnicity. To feminists and others who hold a contrary viewpoint—for example, that sexuality is a matter of personal choice, that it can be liberating or fun—Dworkin has only con- tempt: “Liberals refuse categorically to inquire into even a possibility that there is a relationship between intercourse per se and the low status of women” (1987, 124).

The connection between intercourse and violence was most famously explored by Dworkin in the work she did against pornography with Ca- tharine MacKinnon. Dworkin and MacKinnon’s novel approach seeks to regulate pornography as a manifestation of violence against women rather than as obscenity and to delink it from obscenity law. Dworkin’s analysis of heterosexuality figures prominently in the Dworkin-MacKinnon col- laboration on pornography. Dworkin writes, “One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that one without the imminent possibility of the other is unthinkable and impossible. One can know everything and still, at bottom, refuse to accept the annihilation of women is the source and meaning of identity for men” (1988b, 21). Dworkin and MacKinnon’s analysis of pornography thus begins from Dworkin’s assumption that the gender hierarchy is related to the hierarchy and domination found in the sex act. It goes further in saying not only that this domination is repre- sented in pornography but that pornography is in and of itself an act of sexual aggression.

Historically, those who have argued against the regulation of pornog-

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raphy fall into three basic camps. The first are pragmatists who simply argue that pornography is too difficult to define and therefore cannot and should not be regulated except insofar as it involves violence or children. A second point of view is neutral about pornography as such but passionate about civil liberties, arguing simply that pornography is protected speech. Finally, there are those who actually advocate pornography as a way to combat the repressiveness of Western capitalist countries whose puritanical heritages inhibit sexual freedom and social experimentation.8 In this lib- ertine view, free access to pornography is linked to the sensibilities of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Dworkin and MacKinnon’s approach not only varies significantly from previous legal approaches but also disrupts the heretofore neat left-right split among those who condone or oppose pornography and free sex. In the first place, Dworkin and MacKinnon rejected outright the claim that pornography has any positive effects on society or individuals. This immediately put them at odds with what some thought of as the natural political allies of women’s liberation— the Left—and placed them closer to the traditional space of the ideo- logical right and center, leaving them vulnerable to charges of collab- oration with Reagan-era right-wing agendas. To this Dworkin and MacKinnon parried, “And exactly what is sinister about women uniting with women across conventional political lines against a form of abuse whose politics are sexual has remained unspecified by the critics” (1997, 11).

However, their argument differed in that it was not a moralist one, nor did it advocate censorship as the term is conventionally used. Rather, Dworkin and MacKinnon wrote in favor of a civil law approach based on the notion that individual women should be able to sue pornographers on grounds that pornography harmed them as members of the group women. In their view, the mistake of all previous attempts at regulating pornography was in conceptualizing it as harmless representation: “The legal conception of what pornography is has authoritatively shaped the social conception of what pornography does. Instead of recognizing the personal injuries and systemic harms of pornography, the law has told the society that pornography is a passive reflection or one-level-removed ‘rep-

8 Once moral proscriptions were removed, sexual revolutionaries were free to employ the popular slogan “If it feels good, do it.” Thus, experimentation with homosexuality, pederasty, masturbation, group sex, and so on were condoned precisely because they brought down the old social order built around the nuclear family and monogamy. The latter was actually a myth, rarely if ever realized and nearly always accomplished through hypocrisy, adultery, and repression.

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resentation’ or symptomatic-by-product or artifact of the real world” (Dworkin and MacKinnon 1988, 26). This has meant, they argued, that its harms were rendered invisible and unreal.

Dworkin and MacKinnon’s approach also deviated from the conven- tional jurisprudence on pornography. Though they agreed with other legal scholars that a major component in regulating pornography had to be harm, they differed as to what was meant by harm and who should be allowed to define it. In the feminist antiporn view, the issue was concep- tualized not as social harm but as harm to women. Porn was to be defined not by the 1973 Miller v. California test of contemporary community standards but according to those women who felt harmed by pornogra- phy.9 Since the victims of pornography are not society but women, it is women who should be able to define the extent of that victimization. Speaking about the paucity of previous legal standards regulating porn, Dworkin and MacKinnon write that they “have meant almost nothing, being (actually) dependent upon the viewpoint of the observer. This makes obscenity law less useful the more pornography is a problem, because the more pornography is consumed, the more observers’ views are shaped by it, and the more the world it makes confirms that view” (1988, 27).

Indeed, it is precisely the community standard itself that Dworkin and MacKinnon call into question and redescribe as harmful to women. Con- temporary community standards cannot serve as benchmarks for obscen- ity, since a community that is very tolerant of pornography simply harms women all the more. For Dworkin and MacKinnon, viewing harm ac- cording to the Miller test is like saying that racism should be judged according to community standards, and if lynching, for instance, is ac- ceptable to a given community, then it ought to be legal. Clearly, that would be very bad law. Just as the toleration of something like lynching indicates a serious problem for people of color rather than a standard by which one ought to judge sound law, so the toleration of pornography indicates a problem for women, they claim.

Dworkin and MacKinnon point out that once pornography is defined as that which is sexually arousing, anything that is sexually arousing is potentially pornographic. This means that laws against it are rarely en- forced in practice. Rather than imposing some a priori standard, their approach “looks at the existing universe of the pornography industry and simply describes what is there, including what must be there for it to work in the way that it, and only it, works” (1988, 37). For some, the more problematic aspect is their description of why pornography works. It

9 Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973).

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works, they claim, because it “excites the penis” (1988, 38) by showing sex and subordinating women at the same time. Thus, Dworkin and Mac- kinnon’s antipornography jurisprudence was consistent with Dworkin’s feminist theory. Sex is domination against women. Since male sexual ex- citement can be achieved by viewing pornography that “excites the penis,” then viewing pornography is itself a sex act. They write that “this law is based on proof of a harm, not a judgment about the permissibility of an idea. And like all civil-rights legislation, it addresses a harm that derives its meaning and sting from group status” (Dworkin and MacKinnon 1988, 30). They argue that because its very existence diminishes the status of women as human beings, “pornography is recognized as a practice of civil inequality on the basis of gender” (Dworkin and MacKinnon 1988, 31).

Since MacKinnon and Dworkin believe that sexuality and motherhood are functions that define women in patriarchy, legally mandating that women not be perceived as sexually dominated amounts to a major rev- olutionary act against patriarchy. Dworkin and MacKinnon’s strategy uses legal doctrine to point up and create a controversy about women’s role in society. To the extent that it has been viewed as natural that women are sexual objects, and to the extent that that view has been codified in law, Dworkin and MacKinnon attempt to denature the status of woman as sex object, to decodify the patriarchal view of women as sex slaves. They attempt to insinuate into the law a new principle for codification, namely, that some women categorically reject their own sexual victimi- zation and do so as women who are reclaiming their humanity. Humanity is thus partly defined as one’s ability to opt out of sex. In this sense, Dworkin and MacKinnon hope that women will be empowered to claim agency, first by resisting sexual access, and presumably then by claiming a new and transformed agency.

MacKinnon and Dworkin distinguish theirs from other feminist legal strategies in several important ways. For example, in the United States, abortion has been secured as a right for women on the ground that a woman’s body is her own private business. This doctrine of privacy is the same one that has been used to uphold laws protecting pornography. MacKinnon and Dworkin take the view that privacy is not good law for women since, absent legal protections, women will tend to be subordi- nated to male power, and that the home and the private sphere have historically been very dangerous places for women. They write, “Privacy law has further institutionalized pornography by shielding the sexual sphere, where so much of pornography’s violence to women is done, including by outright guaranteeing the right to possess pornography in the home, the most violent place for women” (1988, 27). Instead of

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privacy, Dworkin and MacKinnon suggest a legal doctrine based on “equality” (1988, 12).

While Dworkin and MacKinnon’s approach is substantively bold and takes a radical position in the context of the feminist movement as a whole, it is also very much in keeping with certain aspects of conventional wisdom in feminist theory. That is, the form of Dworkin and MacKinnon’s ar- gument appears to be consistent with the rest of feminist theory insofar as they suggest that women’s experience is foundational in an episte- mological sense and should be made juridically foundational as well. It is puzzling, then, that they seem to argue that women’s experiences count in this way only if they take a negative view of pornography. In fact, I do not think that Dworkin and MacKinnon’s view of pornography is based in a conventional feminist understanding of experience as an epistemo- logical foundation. The experiences of women who defend pornography or who own businesses that rely on its production and distribution can be dismissed, according to this argument, because these women support the current sexual arrangement of male domination. As such, women who support pornography have been colonized by the patriarchal structure of consciousness and are acting from the feminized subject position of pa- triarchal woman.

Conclusion

Andrea Dworkin believed in the social construction of gender. She argued that it is tied to violence, sexuality, and male domination in a structure that reproduces itself through the complicity of male and female agents. But male and female are subject positions in a structure that can be refused or ratified. For women, the ability to consent or to refuse patriarchy rests on the extent of one’s damage. Women who have been metaphysically annihilated can no longer consent. Women who have not have a moral obligation to resist.

It was easy for Dworkin to understand the stake that men have in reproducing the system. But she struggled with women’s collusion since they suffer so greatly under its yoke. Her arguments were polemical and reductivist, harkening back to a feminism of an earlier time. This was their power. Still, she had begun to theorize the historical nature of sexual intercourse. Its transformation from a genitally focused act to one centered on orality, voyeurism, and bloodletting was related to the central place she afforded to pornography.

Dworkin used the violence of sexuality and the eroticization of violence to explain everything from sexism to racism to anti-Semitism. She clearly

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understood that there were many other factors, but she persisted in the- matizing the one structure that she saw as foundational. Male domination was, for her, the primal structure of oppression and a model for all others. That structure depended on its victims to reproduce it, and they did so on the promise of love and sexual pleasure. I think that the troublesome issue in approaching Dworkin’s work is not that she was an essentialist. She was not, at least not in the way that term is usually defined. A careful reading shows that she was meticulous in theorizing the social construc- tion of human beings into male and female beings. What is at issue, in my view, is perhaps a more interesting problem, namely, Dworkin’s uni- vocal analysis of domination as sexual violence and of sexuality as domi- nation. In my view, what is most provocative about her is also what is most troubling: the notion that there is a gender structure that, in her account, is utterly damned as a monolithic and fundamentally repressive apparatus. Worse, sexuality and sex are so completely linked to it that the three are, for all intents and purposes, inseparable. I do not want to believe Dworkin. If she is right then much of what makes life worthwhile is part of a dark dialectic wherein life is reproduced in death. Is the answer to obliterate the sex distinction itself, as Firestone, Beauvoir, and many other early second-wave feminists argued? Is the answer, as Dworkin might have thought, to revisit the possibility of a feminism based less on ironic play- fulness and more on revolutionary activism?

Women’s Studies Program and Department of Political Science Ohio University

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