Near the end of her life, writer and feminist Andrea Dworkin was asked how she would like to be remembered. “In a museum, when male supremacy is dead. I’d like my work to be an anthropological artifact from an extinct, primitive society.”
We look at people living in totalitarian cults, distanced from us either through time (Nazi Germany) or geography (North Korea), and wonder how they could have gone along with such foolish and harmful ideas, yet Dworkin believed that we too live in just such a cult—it’s just that most people are blind to it.
Three books by the author—Right-Wing Women, Woman Hating and Pornography, recently reissued as Penguin Modern Classics—give a full account of the Kool-Aid we’ve been drinking. The new paperbacks are illustrated by the feminist artist Judy Chicago, who is also having her own renaissance.
Dworkin’s central thesis is this: patriarchy is a totalitarian belief in male supremacy. It is not natural, having only been around for about two per cent of human history. Nor is it popular, as it requires constant and relentless propaganda backed up by violence to keep it in place. As with all totalitarian regimes, it is not inevitable. Culture is manmade, quite literally in the case of patriarchy, and we can remake it. The very narrow, ego-fixated way of seeing the world—man separate and superior to all other life—has been a recipe for life’s extinction and, like all products of ego, is also ultimately unsatisfying. It’s long past time to ditch this death cult.
A certain kind of masculine fervour has been with humanity for a very long time. Donald Trump and Andrew Tate are only the latest embodiments. Dworkin set her forensic gaze on this “collective him”: “who he is, what he wants… why he won’t move off you; what it’s going to take to blow him loose. A different kind of blow job. Is he scared? You bet.”
That fear can be measured in the efforts men made to destroy Dworkin’s reputation while she was alive. She was hated by both right and left, for her stance on female liberation, that sex was the medium of female oppression and pornography the means of male domination. She had great difficulty getting her books published, and even the best went out of print.
None of the criticism survives impact with the reality of her writing. It is bold, courageous and erudite. Dworkin comes across on the page as deeply serious but also often funny. She writes with a clear zest to change the world, one mind at a time. She certainly changed mine. Gloria Steinem described Dworkin as an Old Testament prophet raging in the hills. One might carry the Biblical metaphor further and say that, in these reissues, Dworkin has been resurrected. The writer reborn as the fierce feminist prophet we need to counter the masculine Maga madness that’s hurtling us ever-faster towards our own demise.
Dworkin writes with a clear zest to change the world, one mind at a time
Dworkin became famous for her activism and feminist philosophy, but also for her forensic examinations of culture. In Right-Wing Women she looks at politics and examines how the “free love” movement of the 1960s boiled down to free sex for men—and a costly devaluation of women. In Woman Hating she explores fairy tales and literature, and how ideas seeded in such stories bloom into full-blown violence against women. In two sections titled “Gynocide”, she documents the 1,000-year practice of Chinese foot-binding (which was much more brutal and mutilating than I knew), as well as Europe’s 300-year war on women, in which tens of thousands were burned as witches, wiping out a whole culture of woman-centred healing and lore. Culture matters. It predetermines “who we are, how we behave, what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel”.
All three books explore male power. This is not the power to create life or protect it—but, rather, “power over”. Most of us would call this illegitimate power. It’s a belief in domination at any cost. It turns the world into a binary: fuck or be fucked. I can see it informing Trump’s decision to back Vladimir Putin over Volodymyr Zelensky: Putin is the invader, the fucker. Anyone “fucked” is female, therefore weak. Anyone invading is a strongman. Dworkin is right to point out the moral element missing in the male supremacist idea of power. His logic is solipsistic: if I can invade, I should; if my invasion is successful, it was “right”, survival of the fittest. This is Darwin’s prose mangled to justify all manner of crimes. What Darwin actually said could be better summarised as survival of the nurtured, and for most of human history, that was how we lived.
Modern scholars believe that, before patriarchy, humans were egalitarian. Early religions held nature as sacred, female sexuality was honoured, and women were seen as the embodiment of nature’s regenerative power. In Woman Hating Dworkin posits that if man was going to take that power for himself, he first had to find a way to reframe female power as evil, and his own as divine. He did that through Abrahamic religion and storytelling.
Men declared they were the sex made in God’s image, and given dominion over women and all other creatures, who now existed solely to serve the adult male’s needs and desires. In Pornography Dworkin writes: “The self is the conviction, beyond reason or scrutiny, that there is an equation between what one wants and the fact that one is. Going one better than Descartes, this conviction might be expressed: I want and I am entitled to have, therefore I am.”
The male thus awards himself exceptional status, so that anything he does, however bad, is by definition good because he’s the one doing it. In this setup, power is all. Sexuality shifted from an expression of intimacy and pleasure to one of control and domination. This type of power is also not interested in what makes life meaningful for most humans: nature, life, relationships, love, joy. Domination is a disassociation from life. This self is “entitled to take what it wants to sustain or improve itself, to have anything, to require any need at any cost”.
But as the Buddha taught, where one desire is met, many more will grow. That’s the core problem with the way adult men in a patriarchy define “self”. They can never be sated. It is addiction in its purest form. The results can be seen today all across the board: in the way male billionaires accrue hoards of private wealth and avoid tax; the way capitalists extract from nature while paying nothing back; the way men treat women in pornography, where more objectification, degradation and violence is needed so they can get their rocks off.
It is in Pornography that Dworkin’s exploration of male power is most fully formed and convincing. Dworkin studied masses of pornography to find its DNA. The technologies have changed (she used VHS tapes and printed matter), but the central theme remains the same now as then: “Male power is the raison d’être of pornography; the degradation of the female is the means of achieving this power.”
Objectification is key—an inherently cruel process that turns a living being into an object whose purpose is defined by the viewer. This dehumanisation has a cruel twist, in that “intense estrangement from the female provides the necessary basis for sexual excitement”. In other words, it kills the possibility of real love.
I’m not the only woman who’s wondered why—when tech firms can find a way to take down even the tiniest bit of copyrighted music online—porn is so ubiquitous, no matter its violence or availability to children. There are some hints of outrage, but, for the most part, PornHub continues apace and the social media companies ignore misogyny on their platforms. Reading Dworkin, the reasons become clear: porn is tacitly accepted because it reinforces the power dynamic of male supremacy. “What the penis can do it must do forcibly for a man to be a man.” One can’t help wondering: if porn was about female power or female pleasure, how quickly it would be banned.
Dworkin is methodical and learned but, unlike so many philosophical writers, she is also humane. This shines through especially in Right-Wing Women, where she investigates why women vote and act against their own interests. The book was originally published in 1983, but the appeal of the right for women remains, as evidenced by trad wives and Trumpers, along with politicians such as Kemi Badenoch and Giorgia Meloni.
In the British edition of Right-Wing Women there is a fascinating preface by Dworkin on the origins of right and left as political descriptors. They arose from the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly around 1789; royalists on the right and those inspired by the American Revolution on the left. The royalists were for monarchy and feudalism. The left insisted that political freedom required some measure of civil, economic and social equality. Linking freedom with equality was new—and dangerous to the ruling class.
Americans were resolute republicans; none would tolerate monarchy or any institution resembling it. There were even debates about whether having a president was too monarchical. That didn’t make them egalitarians. As Dworkin puts it, “There never was a king, but there were many obvious surrogates in whom imperial power was vested: from slaveholder to husband.” The “manly” authority that the right invoked was rich over poor, white over black, man over woman.
So why do women support it? Dworkin’s view is that women align with the power they think will best keep them safe and enable them to survive. If feminists don’t have power (and, as women in a patriarchy, they don’t), then to align with them is dangerous as it opens a woman to attack. If she aligns with left-wing men, there is no guarantee she will be protected, as these men often have the same attitudes as right-wing men but are more insidious, as they rape while proclaiming themselves allies, and impregnate then disappear. At least, with right-wing men, women hold some value as wife and mother.
In sum, women vote against their own interests because they see the system as closed and unalterable. Dworkin also sees the system as closed, but she is more optimistic, and believes change is possible. Feminism, she writes, is the “simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and also the most despised”—probably for the same reason.
Feminism, Dworkin writes, is the ‘simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and also the most despised’
Feminism is the liberation of women and, by default, all human beings, as it requires one absolute standard of human dignity, indivisible by sex. It might seem as though the right to one’s own bodily integrity is basic, but when men tweet “your body, my right”, they are stating what Dworkin already identified: “The right of men to women’s bodies for the purpose of intercourse remains the heart, soul, and balls of male supremacy.”
So how do we blow him loose? The biggest issue, then and now, is getting women to open their eyes and acknowledge the scale of the injustice committed against them. Rape, battery, economic and reproductive exploitation—Dworkin catalogues these basic crimes to which women are susceptible simply because they are women. We need bravery to face the pain of what has been a multi-millennial system of abuse and brutalisation of women and children, most often in the form of sexual terrorism by men. Then we need courage to take on male power.
Humans generally struggle when someone or some group concentrates power. America’s founding fathers thought long and hard about how to stop this, and the tripartite federalist structure was their best solution. Now even that is straining. In the end, we come down to a few biological choices: fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
From fairy tale to porn, femininity as defined by men has been a composite of freeze, fawn and flight responses. We must connect with the fight response—to defend ourselves and defend life, to take a stand against brutality and abuse, even if, as Dworkin writes, “it violates every notion of womanhood we have ever been taught.” The preservation of life depends upon it.
Culture is created. We get to decide what is right and what is wrong. How we want to live and how we don’t. If something hurts us, hurts life, it is up to us to make it stop. Think how gratifying it will be to know we did our part to end the cruellest cult the world has ever seen.
