And that infuriated the academics who ridiculed her ideas and marginalized her work in the seminar rooms of women and gender studies programmes. Her mind matured in the crucible of the 1960s anti-war movement, intimate partner violence and an intensive study of violent pornography.ĭworkin’s ideas about justice were crystalline and urgent. Instead, her intellect was formed by her struggle to come to terms with the most personal forms of violence: a family member’s memory of the Holocaust and her early sexual abuse by a stranger in a movie theatre. My guess is that part of what made her such an extraordinary writer is that Andrea Dworkin did not go to graduate school. On the contrary, Dworkin’s theories of sexuality were extraordinarily complex ideas distilled to their essence and articulated so clearly that anyone of any level of education could understand them. Dworkin’s critics often characterized her theories of sex and gender as reductive or essentialist: rarely did they engage them. I have always believed that part of the hostility that Dworkin aroused had something to do with a clarity of mind that terrified people who cannot bear difficult and dangerous thoughts.
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