strategically, with a militarist’s heart.” Dworkin’s first publication, Woman Hating (1974) opened with an enduring mission statement: “revolution is the goal. For her, terror was a necessary tactic she saw herself first and foremost as a political actor crafting “weapon in a war. This viscera is what makes Dworkin’s writing so compelling, and so repellant. “To read Dworkin at eighteen,” writes Fateman in the introduction, “was to see patriarchy with the skin peeled back.” Dworkin’s work presents male supremacy at its goriest and most sadistic by focusing on eroticized brutality, the habitual violence of men the world over who are, at this moment and every moment, “shoving it into her, over and over,” often when the “her” is unwilling, or when she’s a child-and sometimes until she dies, or after she’s dead, or both. I was one, and Johanna Fateman, co-editor of Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, was another. I suspect we are legion, we white women who first read Andrea Dworkin while cresting or just tipped past our teens.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |