Judith Grant

Andrea Dworkin and the Social Construction of Gender: A

Retrospective

q1

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
q2 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

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 31, no. 4]
䉷 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2006/3104-0005$10.00

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WORKING 2 ❙ Grant

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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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 3

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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 WORKING 4 ❙ Grant

q3 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 the subject position of women, femininity, and the female are in
the structural position of that of masochist. She writes, “Our sexual def-
inition 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,
101–2). She writes that though femininity (e.g., passivity, nurturance,
coquettishness) 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.

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 5

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

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, 101–2). 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:

q4 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 re-
warded for hurting oneself by conforming to demeaning or de-
grading rules of behavior; when one is consistently and inevitably
punished for accomplishing, 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 be-
come the cornerstone of one’s personality. And, as you might already

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 WORKING 6 ❙ Grant

know, it is very hard for masochists to find the pride, the strength,
the inner freedom, the 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 sys-
tem of male supremacy will continue to operate as a whole even if
parts of the system itself break down or are reformed.2 (1976f,
60–61)

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
q5 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

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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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 7

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
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 had 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

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WORKING 8 ❙ Grant

“moral bankruptcy familiar to women in love” (1988c, 83).3 She continues

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 femi-
nine-ized adult woman with class and race privileges. Thus Dworkin reads
Brontë’s book as illustrating her own theories about sadomasochism; the
social construction of the gender structure; the sadomasochistic 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”

3
Dworkin argues that the pitfalls of feminine love are most starkly portrayed by Brontë
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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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 9

(67). Elsewhere she lauds Williams for portraying women as beings who
understand that sex should be about “tenderness and sensitivity” (1987,
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,

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 WORKING 10 ❙ Grant

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
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
q6 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 man’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-
q7 ment on the topic. It is here that Dworkin makes the case that sexual
intercourse, male domination, and pornographic representation are three

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 11

moments of the same event. Intercourse is antisex in the sense that Dworkin
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
q8 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
q9 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
q10 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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WORKING 12 ❙ Grant

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). Dwor-
kin 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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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 13

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
q11 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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WORKING 14 ❙ Grant

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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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 15

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
q12 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
q13 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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 WORKING 16 ❙ Grant

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 a 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,
q14 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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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 17

The logical extension of lust and romantic love into death and the
romanticization of loss so evident in popular culture provide opportunities
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 wrote provocatively that Nuss-
baum 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, an-
drogynous 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 crit-
icize Cathy in Wuthering Heights for embracing her own femininity and
race and class privileges while then apologizing for Nussbaum. 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 Nussbaum, 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 ar-
gument then is that at some point female subordination erases human
agency. Being battered, or rather the epistemological 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 re-
moved, by extreme physical abuse. While the abuse initially stemmed from
Nussbaum’s commitment to feminine romantic love and sexuality, that
very commitment eventually 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 na-
ture of male-female relations lead her to ever more ominous conclusions
about the dangers of men. Indeed, bloodletting, a favorite theme of Dwor-
kin’s, is reflected in the title of her collection of essays Our Blood (1976a).

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 WORKING 18 ❙ Grant

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 fun-
damentally associated with violence and bloodletting. Moreover, inter-
course 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 in-
tercourse only because it ontologically 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.
q15 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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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 19

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

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 WORKING 20 ❙ Grant

that “by this standard, Lucy had been had and had and had: by all the
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.” Dworkin
concludes that Dracula is a story of gang rape, male bonding, and voy-
q16 eurism (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;
q17 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 coma, to the screamless

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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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 21

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
q18 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. She 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
q19 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
q21 sexual aggression.
Historically, those who have argued against the regulation of pornog-
raphy fall into three basic camps. The first are pragmatists who simply
argue that pornography is too difficult to define and therefore cannot and

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 WORKING 22 ❙ Grant

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 ideological right
and center, leaving them vulnerable to charges of collaboration with Rea-
gan-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 it 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 ‘representation’
q22 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.

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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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 23

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
q23 more pornography is consumed, the more observer’s 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
q24 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

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

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 WORKING 24 ❙ Grant

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 1984,
q25 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
privacy, Dworkin and MacKinnon suggest a legal doctrine based on
“equality” (1988, 12).
While Dworkin and MacKinnon’s approach is substantively bold and

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 25

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
q26 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 antisemitism. She clearly
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.

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 WORKING 26 ❙ Grant

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 is an essentialist. She
is not, at least not in the way that term is usually defined. A careful reading
shows that she was meticulous in theorizing the social construction of
human beings into male and female beings. What is at issue, in my view,
is perhaps a more interesting problem, namely, Dworkin’s univocal analysis
of domination as sexual violence and of sexuality as domination. 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
q27 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

References
Adams, Carol J. 1993. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical
q28 Theory. New York: Continuum.
Assiter, Alison, and Avedon Carol, eds. 1993. Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The
Challenge to Reclaim Feminism. London: Pluto.
de St. Jorre, John. 1994. “The Unmasking of O.” New Yorker 70(23):42–50.
Dworkin, Andrea. 1974. Woman Hating. New York: Dutton.
———. 1976a. Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics. New York:
Harper & Row.
———. 1976b. “The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door.” In Dworkin 1976a,
22–49.
———. 1976c. “Redefining Non-violence.” In Dworkin 1976a, 66–72.
———. 1976d. “Renouncing Sexual Equality.” In Dworkin 1976a, 10–14.
———. 1976e. “The Root Cause.” In Dworkin 1976a, 96–111.
———. 1976f. “The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage.” In Dworkin 1976a,
50–65.
———. 1978. Right-Wing Women. New York: Perigee.

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 27

———. 1980. The New Woman’s Broken Heart: Short Stories. East Palo Alto, CA:
q29 Frog in the Well.
———. 1987. Intercourse. New York: Free Press.
———. 1988a. “Mourning Tennessee Williams.” In her Letters from a War Zone:
Writings, 1976–1989, 65–67. New York: Dutton.
———. 1988b. “Pornography and Grief.” In her Letters from a War Zone: Writ-
ings, 1976–1989, 19–26. New York: Dutton.
———. 1988c. “Wuthering Heights.” In her Letters from a War Zone: Writings,
1976–1989, 68–86. New York: Dutton.
———. 1991. Mercy. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
———. 1997. “Living in Terror, Pain: Being a Battered Wife.” In her Life and
Death, 51–54. New York: Free Press.
Dworkin, Andrea, and Catharine A. MacKinnon. 1988. Pornography and Civil
Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality. Minneapolis: Organizing against
Pornography.
———. 1997. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
New York: Morrow.
Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jenefsky, Cindy, with Ann Russo. 1998. Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin’s Art
and Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview.
q30 Joreen. 1973. “The Bitch Manifesto.” In Koedt, Levine, and Rapone 1973, 50–59.
Koedt, Anne. 1973. “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” In Koedt, Levine, and
Rapone 1973, 198–207.
Koedt, Anne, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone, eds. 1973. Radical Feminism. New
York: Quadrangle.
Segal, Lynne, and Mary McIntosh, eds. 1993. Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the
Pornography Debate. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Snitow, Ann, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. 1983. Powers of Desire:
The Politics of Sexuality. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Stoltenberg, John. 1990. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. New
York: Penguin.

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WORKING 28 ❙ Grant

QUERIES TO THE AUTHOR

1. JO: Quotes and caps with “Woman” and italics with “second”
stetted per your direction.

2. AU: First name stetted per your request.

3. AU: I added closing quotation marks after “female.” Correct

place?

4. AU: Comma stetted per your request.

5. AU: “feminine-ized” stetted per your request here and in in-

stances below.

6. AU: Open-endedness of protest stetted per your request.

7. AU: Can you say topic of what? Otherwise, you have

“themes....topic,” plural/singular. Perhaps “on the topic of sexual
domination”?

8. AU: Nota bene addition of “because” to complete sense of

sentence.

9. AU: Italics stetted per your request.

10. AU: “Lack human being” stetted per your request.

11. AU: Semicolon after “means” stetted per your request.

Wednesday Jan 18 2006 03:04 PM SIGNS v31n4 60090 JAK

 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ WORKING 29

12. AU: Quotation marks stetted per your request.

13. AU: Okay that I changed “Is” to “is”?

14. AU: Quotation marks stetted per your request.

15. AU: Quotation marks stetted per your request.

16. AU: Quotation marks stetted per your request.

17. AU: Nota bene change of “is sexual” to “as sexual.”

18. AU: “Delink” stetted per your request.

19. AU: Noted that quotation is correct as it now stands.

20. AU: Since there is no 1998b for either Dworkin or Dworkin

and Mackinnon, I have made it Dworkin 1988b. But as this paragraph
is now worded, readers will probably expect it to be a quote from a
Dworkin and Mackinnon work. If Dworkin 1988b is incorrect, a text
citation is needed for that entry.

21. AU: Note that “not only” has been moved from before “rep-
resented” to after “saying,” for parallelism’s sake.

22. AU: Is hyphen after “symptomatic” in original?

23. AU: Okay to make “observer’s” a plural possessive?

Wednesday Jan 18 2006 03:04 PM SIGNS v31n4 60090 JAK

WORKING 30 ❙ Grant

24. AU: I changed 1998 to 1988 here. Is a 1998 Reference entry

needed instead?

25. AU: Please add Reference entry for Dworkin and MacKinnon
1984. Or should it be 1988?

26. AU: Repetition of first name stetted per your request.

27. AU: You had a second choice with “might,” namely, “would.”
Which do you prefer?

28. AU: Add text citation for Adams 1993 or delete Reference
entry.

29. AU: Add text citation for Dworkin 1980 or delete from
References.

30. AU: Joreen stands alone, per your direction.

Wednesday Jan 18 2006 03:04 PM SIGNS v31n4 60090 JAK

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