But through this volume’s skillful curation, the writer who pledged herself to severity and absolutism is revealed to be a complex, contradictory figure. “In her singular scorched-earth theory,” Fateman writes, “pornography is fascist propaganda” and prostitution “the bottom rung of hell.” Both had to be eliminated completely before women could be free, as would intercourse as we know it. The stakes were too high: one moment of vacillation might cost her the war. Because she was a militant, she could not allow hesitation, uncertainty, or ambivalence-the very experiences that lead theorists to new insights.

She was massively talented and occasionally brilliant but in the 1980s, her thinking became recursive and compulsive, caught on the snag of itself, and her writing suffered accordingly. Last Days at Hot Slit provides a service by virtue of its inclusion of previously unpublished pieces and excerpts from out-of-print books, but there’s also great skill behind the respectful, honest depiction of Dworkin’s fraught development as an intellectual. has no other purpose.”įateman and co-editor Amy Scholder are adroit, sensitive handlers of this volatile material.

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.

Pornography by Andrea Dworkin