Andrea Dworkin: The Definitive Anti-Porn Feminist

Editor’s Note: This post is the third in a series by YNOT’s LynseyG that gives an overview of the history of anti-porn sentiment in America. Read the first post in the series here and read the second post here. 

In my series on anti-porn crusaders, last week I wrote about Charles Keating, who effectively turned the city  of Cincinnati into an anti-porn mecca capable of convicting Larry Flynt on obscenity charges because its “community standards” were so stringent. Keating was also one of the men whose unethical financial dealings led to the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. From the evidence available, Keating appears to have been an egomaniac willing to do  anything to get to the top, whether that meant crusading against sexy media to get famous or defrauding Americans out of their life savings to enrich himself.

Next, I’ll turn to Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist writer and activist who focused her ire on the porn industries from the mid-seventies through the nineties. Dworkin was a woman of strong convictions whose hyperbolic words provoked strong reactions—for better and for worse. After experiencing assault and abuse at the hands of men throughout her life—beginning at the age of nine and continuing through adulthood—she devoted her career almost entirely to contempt for pornographers, most other men, and the systems that she believed they use to enact the subjugation of women.

In 1976, she led picketers against the film Snuff in New York, then used the momentum these protests earned to start organizing the anti-porn group that would become Women Against Pornography (WAP)—which worked to undermine the porn industry for nearly twenty years, and whose name, hilariously, shortens to the title a recent song by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. Dworkin, however, was never a member of the group.

In 1980, Dworkin, along with Catharine MacKinnon and members of WAP, supported Linda Boreman (aka Linda Lovelace) when she publicly accused Chuck Traynor, her ex-husband and the production manager for Deep Throat, of coercion and physical abuse. Dworkin would use Boreman’s experience as the basis for her future sweeping generalizations about pornography as synonymous with abuse, starting with the attempt to make pornography a civil rights issue.

Together, Dworkin and MacKinnon drafted an anti-porn civil rights ordinance for the city of Minneapolis that “defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women, and allowed women who claimed harm from pornography to sue the producers and distributors in civil court for damages.” The law was vetoed twice by the city’s mayor, and similar versions were overturned in court in Indianapolis, then defeated in voter initiatives in Massachusetts and the state of Washington. Although these attempts to make pornography a civil rights issue failed, Dworkin’s assertion that porn is, by its very nature, damaging to women still persists forty years later in the public consciousness, showing up in anti-porn protests, writing, and legislation even today.

In Dworkin’s 1981 book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, she wrote: “Pornography is a celebration of rape and injury to women; it’s a kind of union for rapists, a way of legitimising rape and formalising male supremacy in our society.” She further posited that pornography, as an industry, “is implicated in violence against women, both in its production (through the abuse of the women that are used to star in it) and in the social consequences of its consumption by encouraging men to eroticize the domination, humiliation and abuse of women.” 

Her diatribe earned her the respect of the Reagan administration, and in 1986 she testified before the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, led by Edwin Meese. There, she recommended that the Commission seek to “instruct law-enforcement agencies to keep records of the use of pornography in violent crimes,” ban pornography in prisons, “enforce laws against pimping and pandering against pornographers,” and prioritize going after pornography under the RICO Act. She also hoped that the commission would influence Congress to “adopt federal anti-pornography civil rights legislation which would provide for civil damages for harm inflicted on women”—continuing her porn-as-a-civil-rights-issue campaign.

Her blazing anti-porn testimony so impressed the already anti-porn commission that it was reprinted in the final report, which concluded that porn was in fact a public menace and should be restricted.

Dworkin continued to rail against porn as a central tenet of the patriarchy that subjugated and desecrated women until her death in 2005. Much of her later life was spent in defending her earlier work, repeatedly claiming that people had misinterpreted her words, disavowing any ties to conservative groups or sentiments, and denying that she hated men or thought that all sex was rape.

Still, her legacy is built largely on the image of Dworkin as the quintessential “man-hating,” anti-porn feminist. And much of her undeniably divisive logic still holds sway over conservative views of pornography. Her primary concern was, as stated by Katharine Viner for The Guardian after Dworkin’s death, for “the women performing in the films, the harm they suffered, and what other women had to suffer as a result of men watching porn.” This moralistic crusade to “save” sex workers from their own decisions continues to this day, along with the conviction that the rest of society is damaged by smut—despite decades of scientific inquiry finding no link between consumption of pornography and any of the negative outcomes Dworkin and others have predicted.

Dworkin remains a controversial figure in nearly every group in which her influence remains, most notably feminism. Later waves of sex-positive feminists—myself included—have denounced her work and distanced themselves from her ideas. Still, she remains a central figure in feminism as we know it, for better or for worse. Her work as an anti-porn crusader seems to have come from twin sources—her own righteous anger at the sexual violence she endured at the hands of men, and a depth of conviction and energy that few others have displayed in the quest to destroy porn in America.

Photo of Andrea Dworkin by Open Media Ltd. via Wikipedia under Creative Commons 3.0 license. It has been cropped and resized.