What makes Andrea Dworkin seminal, in human and feminist thought, is the direct and emotional way she expresses the sheer enormity of the forceful subordination of women in the world today. Her latest book, 'Life and Death', is no exception. Subtitled as 'unapologetic writings on the continuing war against women', it uses several contemporary news stories to illustrate, in plain and powerful language, the nature and extent of that war.
Life and Death is different from - and sheds light on - previous Dworkin classics (such as Intercourse). While she has always been the quintessential engaged writer, she has never before revealed so much about herself. Her own life-story, she reveals, is the 'unseen foundation' of her previous work. She tracks her life, from the child with a remote mother and a loving father, through to private college (state college is described as 'mediocre') where she 'fucked for food and shelter' in the vacation, to 'battered wife' and feminist writer in Amsterdam.
Standpoints feminism can appear to universalise from personal experience. There is no mention, for instance, of the (post-intercourse) politics of reproduction and childrearing as a feminist issue, because that is not part of her own experience. Dworkin's life-story is interlaced into several of the pieces - encompassing Nicole Brown Simpson, Hedda Nussbaum, and women in the Holocaust - and sketched out in a section called 'My life as a writer'. It is a disturbing story. An undercurrent to its horror, however, is a niggling worry that her tendency to celebrate the strength of women in bearing (rather than resisting) brutality is a reflection of aspects of her own life. Moving from economic dependence on one man (her three-job Dad), to several (prostitution), to 'my husband', Dworkin ended up a 'battered wife' trapped in an abusive, dependent relationship that she repeatedly and without any qualification refers to as her 'marriage'. Her refusal, even 25 years later, to identify this man, is obviously a token of the terror she still suffers, but sits uneasily with the exhortation to other women 'to name the perpetrator, to name the oppressor'.
Dworkin's popular 'man-hating' image is not accurate. While she does often use a broad brush - 'men cannot have sex with women who are their equals, they're incapable of it' - it is a curious feature of this book that the identifiable men in her own life - her father, her late brother, her partner - are portrayed as the good and decent men they clearly are. They are, she explains, 'different from other men', and indeed we get a clearer individual picture of them than of the mass of brutalised females. She makes the point powerfully that these women are anonymous, of course, but does not try to reclaim their names. Indeed, she says repeatedly that she cannot remember the name of the rape victim on which the film The Accused was based.
None is more faceless in this book than young Lisa Steinberg. Dworkin's broad brush sweeps up Lisa's abuser (Hedda Nussbaum) along with the brutally hunted and murdered Nicole Brown Simpson. Both are victims for Dworkin, regardless of their individual cases. Aristotle thought that women did not have souls. While individual men are assumed to be agents of their own lives - and bear responsibility for their actions - it could be argued that Dworkin too does not credit women with enough individuality and responsibility.
Whatever you make of it in the end, Life and Death is an important book about male violence against women that should be required reading for everyone.
Peter McKenna
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