Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin

Apparently it was a bad hair day.

This charming lass was pretty big (if you’ll pardon the expression) in the feminist movement. Born to two radical parents, she endeavored to be a writer and an activist. Later, she married a Dutch anarchist. By her account, he abused her severely. This was quite unfortunate, but like so many feminists, she projected her bad experiences onto all men.
She was one of the ones who popularized the “all sex is rape” meme—she didn’t say so exactly, but close enough, for example: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” Also, “intercourse itself may be immune to reform.” Actually, she did figure out a way to reform the primordial dance of ecstasy, but I’m a little skeptical that this would be much of an improvement:

For men I suspect that this transformation begins in the place they most dread—that is, in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together.

It’s a little too much to imagine even some male feminist following this edict; “Honey, let’s scissor, and I’ll try not to get hard.”
Likewise, she fueled the “all pornography is violence against women” meme. She got into a very public spat with the porn industry. Unfortunately for her, one of them dug up the following from her 1974 book Woman Hating:

The parent-child relationship is primarily erotic because all human relationships are primarily erotic.

Paging Dr. Freud… If that wasn’t bad enough:

The incest taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them. The incest taboo does the worst work of the culture… The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism.

That’s interesting, shall we say.
After she died at age 58 from a cheeseburger overdose, she was glowingly lauded by feminists, despite her being a whack job. As Gloria Steinem Herself put it, “In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.”
A small selection of more kooky quotes:

Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

Welcome to Feminist Demagoguery 101. The next one is mind-boggling:

Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.

Quite fortunately, that’s pretty rare these days, thanks to modern medicine. As it happens, all that was overwhelmingly developed by men—how about a little credit where it’s due?

Pregnancy is confirmation that the woman has been fucked: it is confirmation that she has a cunt… The display marks her as a whore… Her belly is proof that she has been used. Her belly is his phallic triumph… The pregnancy is punishment for her participation in sex. She will get sick, her body will go wrong in a thousand different ways, she will die. The sexual excitement is in her possible death… And now, the doctors have added more sex–to birth itself… They cut directly into the uterus with a knife—a surgical fuck.

Apparently she was unaware that a caesarean section is meant to be a lifesaving procedure. I wonder if she ever shared her potty-mouthed misconceptions about mammalian biology with her mother?

On second thought, not even Sigmund Freud could have cured her.