A big thinker with a bigger vision

Controversial feminist Andrea Dworkin, who died this week, was not unlike Pope John Paul II in ways, argues Kate Holmquist.

Controversial feminist Andrea Dworkin, who died this week, was not unlike Pope John Paul II in ways, argues Kate Holmquist.

'For a woman, the home is the most dangerous place in the world." The feminist powerhouse who 30 years ago first uttered these words, died "in her sleep" at home in Washington DC last Saturday at the age of 58, the cause of death to be determined by the coroner.

Andrea Dworkin died in isolation, seriously off-message as far as all but the most radical feminists were concerned, a figure of ridicule with her huge body and pendulous breasts draped in her trademark bib overalls. A challenging, belligerent, hairy, unlipsticked, brilliant, lesbian married to a gay man, she was the repellent stereotype post-feminist women think of when they say, "I'm no feminist, but . . ."

A few years ago, she was found wandering incoherent in the streets of New York in a feverish daze, her fleshy legs infected by cellulitis. And when she claimed to have been raped in a Paris hotel room in 1999, even her parents rejected her. Yet Andrea Dworkin, mad as she may have been, had the soul of a prophet.

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Her words had a particular resonance in this country during the week, when Colin Whelan was jailed for life for the murder, at home, of his wife Mary Whelan and David Hughes was jailed for 18 months for reckless endangerment following the death, at home, of his partner, Janet Chaney.

Of 109 women killed in the Republic since 1995, 83.3 per cent were killed by someone they knew; 47.7 per cent by a partner or ex-partner. Sixty-six per cent of Irish female murder victims are killed in their own homes, the most dangerous place in the world, for them.

We are still in danger of paying little more than lip service to women trapped in violent homes. When a TV campaign encouraging women to report abuse aired recently, Women's Aid could answer only half the calls; normally it can answer two-thirds.

Underfunded refuges are still forced to turn women away. Women's Aid director Margaret Martin argues that, 30 years after the organisation was founded, we have failed in two of the main goals: ensuring women's safety and ensuring that perpetrators are punished.

So then, Andrea Dworkin wasn't completely off message, was she? To understand her legacy, we have to reach back to the mindset of the 1970s, when the incidence of incest was thought to be a mere one in a million and when rape, wife-battering and pornography were protected by a conspiracy of silence.

Evelyn Conlon, one of the founders of the Rape Crisis Centre in 1979, recalls disbelieving a social worker from the ISPCC who claimed that incest and child sexual abuse were far more common than official statistics revealed.

"We thought she was exaggerating. We said 'No, this couldn't be happening'. If people like us were saying that, you can imagine what others were saying."

Dworkin had a leading role in breaking the silence, writing not just about her own feminist philosophy but also identifying herself as a victim to the extent that Nell McCafferty, like many others, found her books "too painful to read".

Dworkin was such an original thinker that her ideas still affect us. "Andrea Dworkin . . . was a visionary in a vision-free world," says Ailbhe Smyth, director of Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre at UCD. "She was big in every way - a big woman, a big thinker with a big vision. She warned about the insidious nature of child pornography before the internet was even invented - and how right she was. She understood how powerful pornography was in shaping certain kinds of masculinity."

It was revealed in the US during the week, that a 16-year-old girl was forced to perform oral sex on two boys in a high-school auditorium, as more than a dozen students watched, and while one student videotaped the assault. The school authorities convinced the girl's father not to dial 911, arguing that the police would bring with them unwanted media attention. The story came out only when the girl confided in a teacher.

The incident seems to illustrate Dworkin's statement that "pornography is the theory, rape is the practice", as well as her view that the desire to silence victims is hard-wired into our brains by a language of expression designed in the service of a male-dominated hierarchy. Female students today may not have heard of Dworkin, but they worry about pornography, feeling unsafe, and being viewed as objects whose main purpose is to shop.

Dworkin's unintentional legacy was to open the Pandora's Box of pornography, giving the liberal left legitimate cause to justify titillation with intellectual intrigue and put "pornography studies" on university course lists.

Now that it's almost impossible to access e-mail without being offered pornography, we wish we could close that box. Perhaps we are closing it, in a way, by becoming, quite simply, uninterested.

In the 1970s, we needed the scales pulled from our eyes, but now we've reached the point where it's just too much information, thank you.

FEMINISM? WOMEN TODAY just want to know if they have to drop the baby at the creche extra early due to a collision on Dublin's M50. Pornography? Go ahead. If the people doing it are paid well and enjoying themselves, who cares? We've come full circle. In the 1970s, ignorance made us turn a blind eye. Thirty years later, cynicism does. Only a fool would be an idealist.

In this way, Dworkin was remarkably like Pope John Paul II. Many Catholics will say that the late pope espoused ideals of behaviour that are fine in theory, but impossible in practice. Similarly, the vision of Dworkin - the most difficult prophet of the feminist vatican - is hard to live up to.

Who, apart from the sociopathic, doesn't want to see society revolutionised so radically that women and children always feel safe? Unfortunately, her addition that the victims of rape and paedophilia should have the right to kill their abusers didn't go down too well with anyone, feminists included.

Her disrespectful attitude to all men was counterproductive. She also lost favour with Irish feminists when she claimed that all sexual intercourse was rape, designed physiologically to prove women's inferiority.

"Real women don't want to know that the accoutrements of rape are the same as the accoutrements of great, passionate sex. Women want to enjoy it and thinking about rape ruins it," says Conlon.

Feminism has failed women in that the focus on sex has distracted us from what we really need: a better society for women and men.

We don't want to be trapped on the M50 or to have to leave babies in creches early in the morning. Women have all the worst aspects of the working lifestyle that men had, without things improving much for either gender, Conlon argues.

Dworkin's emphasis on sex and pornography covered only a portion of what feminism should be about. A better world would be violence-free, but it would also have longer paid parental leave and free childcare.

Dworkin paid a terrible price for her passion. She had no boundaries between her public self and her private self, identifying with victims to the extent that near the end it almost seemed she was fantasising in order to gain attention.

Despite this weakness, we needed her voice. As Gloria Steinem put it, Dworkin's thoughts helped civilisation evolve, even though it may not have evolved as she would have liked.