Dworkin had reason to be angry: Her life was marked by the kind of male violence that is disturbingly common yet consistently goes unacknowledged. The style is strident, enraged, and the conclusions are often stark, bluntly phrased, and difficult to read. Hot Slit contains excerpts from all of Dworkin’s major books as well as previously unpublished material, including letters to her parents, university lectures, and a portion of an unfinished end-of-life autobiographical manuscript called My Suicide.
Last Days at Hot Slit, a collection of Dworkin’s writing edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, is an invitation “to consider what was lost in the fray,” as Fateman writes in her moving introduction. By the end of the decade, high heels, lipstick, and sex positivity were in Dworkin-and her gruesome, angry characterization of sexual violence-was decidedly out. She published her most influential books not in the late 1960s but in the 1980s, just as the second wave was dissolving into factionalism and backstabbing, and as an emergent conservative groundswell was taking hold and preparing to sweep away their gains. Dworkin was twelve years younger than the woman she considered her hero, the second-wave feminist critic Kate Millett, and she found herself expanding on Millett’s ideas of structural misogyny a half generation too late. But part of her downfall was simply a matter of timing. It’s true, too, that she wrote with a passion and anger still uncommon in women, and she directed some of her fiercest critiques at fellow feminists who had once been her friends. She held inflexible opinions on pornography and sex work that have fallen dramatically out of fashion, and she made terrible tactical missteps in pursuing her vision of a world without the sex trade.
Much of Dworkin’s unpopularity was her own fault. It is still more common to see her ridiculed than cited. Almost fifteen years after her death, her exile from the sphere of acceptable political thought is near-absolute. The left aggressively disavowed her, with other feminists going out of their way to contrast her opinions with their own. The right parodied her with the viciousness reserved for misogyny, mocking her overalls, frizzy hair, and excess weight. She had become less a public thinker than a symbol, an embodiment of feminism’s missteps and excesses. EVEN BEFORE her death from myocarditis in 2005, Andrea Dworkin was more read about than read.
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