Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

een a pimp, Malcolm had been a hustler, Malcolm had beena drug addict. It’s the militant voice, it’s the voice that woulddare say what nobody else was saying. . . and it can’t helpbut say it because it is speaking out of such incredible personalpain. ”There were other feminists who were as zealous in their convictionthat pornography was “the undiluted essence of antifemalepropaganda, ” as Susan Brownmiller once put it, butnobody else could elicit the same disgust and fascination fromthe public as Andrea Dworkin—they didn’t have her overallsor her anger; they weren’t as big. People didn’t just disagreewith Dworkin, they hated her. To her detractors, she was thehorror of women’s lib personified, the angriest woman inAmerica.With the possible exception of the Shakers, it is difficult tothink of an American movement that has failed more spectacularlythan antipornography feminism. In the late 1970s, whena prominent faction of the women’s liberation movement—including Brownmiller, Dworkin, Steinem, Morgan, AudreLorde, the writer Grace Paley, and the poet Adrienne Rich—turned their attention to fighting pornography, porn was stillsomething marginalized, as opposed to what it is now: asource of inspiration for all of popular culture. (ConsiderJenna Jameson, implants, almost any reality television show,Brazilian bikini waxes, thong underwear, and go from there. )In her recent book, Women's Lives, Men's Laws, Dworkin’sfriend and colleague Catharine MacKinnon put it like this:“The aggressors have won. ”If the antiporn crusade was a losing battle, it was also acostly one: it divided, some would say destroyed, the women’s