Andrea Dworkin's "women hating"

[thefinerthingsinlife]

Has anyone read it? Is it any good?

[LadyOfTheManor]

I haven't read this, but I have read a lot of her work, I like her very much.

[Beachcomber]

I read it a long time ago. It was one of the first feminist theory books I read. The book blew me away and made me understand why I was a feminist. Dworkin's writing style is fantastic because she is very very clear and easy to understand. She deconstructs complicated concepts that we are not encouraged to question, indeed concepts that are 'not open for debate' in patriarchy IYSWIM.

Gosh you are making me want to reread it now.

[thefinerthingsinlife]

I have her book Porography that i'm using to write my essay and I'm enjoying that. I will have to add this to my list of books to get.

[JulianReal]

I've read most of Andrea's work. I've still got "Scapegoat" and "Life and Death" to go.

What I'd like to say about Woman Hating is that it has some really excellent parts and some parts that Andrea herself later critiqued. That self-critique appears in the notes of a book called "Without Apology: The Art and Politics of Andrea Dworkin", by Cindy Jenefsky. Here's a link to that:

www.amazon.co.uk/Without-Apology-Dworkins-Politics-Polemics/dp/0813318262?tag=mumsnet&ascsubtag=mnforum-21

I highly recommend the first two sections of the book on Fairy Tales and Pornography. I would caution people about some of the latter section (on androgyny, incest, and bestiality), as it has not only been greatly misunderstoodand used by her enemies against Andrea to discredit everything she ever wrote, earlier in that very book and since that bookbut is also not, I believe, how she would speak about those issues were she to do it over again. To be clear, she doesn't/didn't advocate for abuses of power with children or animals--ever. She was, as many know and as she has written, a survivor of child molestation and rape. She has, in her feminist writings, always been crystal clear about what was wrong and political about each.

Alas, with non-internet published writings, once it's committed to paper, there it is for all to read, no opportunities for major edits, usually.

As I recall, she admits to being a little too uncritical and accepting of aspects of Freudian analysis at the time she wrote the latter section. But what she has to say is, in a paragraph as I recall, in the Jenefsky book, for those who want to read more.

Cheers. Thanks for being such a loving place to radical feminist writers and activists. It's such a rare treat on the internet, as I'm sure you well know.

Julian (I help keep up the official Dworkin websites with Nikki Craft)

[HerBEggs]

Didn't she write one called right wing women as well? I think that would be really interesting