PrintThe Pity of Feminism
There is something achingly sad about the life of Andrea Dworkin, 58, the feminist firebrand who died April 9 of undisclosed causes. Daughter to a 'committed socialist' Jewish postal worker, she went to progressive schools and lived as an activist from childhood. She first hit the headlines in 1965 when she reported experiencing humiliating body cavity searches at a women's detention center after arrest at the United Nations for protesting the Vietnam War.
Dworkin earned money from prostitution, and suffered an abusive marriage to a Dutch political radical. A prolific and shamelessly inflammatory writer, she achieved notoriety in the 1980s from her campaign against pornography. She reported being raped in a movie theater at the age of nine, and drugged and raped by staff in a Paris hotel in 1999. Morbidly obese, she never mentioned her real problem, according to Camille Paglia, which was food. Now she is dead.
Perhaps her problem was not food but her left—wing belief system. In 'Investigation: Shameless and Loveless' British philosopher Roger Scruton reviews the four decades since 'sexual intercourse began' in the sexual revolution. Maybe Andrea Dworkin became so liberated that she had lost any sense of sexual shame, a concept that 'Max Scheler described... as a Schutzgef
