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Carol Platt Liebau - Columnist

Carol Platt Liebau is editorial director and a senior member of tOR and CRO editorial boards. She is an attorney, political analyst and commentator based in San Marino, CA, and has appeared on the Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN, Orange County News Channel, Cox Cable and a variety of radio programs throughout the United States. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Carol Platt Liebau also served as the first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her web log can be found at CarolLiebau.blogspot.com [go to Liebau index]

May Andrea Dworkin Rest in Peace
...Along with the Man-Hating Feminism She Propounded
[Carol Platt Liebau] 4/18/05

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction,
the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.
- Andrea Dworkin (9/26/46-4/9/05)

Andrea Dworkin was one of America’s most successful radical feminists in an age when radical feminism was, at least for a time, the rage. Her books were widely read on college campuses and her critiques were taken seriously by many, not only in the academy but in the popular press, as well.

Perhaps the news last week of Dworkin’s death at the tragically early age of 58 heralds the end of an era. We can only hope. Her brand of man-hating feminism resulted in the poisoning of relationships between the sexes and, ironically, her extremism only hurt the cause of the exploited women whose cause she claimed to champion.

Like too many radical feminists, Dworkin’s views on men seem to have been shaped by her own negative experiences with them. Growing up in Cherry Hill, N.J., she made frequent trips to New York, subsidized, she said, by finding "some stupid man . . . and basically exchang[ing] sex for money." When, as a college student, she was arrested during a Vietnam War protest, she reported that she had endured a degrading body cavity search conducted by male doctors. And later, she was married to a Dutch anarchist, whom, she asserted, beat her and burned her with cigarettes.

Certainly, any woman who had experienced such ill-treatment would have “issues” with men. But Andrea Dworkin universalized her own psychodrama, projected it onto American society at large, imputed to all men the brutality and wickedness of her own male malefactors, and then tried to persuade other women that her twisted views about men were, in fact, correct. Not only was Dworkin’s approach deeply unjust – for, of course, there are many good and noble men, who cherish, protect and care for women – but, in the end, it rendered Dworkin totally ineffective, except as a provocateur capable of temporarily shocking mainstream America.

Perhaps Dworkin’s best known insights centered on the harm visited upon women (particularly the most easily exploited women) by pornography. Indeed, for Dworkin, all heterosexual male-female relationships were reducible to the sex act – ironically, a complaint often leveled against unenlightened men. But she went on to advocate a radical and overblown “civil rights” regime to address the pornography problem, which would have allowed women “harmed” by pornography to sue its publishers.

And, of course, many of Dworkin’s appeals were bound to fall on deaf ears. Dworkin built her career writing about the relationship between the sexes with unyielding venom – “Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice” became one of her best known assertions. Having spent years analogizing marriage (and equating consensual sex) to rape, it’s not surprising that Dworkin never attracted mainstream support even for women exploited by pornography – her extremism made it easy for her opponents to dismiss her.

In the end, what’s most notable about Dworkin’s writings is what’s missing: Any acknowledgement of the deep friendship and disinterested love that can, and does, exist between men and women – and any recognition of the joy and fulfillment women gain by loving and caring for a husband and family. Ultimately, the absence of that understanding makes Andrea Dworkin a figure more to be pitied than blamed.

Dworkin once wrote: “By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it.”

It is profoundly sad to think of anyone living in such a perpetual state of fear, with such an eternal sense of victimization. It is even sadder to realize that Dworkin’s talent and the ideological support of fellow radical feminists, academics and writers combined to form a witch’s brew of sexual politics that poisoned many male-female relationships in America, with damage that persists to this day.

One can only hope that Andrea Dworkin rests in peace, no longer afraid. And that with her, some of the radical, man-hating radical feminism that she espoused likewise can be laid to rest. tOR

Columnist Carol Platt Liebau is a political analyst, commentator and theOneRepublic / CaliforniaRepublic.org editorial director based in San Marino, CA. Ms. Liebau also served as the first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her web log can be found at CarolLiebau.blogspot.com

copyright 2005

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