What does the Right offer to women? How does the Right mobilize women? Why is the Right succeeding in opposing women's rights? With the stark precision and forceful passion that characterize all of her work, Andrea Dworkin answers these timely questions. And by providing the first clear analysis of the impact on women of the Right's position on abortion, homosexuality, anti-Semitism, female poverty, and antifeminism, she demonstrates how the Right attempts both to exploit and to quiet women's deepest fears. — From the reverse cover.

Andrea Dworkin, once called "Feminism's Malcolm X," has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Now the book that she's best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century. Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men. (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to "all sex is rape" in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin's already radical persona.) In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse , Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs , discusses the circumstances of Dworkin's untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin's argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?

a rhetorically powerful argument about how the myths and ideals of femininity are harmful.

On Yom Kippur, Jews of antiquity would sacrifice two goats: one killed as an offering to a harsh and judging god, the other taken to the wilderness and turned loose, a carrier of the sins of the group. Throughout history, argues brilliant feminist critic Andrea Dworkin, women and Jews have been stigmatized as society's scapegoats.
In this stunning and provocative book, Dworkin brings her rigorous intellect to bear on the dynamics of scapegoating. Drawing upon history, philosophy, literature, and politics, she creates a terrifying picture of the workings of misogyny and anti-Semitism in the last millennium.
With examples that range from the Inquisition, when women were targeted as witches and Jews as heretics, to the terror of the Nazis, whose aggression was both race- and gender-motivated, Dworkin illustrates how and why women and Jews have been scapegoated and compares the civil inequality, prejudices, and stereotypes that have framed identity for both groups. Taking the state of Israel as a paradigm, Dworkin traces the growth of male dominance in societies both old and new -- resulting in the subordination of women and a racial or ethnic "other."
In Israel today, Palestinians and prostitutes are the new scapegoats: degraded, inferior, abject. Although the gentle Jewish martyrs of old have become modern Israeli warriors, women retain the stigmatized status of "weak Jews" who, when attacked, never fight back. This leads Dworkin to imagine a world in which women betray men of their own kind in order to develop and defend their own sovereignty. Ultimately, her book forces us to ask profound questions: Why do women continue to value their own lives less than those of the men theylove? Where is the line between justifiable self-defense and violence? Both an impassioned plea for women to challenge and destroy the author- ity of the men in their own group and a startling work of history, Scapegoat will forever change how we think about the patterns of behavior and belief that give rise to domination and oppression.

The novel is a first person narrative and has strong (but limited) autobiographical elements; there are significant areas of difference with Dworkin’s life. The childhood described is very similar to Dworkin’s; an adored father and a mother who was unwell for years. The narrator was brought up in a Jewish neighbourhood and describes the strict divisions between neighbourhoods and the changing nature of childhood games. The tone of the novel changes abruptly as it switches to adulthood with the narrator living with a girlfriend in New York’s Lower East Side. Both women are regular drug users; they earn money in a variety of ways, but mainly by selling themselves, to men and women. The men around them are predatory and they are beaten and raped at various times. The descriptions are bleak and often brutal. The descriptions of the surroundings in this novel are remarkably good and Dworkin does have a good descriptive mode; especially when describing squalor and bad food. The narrator also spends time in Europe (paralleling Dworkin’s time in The Netherlands). She writes and seems to start to find her voice, and meets and marries a man who is impotent. As he finds his confidence through her he becomes increasingly abusive and violent and she is seriously hurt. She manages to get back to the States and lives alone (we won’t mention the rats) in an apartment in the Lower East Side, where she writes. The end of the novel revolves around struggles to get published. It could not be described as an upbeat novel and a number of reviewers have focussed on the abuse and violence, missing inner meanings. I sat back at one point and the light suddenly came on (It took a while!) and realised what was going on.

Eight short stories by the author of WOMAN HATING and OUR BLOOD.
These are just the beginnings:
"it began quite possibly with Nancy Drew"
— the simple story of a lesbian girlhood
"first i gave up men. it wasnt easy but it sure as hell as obvious."
— bertha schneiders existencial edge
"there was a woman. she was a big woman and she was a sad woman. she had been in her life to the mountains and to the oceans. she had seen the sand. she did not got to the desert."
— how seasons pass
"bertha schneider, nearly 31, was too disturbed to have any friends. she was like all other schlubs running around out there. loss was driving her crazy."
— some awful facts, recounted by bertha schneider
"morning broke. I mean, fell right on its goddamn ass and broke. no walking barefoot if you care about yr feet, kid."
— the new womans broken heart
"bertha schneider had once been a woman and was now an androgyne. as a woman she had lain for 8 years on her back with her legs open as the multitudes passed by leaving gifts of sperm and spit. now as an androgyne her legs were still open but at the same time they ran, jumped, swan, stood up, skipped, and squatted."
— the wild cherries of lust
"as she kissed his neck, bertha schneider remembered her unrelenting sadness."
— bertha schneiders unrelenting sadness
"she was slit in the middle, a knife into the abdomen, his head rose up from the bloody mess, indistinguishable from her own inner slime. this was his birth. success at least. her 40th birthday came and went."
— the slit

If Andrea Dworkin is the Malcolm X of feminism, then this novel is her version of his autobiography. . . . She is brilliant, her anger is a polished and dangerous instrument, and even some of the people she's marked as enemies can hope she finds her way. –– Madison Smartt Bell, Chicago Tribune

A collection of Dworkin's early speeches.

Reflections on writing and writers, freedom of speech and censorship, pornography, violence against women, and the politics of our time.

This volume presents a study of the damaging effect of pornography and its ramifications on society.

Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy, Dworkin was a philosopher outside and against the academy who wrote with a singular, apocalyptic urgency.
brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. The collection charts her path from the militant primer
(1974), to the formally complex polemics of
(1979) and
(1987) and the raw experimentalism of her final novel
(1990). It also includes “Goodbye to All This” (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript that calls out her feminist adversaries, and “My Suicide” (2005), a despairing long-form essay found on her hard drive after her death.

Andrea Dworkin, once called “Feminism’s Malcolm X,” has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Now the book that she’s best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century.
enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women’s subordination to men. (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to “all sex is rape” in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin’s already radical persona.) In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of
, Ariel Levy, the author of
, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin’s untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin’s argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?

Andrea Dworkin, once called "Feminism's Malcolm X," has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Now the book that she's best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century. Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men. (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to "all sex is rape" in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin's already radical persona.) In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse, Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin's untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin's argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?