Re-Collecting Andrea Dworkin’s Sexual Politics
From “Why Norman Mailer Refuses to Be the Woman He Is” to ‘Intercourse’
Here is the text of my paper that formed the basis for the presentation I delivered on the “Cultural, Political, and Social Movements” panel at the 14th Annual Alabama Communication Association (ACA) Conference, University of North Alabama, July 27, 2024.
The presentation covered peculiar distortions of Dworkin—from Mother Jones retitling her 1978 essay “A Battered Wife Survives” to “The Bruise That Doesn’t Heal” (what she viewed as “rather silly”) to part of Martin Duberman’s 2020 biography misremembering Dworkin’s 1973 essay “Why Norman Mailer Refuses to Be the Woman He Is” as “LGBTQ.” I have found at least a few such distortions in Duberman’s biography. These cases give a look into a larger, far more widespread phenomenon of misremembrance binding Dworkin’s writing. Apart from misremembrance, I discussed applications of Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory to Dworkin’s work. These included Burke’s uses of “irony” (1941) and, most significantly, his “dialectic of the scapegoat” (1945). My ongoing analysis situates Dworkin’s Woman Hating, first published in 1974, in relation to her earlier 1973 essay. Dworkin’s analysis in this early work and further developed critiques in her later works, especially Intercourse in 1987, give valuable insights in reading Woman Hating in retrospect.
In a comment technically “off-script,” I agreed with Dworkin that “The Bruise That Doesn’t Heal” looks silly, very much so, in contrast to “A Battered Wife Survives.” In another side comment, I noted how the dialectic of the scapegoat connects to Shulamith Firestone’s theory of the “dialectic of sex” in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex. Sexual and racial mythologies conform to a recognizable dynamic of ritualistic alienation followed by “rebirth.”
For the paper and presentation, I used some prior analysis and passages seen in my longer essay on Dworkin’s critique of Norman Mailer.
These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define.
- Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 1931
Fifty years later, Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, first published in 1974, seems as relevant today, if not more so, in the problem of any woman telling the truth about her own experiences as a body. Bodily narratives can become disfigured from binding—parts cut and cast aside, manipulated as if textual medical waste, in what Nikki Craft (2016) has sharply termed “editorial surgery.” To re-collect, then, would be to recognize how public memory can become distorted and distort—and, then, work to re-call what can be known of the truth. Following Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, in 1976, Dworkin already understood the power of distortion to paralyze thought and drain life, especially for the woman as writer. Dated June 15, 1978, an ever-applicable letter to her mother and father says, “I feel that by now you have had ample opportunity to see how things are distorted” (p. 114). The occasion was the forthcoming Mother Jones publication of her essay “A Battered Wife Survives,” retitled “The Bruise That Doesn’t Heal”—“a rather silly title I think,” Dworkin (1978/2019) adds—writing to her parents afraid that this piece, like others before, will embarrass them. Literate society has known so little of the woman who survives, an illiteracy that unites all people across class and race, knowing less so about the truth of her experiences—or, re-considering this chilling ignorance, desiring not to know.
In re-collecting Dworkin’s work, at least in our work to comprehend her radical feminist rhetoric, we may turn to rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke, who taught at Bennington College between 1942 and 1962, as Dworkin attended between 1964 and 1968. Searching, the only analysis that I have found applying Burke’s rhetorical theory to Dworkin’s work is Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin’s Art and Politics, written by Cindy Jenefsky, with Ann Russo, published in 1998. Even so, the moments with Burke’s concepts appear on just a few pages in the text. In the first, Jenefsky explains the concept of representative anecdote regarding Dworkin’s analysis of fairy tales in Woman Hating. Again, she notes Dworkin’s essentializing mode in contrast to what would be termed proportional, applying Burke in this distinction. Last, Jenfesky defines the concept of scene with reference to Burke’s dramatistic pentad. Reading Burke’s 1941 essay titled “Four Master Tropes” and his 1945 work titled A Grammar of Motives, however, I noticed other striking applications of Burke’s rhetorical theory—namely, what he terms “the dialectic of the scapegoat,” which, as we will see, applies remarkably well to Dworkin’s sex-class analysis. Burke (1945/1969) explains what constitutes the dialectic of the scapegoat in the following three parts, as numbered in his Grammar:
(1) an original state of merger, in that the iniquities are shared by both the iniquitous and their chosen vessel; (2) a principle of division, in that the elements shared in common are being ritualistically alienated; (3) a new principle of merger, this time in the unification of those whose purified identity is defined in dialectical opposition to the sacrificial offering. (p. 406)
For Burke, both the one inventing the scapegoat and the scapegoat hold an intertwined existence: originally merged, divided in the scapegoat as symbol, and finally merged in the act of the self that sacrifices the other. The two become symbolically divided but united in the invention and containing of the negative qualities—the burnt offering. “For the alienating of iniquities from the self to the scapegoat,” Burke (1945/1969) writes, “amounts to a rebirth of the self” (p. 407). Illustrating the dialectic of the scapegoat, Dworkin connects the way in which men invent women to men possessing women as vessels for male desire, which, throughout her work, articulates the landscape of the female condition. When men invent women in their image, they establish a sense of identity around this alienation of iniquity manifested through sexuality and enforced as gender: symbols of subjection. Inventing Eve in his image, Adam becomes reborn through her, put on display virtually everywhere, from the culture’s fairy tales to its pornography.
Illustrating the dialectic of the scapegoat, Dworkin connects the way in which men invent women to men possessing women as vessels for male desire, which, throughout her work, articulates the landscape of the female condition.
Irony in Burke’s “Four Master Tropes” connects to the above concept of the dialectic of the scapegoat. Burke (1941) writes: “True irony, humble irony, is based upon a sense of fundamental kinship with the enemy, as one needs him, is indebted to him, is not merely outside him as an observer but contains him within, being consubstantial with him” (p. 435). The self inventing the other exhibits this same relation of kinship—a need and indebtedness for one’s identity. “Identification as,” which can express an “identification against,” the self engaging in the occupation of the other, has differing implications than “identification with.” “This is the irony of Flaubert,” Burke (1941) continues, “when he recognizes that Madame Bovary is himself” (p. 435). Burke gives no further explanation of this one-line literary analysis, but, for those who have read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Burke’s observation is obvious. Dworkin confirms as much in her own analysis of Flaubert’s novel, one of the most splendid passages in her Intercourse. “He may have found distraction or the pleasures of male dominance in intercourse,” she (1987/2007) writes, “but he found his freedom elsewhere” (p. 141). Flaubert’s invention of Bovary demonstrates the alienating of iniquities from himself to her as his scapegoat, where his identity can be constructed against woman’s nonbeing. Most deliciously, however, he is the woman as he invented her. What is the woman in a man’s head, this fantasy of her in his image, if not the man himself fragmented by a ritualistic alienation, the self disembodied by desire for the other?
Writing to John Crowe Ransom, in a letter dated August 29, 1939, Burke explains the problem of representation by anecdote, terminology ever insufficient: “[T]he world is a riddle, hence cannot be discussed in a terminology free of inconsistency” (as cited in Tell, 2004, p. 46). More than being a riddle, the world is closer to the warp and woof of many riddles interwoven: a basket. One assumes mastery only to be enslaved to misunderstanding—the master ironically exposed as the slave. A moment from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons comes to mind. Riddles have a roominess about them: open rather than closed, consistent in their inconsistency, as Burke knew. “This which is mastered,” Stein (1914/1990) writes, “has so thin a space to build it all that there is plenty of room and yet is it quarreling, it is not and the insistence is marked” (p. 505). Biography as portraiture is not without its quarrels and ironies.
Reading a text can be a riddle, and Dworkin’s Woman Hating requires contextualization to be understood, going to its roots. Published before Woman Hating, Dworkin’s “Why Norman Mailer Refuses to Be the Woman He Is” appeared in the preview edition of OUT magazine in December 1973. Purposefully written without apostrophes and in limited capitalization, as maintained in the quotations below, this early work presents her developing analysis of sexual politics in a more compact form. In her critique of Mailer, Dworkin expresses disillusionment over his book released at the time: Mailer’s 1973 “biography” of Marilyn Monroe. She (1973) describes Mailer’s Marilyn as his “newest religious tract on manhood, balling, and Amerika,” “Dorians twisted soul finally revealed” (p. 10). His Marilyn, this statue made to his taste, tells the reader more about him than it does about her: a picture of the man in the woman according to his image. Here we have perhaps the earliest instance in Dworkin’s published writing of the Burkeian dialectic of the scapegoat: Flaubert revealed to be his Madame Bovary.
Dworkin first read Mailer at the age of sixteen, and, through him, she (1973) writes, “learned to love sex and adventure” (p. 10). Works like Mailer’s An American Dream (1965) appealed to the young Dworkin—then, at least. On her youthful love for “the mystique,” as Mailer fabricated it, Dworkin says (1973) she “had done the neat number of identifying with his male characters while living out the female scenario” (p. 11). In her identification with men over women, Dworkin had not been a woman-identified woman but a man-identified woman. The male-defined values she had internalized from Mailer and the counterculture diverged from those more pronounced in Dworkin’s 1973 critique and in her later philosophical thought.
This critique of Mailer focuses on how he has crafted the one-dimensional woman, who, in truth, reflects his own hollowness back at him. According to Dworkin, the man has artificed “a mystique of HIMSELF THE HERO AND HIS MANLINESS” (emphasis in original), “a continuing and endlessly repetitive saga of conquering and vanquishing the female foe” (p. 11). By inventing woman according to man’s image, Mailer possesses Marilyn; man possesses woman; he possesses her. Liberated from her love for Mailer, Dworkin writes:
when I understood that Mailer believed his women to be real women, and that therefore that did relate to me because of my biological womanhood, I was finally free—of the mystique, my place in it, and the love I had had for Norman Mailer. but one does not watch the death of an artist with detachment, one cannot abandon a teacher who has gone wrong, wronger, wrongest, without a great feeling of loss. and so, not surprisingly, I have thought a great deal about Mailer, and his art, and how he left it, and why. (pp. 11-12)
Through a male denial of female selfhood, in favor of their nonbeing, as Mailer constructs artifice in place of authenticity, he ironically negates himself at the moment of affirming his identity through female negation. In the process of seeking to possess womankind, his notion of making her “take it,” Mailer transitions, as Dworkin explains, “from rebellion and imagination to reaction and intransigence” (p. 10). The former qualities, the rebellious and imaginative forces, are essential to the artist; the latter ones mean paralysis and death. Dworkin continues:
there is a terrible logic and symmetry to Mailers way of being in the world. he rejects the women who live inside his personality, and he would annihilate the women outside of him—deny them selfhood because he must deny that part of himself. he rejects those other bearers of the female stigma, male homosexuals, where they live in his own personality, and he is overtly hostile to those who live outside of his body—deny them selfhood because he must deny that part of himself. he has opted for a reactionary identity, and the security of a closed, narrowly-defined, sexually unambiguous persona. (p. 12)
For Mailer, his sense of sex relative to the self has become an imprisoned expression of sex-role stereotyping, in the crudest sense—a great put-on, a drag, a minstrel show. Because he has bought stereotypes as the truth of sex, he has become a prisoner of it, the one-dimensional caricature Dworkin critiques revealed in Mailer’s Marilyn: his picture of Dorian Gray. The shell Mailer has crafted, which he sells as authentic, can never compare to what he could be, rather could have been—if he were to escape the bondage he mistakes for his freedom, were he to achieve being free of nonbeing. This “reactionary identity” comprises man’s attempt to seize from woman what Mary Daly (1973/1985) terms “the power of naming” (p. 8). When female existence becomes the stuff of male fantasy, a state of his false being through her falsified nonbeing, it denies woman’s selfhood. Dworkin expanded her analysis of men possessing women in Pornography and Intercourse. Interestingly, more than Woman Hating, Dworkin’s essay partly foreshadows Dworkin’s pivot from a concern with androgyny and sexual repression, most evident in the last chapter of Woman Hating, to a sharper rejection of sexual liberalism present in her later works. Still, the idealism of androgyny and “pansexuality,” with such emphasis on “human liberation,” remains prevalent in Dworkin’s analysis of Mailer as it does at the end of Woman Hating.
When female existence becomes the stuff of male fantasy, a state of his false being through her falsified nonbeing, it denies woman’s selfhood.
Martin Duberman’s Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary, published in 2020, briefly discusses Dworkin’s “Why Norman Mailer Refuses to Be the Woman He Is.” The passage goes from a paragraph at the bottom third of one page onto the top of the next. He (2020) writes that “she did now and then give a speech or write an article centered on LGBTQ issues,” followed by a few quotations from Dworkin’s piece (p. 73). Reading her piece in full, it does not seem “centered on LGBTQ issues,” but rather more focused on men’s domination of women that Duberman’s generalization serves to obscure beneath the shroud of “LGBTQ.” In his reading of Plato’s Theaetetus, Kendall R. Phillips observes that individuals can fit images to a mold, as in Plato’s “block of wax” analogy. “While forgetting is conceived as a kind of occlusion or even erasure, the process of ‘other-judging,’ or here misremembering,” Phillips (2012) writes, “constitutes an active process of making knowledge claims about the past that are in error” (p. 212). Thus, I argue that Duberman’s casting of Dworkin’s early work through an “LGBTQ” framing represents one case of misremembrance in his Andrea Dworkin. By contrast, the dialectic of the scapegoat deployed critically in Dworkin’s work, even in 1973, accounted for the dynamic of Flaubert as Bovary, here represented in Mailer as Monroe.
Dworkin was a woman who learned for her life against the supposed “givens,” including those of the “radical” left revealed as not so radical—at least, when politics concerns women. She experienced what may be termed serial disillusionment over typical male artificers—icons—from whom she drew great inspiration in art—two striking examples being Mailer, as discussed here, and, of course, Allen Ginsberg. Other literary influences were D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, both of whom she also grew disenchanted with, much as Mailer looked different—not rebellious and courageous but impotent and fearful—after she looked at him again. Dworkin’s body of work insists that we think and, in so doing, think again, even more, in moving toward integrity, not merely into the collaboration of integration. What has been left out, that unremarked but remarkable, is what must be found, beyond “the given.”
Art demands that artists live with difference, an ethic of integrity, not to be negated by false affirmation.
Learning for one’s life necessitates, as Dworkin (1973) describes it, not only creating but also engaging “a living world with all of its contradictions, tensions, and discrete personalities” (p. 12). For her, the artist does not inhabit others, possessing and colonizing them, as Flaubert to his Bovary and Mailer to his Monroe. Art demands that artists live with difference, an ethic of integrity, not to be negated by false affirmation. “Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human,” Dworkin (1987/2007) writes in Intercourse. “This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions” (p. 36). Perhaps this point, what I have learned from Dworkin past to present, this living being in one’s body and understanding others, has been widely neglected for half a century too long.
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References
Burke, K. (1941). Four master tropes. The Kenyon Review, 3(4), 421-438.
Burke, K. (1945/1969). A grammar of motives. University of California Press.
Craft, N. (2016, March 7). Altering Andrea: How John Stoltenberg performs editorial surgery on Dworkin’s sexual politics. The Papers of Nikki Craft.
Daly, M. (1973/1985). Beyond god the father: Toward a philosophy of women’s liberation. Beacon Press.
Duberman, M. (2020). Andrea Dworkin: The feminist as revolutionary. The New Press.
Dworkin, A. (1973, December). Why Norman Mailer refuses to be the woman he is. OUT, preview issue, 10-13.
Dworkin, A. (1974). Woman hating: A radical look at sexuality. Plume.
Dworkin, A. (1978, June 15/2019). Letter to mom and dad. In J. Fateman & A. Scholder (Eds.), Last days at hot slit: The radical feminism of Andrea Dworkin (pp. 113-115). Semiotext(e).
Dworkin, A. (1987/2007). Intercourse. Basic Books.
Phillips, K. R. (2010). The failure of memory: Reflections on rhetoric and public remembrance. Western Journal of Communication, 74(2), 208–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570311003680600
Stein, G. (1914/1990). Tender buttons. In C. Vechten (Ed.), Selected writings of Gertrude Stein. Vintage Books.
Tell, D. (2004). Burke’s encounter with Ransom: Rhetoric and epistemology in “Four Master Tropes.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 34(4), 33-54. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773940409391294