Though she tempered her contempt for establishment stupidity with a naughtily blunt sense of humor and a deep-down belief that people could examine their ethics and change, her reputation always preceded her work, and she knew it. Dworkin was widely regarded as sexless and “anti-sex,” feminism’s image problem incarnate, hated by various denominations of liberals and-except when she was campaigning against pornography-conservatives alike. Out of the fray emerged the idea that she believed all sex was rape, which, along with her frizzy hair, dumpy overalls, and uncompromising positions on sex work and sadomasochism, came to epitomize radical feminist hostility throughout the nineteen-eighties and nineties. “I will check back in a decade to see what you all think,” she wrote in a scathing letter to the Times, in 1987, responding to its pan of the first edition of “Intercourse.” “In the meantime, I suggest you examine your ethics to see how you managed to avoid discussing anything real or even vaguely intelligent about my work and the political questions it raises.” “Overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print,” reviewers seemed to deny her the authority of her personal experience of rape, prostitution, and domestic violence, which they did not understand, and to wave aside the literary criticism in the book, which they also did not understand.

“I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers,” she wrote in the preface to the second edition of “Intercourse,” the work that presented her alienating theory of heterosexual sex as a violation, “a use and an abuse simultaneously,” and “the key to women’s lower human status,” among other descriptions. Apologies to Andrea Dworkin, who did not like book critics and who, fourteen years after her death, from myocarditis, at fifty-eight, is being subjected to a round of us again.

Woman hating andrea