Dworkin Being Whitewashed?Cathy Young
thinks so.
Whatever her defenders may say, Dworkin was a relentless preacher of hatred toward men ("Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman" -- Our Blood, 1976, p. 20), masculinity, and male sexuality -- which she described as "intrinsically drunk on its contempt for all life, but especially for women's lives" (Letters from a War Zone, 1989, p. 14). Yes, she apparently had genuine and even warm affection for some men in her own life, and spent her last 20 years with a male companion she eventually married (John Stoltenberg, a MacDworkinite feminist and practically a poet of male self-loathing). But no one would absolve a male misogynist on the grounds that he loved his mother and sister, or had a devoted wife who embraced his ideology.More important, from the whitewashers' point of view, is that Dworkin was also relentlessly anti-American. Indeed in the one of her books that I read in the late 1980s, she still referred to this country as "Amerika" which I found rather quaint.
