Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin by Andrea Dworkin

Mar 14, 2019 Corvus rated it it was amazing

Shelves: women-and-feminism

Content Note: This review contains mention of many kinds of abuse of women that I won't specifically list for worry of leaving something out as well as suicide.

I couldn't write a review without an analysis of Andrea Dworkin and everything that has developed since her contributions to the world. Dworkin is one of the most passionate, honest, and brave writers I have ever read. I had to take my time reading this book even though Dworkin's writing sucks me in. The book is extremely intense with lot ...more

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May 01, 2022 Mansoor rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: evolution-deniers

درکین دشمنِ چندتایی چیز بد بود. از آن طرف اما با هرچه چیز خوب هست هم سر دشمنی داشت

در ایدئولوژی فمینیسم خوشبختی زنان و رضایتشان از زندگی هیچ محلی از اعراب ندارد
"I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together."

ایدئولوژی زن‌ستیز ترنس از زیر عبای فمینیسم بیرون آمده
"Androgynous mythology provides us with a model which does not use polar role definitions, where the definitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male = good, female= bad, man =

درکین دشمنِ چندتایی چیز بد بود. از آن طرف اما با هرچه چیز خوب هست هم سر دشمنی داشت

در ایدئولوژی فمینیسم خوشبختی زنان و رضایتشان از زندگی هیچ محلی از اعراب ندارد
"I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together."

ایدئولوژی زن‌ستیز ترنس از زیر عبای فمینیسم بیرون آمده
"Androgynous mythology provides us with a model which does not use polar role definitions, where the definitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male = good, female= bad, man = human, woman = other. Androgyny myths are multisexual mythological models. They go well beyond bisexuality as we know it in the scenarios they suggest for building community, for realizing the fullest expression of human sexual possibility and creativity.
Androgyny as a concept has no notion of sexual repression built into it. Where woman is carnality, and carnality is evil, it stands to reason (hail reason! ) that woman must be chained, whipped, punished, purged; that fucking is shameful, forbidden, fearful, guilt- ridden. Androgyny as the basis of sexual identity and community life provides no such imperatives. Sexual freedom and freedom for biological women, or all persons “female,” are not separable. That they are different, and that sexual freedom has priority, is the worst of sexist hypes. Androgyny can show the way to both. It may be the one road to freedom open to women, men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us."

این پاراگراف به‌خوبی اغراض و انگیزه‌ها و نقطه‌نظر ایدئولوژی فمینیسم را عیان می‌کند
"We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions of male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to destroy the structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws: all of the images, institutions, and structural mental sets which define women as hot wet fuck tubes, hot slits." ...more

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May 18, 2019 Megan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: feminist, dyke-lit, sex-wars, gender, women-and-horror, on-writing, ha-ha, memoir

Tenacious, ferocious, exhausting, brazen, grim, provoking, lucid, lurid, stirring, dogmatic, painful, artful, riveting, boom: I'm here for Dworkin's writing, and this is a fine assortment of it, ranging from letters to her parents to excerpts from unpublished essays and novels, along with well-chosen selections from her most infamous texts. There is much to appreciate in this body of work, and plenty to object to as well. She was a force--her audacious fearlessness necessarily covering over an i ...more

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Aug 28, 2019 Kitty rated it it was amazing

Shelves: political

Might start recommending this as a starter to Dworkin. It has bits and pieces of all of her work, speeches, fiction, and a previously unpublished essay My Suicide. I wish so badly things had gone differently. This collection is a much more multifaceted look at Dworkin instead of the different one-dimensional representations she is presented as in different places. A complicated woman.

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Mar 26, 2019 Moved to Library Thing adaorhell rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019, books-i-own, ff, given-away, sex-and-sexuality, jtrb

Please let me die.

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Jan 16, 2022 Esther Friedlander rated it it was amazing

Andrea Dworkin was one of the most powerful writers of the 20th century, maybe ever. There is no way to describe the way she writes. It is so powerful and so painful. She speaks to me like no one else can.

This is a wonderful selection of her work. So happy to see her "I Want A Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape" speech included. Underappreciated and absolutely phenomenal speech. Also loved the inclusion of the androgyny chapter of Woman Hating. Fateman and Scholder did a wonde ...more

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Oct 02, 2019 Sarah rated it really liked it

This is a harsh book to read! OMG. I read it pretty quickly though--it's immersive and honestly not the type of book I wanted to linger over. I'm sort of fascinated with Andrea Dworkin, but not in the sense that I would espouse her beliefs, or agree with (most of) the things she says. The subtitle on this book says "The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin"--but she doesn't actually get into her thoughts about trans women, and I think she was a radical feminist in the original sense of taking her This is a harsh book to read! OMG. I read it pretty quickly though--it's immersive and honestly not the type of book I wanted to linger over. I'm sort of fascinated with Andrea Dworkin, but not in the sense that I would espouse her beliefs, or agree with (most of) the things she says. The subtitle on this book says "The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin"--but she doesn't actually get into her thoughts about trans women, and I think she was a radical feminist in the original sense of taking her feminism to an extreme of misandry. Which is pretty unusual actually, and can be sort of exciting to read. She had lots of controversial opinions which are covered here, the most contentious probably being that heterosexual sex (PIV as people say!), amount to rape due to the power imbalance between men and women. Obviously its not that simple, and she expounds on this idea until its truly wearying. She also writes extensively about rape, sexual assault and domestic violence.
The book is excerpts from her books, plus a couple of speeches she gave (one at a men's rally where she makes a plea for them to stop rape for 24hrs--better than it sounds!). Her polemics against pornography are honestly kind of compelling. I don't agree with the assertion that pornography teaches men to rape--at all--nor do I think research supports that idea. But she does get to the bottom of a nagging feeling that women might have who've been exposed to really explicit or violence pornography--mainly that there is something self negating about it. I think that self negation might be more worthy of investigation than the porn itself, but Dworkin really immerses herself in porn, and as a reader you wind up wallowing in these really abject images, and being forced to analyze their creation, or the market that supports it.
With respect to sex she basically demanded that men leave their penises out of it---that this would remedy the sexual script that had caused so much misery for women.
I'm glad I read this. I had tried to read Intercourse, and failed years ago. Her writing can be difficult--it's pretty stark and nihilistic, although at times entertaining, such as the piece where she bids farewell to all the leftist liberals who she feels have sold out or capitulated on their radical ideals (mainly other writers, but also any sex positive feminist of the day)--and that piece made me laugh out loud.
She strikes me as a narcissistic person, and she clearly can't imagine any women actually enjoying sex--so if you take free will and sexual desire out of the equation where sex is concerned between men and women---that's the perspective she's writing from. She is also prone to really lurid and lengthy descrptions of her own sexual assaults, which are difficult to read but also must have been agony to write. Strangely the book ends with a suicide tract she wrote (she didn't commit suicide but Johanna Fateman's foreword tells you this essay devastated her partner after her death in 2002)--wherein she confesses the worst thing she ever did was to beat her dog when she was a battered woman in her 20s. So--not a happy book and a terribly grim ending. And yet! I enjoyed it.

My sense of Dworkin is that she was a true Marxist feminist revolutionary. I think working on the President's Commission on Obscenity Pornography (the Meese Report)--which aimed to treat pornography as a violation of women's civil rights, was a huge turning point for her in how she was accepted (or rather completely rejected and abandoned) by the women's movement. OF course she must had high hopes of having some lasting impact on her lifelong war against porn and sexual violence, but the work really drew a line in the sand between Dworkin and the changing tides of feminism after the second wave, which was becoming more sex positive and trying to acknowledge women's sexual agency. The work she and Catharine McKinnon did there really caused mainstream feminism to totally write her off, which must have been difficult and painful for her. I find her a pretty tragic figure honestly.
At any rate, she writes really well, and she's definitely an accessible intellectual if you are interested in some very radical feminist writing that really, really hates men. ...more

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Mar 23, 2020 Kathleen rated it it was amazing

“Men of the Right and men of the Left have an undying allegiance to prostitution as such, regardless of their theoretical relationship to marriage. The Left sees the prostitute as the free, public woman of sex, exciting because she flaunts it, because of her brazen availability. The Right sees in the prostitute the power of the bad woman of sex, the male's use of her being his dirty little secret. The old pornography industry was a right-wing industry: secret money, secret sin, secret sex, secre “Men of the Right and men of the Left have an undying allegiance to prostitution as such, regardless of their theoretical relationship to marriage. The Left sees the prostitute as the free, public woman of sex, exciting because she flaunts it, because of her brazen availability. The Right sees in the prostitute the power of the bad woman of sex, the male's use of her being his dirty little secret. The old pornography industry was a right-wing industry: secret money, secret sin, secret sex, secret promiscuity, secret buying and selling of women, secret profit, secret pleasure not only from sex but also from the buying and selling. The new pornography industry is a left-wing industry: promoted especially by the boys of the sixties as simple pleasure, lusty fun, public sex, the whore brought out of the bourgeois (sic) home into the streets for the democratic consumption of all men; her freedom, her free sexuality, is as his whore--and she likes it. It is her political will as well as her sexual will; it is liberation. The dirty little secret of the left-wing pornography industry is not sex but commerce.

The new pornography industry is held, by leftist males, to be inherently radical. Sex is claimed by the Left as a leftist phenomenon; the trade in women is most of sex. The politics of liberation are claimed as indigenous to the Left by the Left; central to the politics of liberation is the mass-marketing of material that depicts women being used as whores. The pimps of pornography are hailed by leftists as saviors and savants. Larry Flynt has been proclaimed a savior of the counterculture, a working-class hero, and even, in a full-page advertisement in The New York Times signed by distinguished leftist literati, an "American Dissident" persecuted as Soviet dissidents are. Hugh Hefner is viewed as a pioneer of sexual freedom who showed, in the words of columnist Max Lerner, "how the legislating of sexuality could be fought, how the absurd anti-play and anti-pleasure ethic could be turned into a stylish hedonism and a lifeway which includes play and playfulness along with work. Lerner also credits Hefner with being a precursor of the women's movement.

On the Left, the sexually liberated woman is the woman of pornography. Free male sexuality wants, has a right to, produces, and consumes pornography because pornography is pleasure. Leftist sensibility promotes and protects pornography because pornography is freedom. The pornography glut is bread and roses for the masses. Freedom is the mass-marketing of woman as whore. Free sexuality for the woman is in being massively consumed, denied an individual nature, denied any sexual sensibility other than that which serves the male. Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, organized crime syndicates, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too” (156-157).

“Goodbye to stupid feminist academics who romanticize prostitution and to stupid feminist magazine editors who romanticize pornography and fetishism and sadomasochism. And especially goodbye to stupid feminist writers who romanticize rituals of degradation and symbols of inferiority. Oh, and incidentally, goodbye to all you feminists who go to bars and concerts but won’t buy books. Goodbye to all this, all them, all you” (215).

“Intercourse does not narrate my experience to measure it against Norma Mailer’s or D.H. Lawrence’s.
The first-person is embedded in the way the book is built. I use Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Flaubert not as authorities but as examples. I use them; I cut and slice into them in order to exhibit them; but the authority behind the book—behind each and every choice—is mine. In formal terms, then, Intercourse is arrogant, cold, and remorseless. You, the reader, will not be looking at me, the girl; you will be looking at them. In Intercourse I created an intellectual and imaginative environment in which you can see them. The very fact that I usurp their place—make them my characters—lessens the unexamined authority that goes not with their art but with their gender. I love the literature these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not. Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they know more about women than we know about ourselves. And I do not believe that they know more about intercourse. Habits of deference can be broken, and it is up to writers to break them. Submission can be refused; and I refuse it” (229-230).

“There has always been a peculiar irrationality to all the biological arguments that supposedly predetermine the inferior social status of women. Bulls mount cows and baboons do whatever; but human females do not have estrus or go into heat. The logical inference is not that we are always available for mounting but rather that we are never, strictly speaking, ‘available.’ Nor do animals have cultures; nor do they determine in so many things what they will do and how they will do them and what the meaning of their own behavior is. Only humans face the often complicated reality of having potential and having to make choices based on having potential. We are not driven by instinct, at least not much. We have possibilities, and we make up meanings as we go along. The meanings we create or learn do not exist only in our heads, in ineffable ideas. Our meanings also exist in our bodies—what we are, what we do, what we physically feel, what we physically know; and there is no personal psychology that is separate from what the body has learned about life. Yet when we look at the human condition, including the condition of women, we act as if we are driven by biology or some metaphysically absolute dogma. We refuse to recognize our possibilities because we refuse to honor the potential humans have, including human women, to make choices. Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?” (254-255). ...more

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Jan 04, 2019 Theresa rated it really liked it

I have read all of her books (in fact I used to use some of them in my Women's Studies classes) and since this is a compilation of her work, I consider that I have read it. ...more

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Jan 24, 2020 Elizabeth rated it really liked it

Last summer, I picked up the new Andrea Dworkin essay collection Last Days at Hot Slit (2019) and was surprised to find my alma mater featured.

In a speech Dworkin gave in New York in 1975, titled “The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door,” she describes a gang-rape that happened at Notre Dame in 1974, offering it as one of many examples of how male-founded and male-controlled institutions (such as the university and the justice system) are ultimately loyal to male interests.

“The girl” Hesburgh re ...more

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Aug 27, 2019 Darn Arckerman rated it it was amazing

25th birthday present from a great friend, only got to read it late in the year. I love the Dworkinite community. Andrea-heads will pass around a book like this like the sacred text in a Brecht play, and it doesn't always read like a revelation, but I do always feel like I'm keeping some important strange little part of the world alive. It's so common in these circles to project a personal relationship onto this author, and this anthology's editor Johanna Fateman makes it even easier by slipping 25th birthday present from a great friend, only got to read it late in the year. I love the Dworkinite community. Andrea-heads will pass around a book like this like the sacred text in a Brecht play, and it doesn't always read like a revelation, but I do always feel like I'm keeping some important strange little part of the world alive. It's so common in these circles to project a personal relationship onto this author, and this anthology's editor Johanna Fateman makes it even easier by slipping a couple of Dworkin's letters to her parents into the book between significant texts from her life's work. Dworkin's like the Outline: She's not for everyone; she's for me.

Fateman provides pretty good background on Dworkin in the introduction, in which she also disowns Dworkin just enough and in just vague enough terms that she can't be held accountable for the kinds of statements that still make good people despise Dworkin ("The Left cannot have its whores and its politics, too" is in here), but by the same token, a reader doesn't really get a sense for what the secondary "literature" has struggled with and against in Dworkin. Fateman couldn't be more right, though, when she points out how often Dworkin is taken to mean the exact opposite of what she clearly means in context.

I found the stereotype of Dworkin's pessimism, perfected in the infamous all-sex-is-rape misinterpretation of her book Intercourse, wonderfully contradicted when I realized that Dworkin is one of the most optimistic writers/speakers on issues like rape and abuse that I've ever encountered. She fits perfectly into the socialist tradition she seems to have inherited from Marcuse by way of Firestone. She sees injustice fold further injustice into itself, assimilate its own challenges for its own purposes, and yet she continues to see in every new depth of atrocity all the greater potential for revolutionary change, in every new woman who escapes her batterer husband a new potential warrior for liberation. Speaking of the Outline, the line Leah Finnegan has cited to demonstrate Dworkin's sense of humor, that "men will have to give up their precious erections" is in here. I think her line about woman-hating male authors is even funnier: "So what do you say; they're just so fucking filled with hate they can't do anything else or feel anything else or write anything else? I mean, do they ever look at the fucking moon?"

Far from any continuity with the kind of trans-hating "radfems" or "cultural feminists", who I think Sophie Lewis rightly identifies as opportunistic usurpers of the Second Wave tradition, Dworkin insists on abolishing men and women as such, manhood and womanhood, and muses about the possibilities opened up by "androgyny". I've seen people pull quotes of hers entirely out of place and onto twitter, like the one about how "The Israelis my guys", when her essay on Israel in this book makes it explicitly clear that Dworkin is "not a Zionist and never was". Unfortunately, she's a good writer. She implicitly takes her own father as a model in how he performed a type of self-criticism, listing his anti-Black prejudices to his daughter and cutting each one of them down in front of her. She confronts her own and her community's history of anti-Arab racism head-on and I think holds up her own ambivalent feelings about the Jewish state (including the haunting reminder that "the Cambodians had Cambodia and it didn’t help them much") as a warning for victims of violence who know its power well and might be tempted by it.

She doesn't even let her liberal childhood self off the hook. When she tells the story about how, at eleven years old, she got into a shouting match with her Holocaust-survivor Hebrew school teacher because he told the class they should consider themselves Jews first, Americans second, and citizens of the world or human beings last and little Andrea told him that the exact opposite was true, that the only way Jews would ever be safe was if people considered themselves fellow citizens of the world first, members of a secular democracy next, and part of their ancient tribe last, the writer Dworkin puts her preferred spelling of "Amerika" and "Amerikan" into the mouth of the child she's recalling being long before that girl read Kafka and developed her own idiosyncratic critique of what she came to call the "Immovable Punctuation Typography Structure". By the time she gets through her witness of the horrors committed against Palestinians in the name of the country, the "abject" condition of Jewish women in Israel, and the real joke, that "[i]t turns out that I am a woman first, second, and last", you can get the sense that she doesn't disagree with her old teacher that she has the blood of Jews on her hands; she just sees a lot more blood there than he did.

Dworkin hates herself early and often. Her self-destructive fantasies usually stall at the individually suicidal level, but as Fateman draws out by giving this collection the title (Last Days at Hot Slit) that Dworkin initially intended for the book that eventually became Woman Hating, an apocalyptic vein runs throughout.

I read The World Turned Upside Down right before this, and seeing how a belief in the looming Second Coming motivated so many seventeenth-century English radicals primed me to pay special attention to the thread in Dworkin that holds nuclear annihilation as the logical endpoint of male domination. I don't think it's fair to say that every generation of radicals imagines the end of the world and they all turn out to be wrong. For a lot of ethical Protestants, Christ did return: in them. The kingdom they established was capitalism, and it might not last a thousand years, it might already have ended, but we're at least living in its ruins. Human beings might not evaporate entirely in the Sixth Great Extinction, but the world has already ended for countless other species, and it's hard to imagine the world as we know it will last another decade.

As far as Dworkin goes, she may have escaped the atomic bombs. For now, we continue to as well. But she lived to see the inauguration of the unipolar world, the collapse of one nuclear empire and the hegemony of another, and after her death, it's obvious that Dworkin lost her battle for humanity. Not just because the new pornocrats have achieved heights of power, exploitation, and propaganda that Hefner, Guccione, and Flynt could've never dreamed of, but also because her prophesy came true that reactionary masochism would find synthesis with reactionary sadism in the generation of hack writers who came after her. The world is now full of the mutant Miller-Genet hybrids that she saw coming.

All the more reason to make sure all those glamorous personal battles she got into don't disappear into the ether. Take a couple minutes today to listen to Dworkin tell a reporter about the time she threatened to murder Allen Ginsberg because he harassed her about how much he loved raping children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx714...

She calls his style of pedophile apology "very Gemini"! Project with me! ...more

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Mar 24, 2019 Reana Kovalcik rated it it was amazing

A great Dworkin primer, anthology, that allows her to be at once human, feminist, female, writer, poet, and artist. This compilation explores the depth and breadth of her work in a way that puts the "never read her but know we oppose her" critics to shame. Well organized and an excellent introduction by the editors. ...more

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May 01, 2021 Keely rated it really liked it

In Last Days at Hot Slit, editors Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder present excerpts from the work of feminist Andrea Dworkin, well-known in the 1970s-90s for her outspokenness against rape and her strong anti-pornography and anti-prostitution views. Dworkin, a battered woman and victim of rape herself, was audacious and uncompromising in speaking out against the patriarchal systems that tacitly condone violence against women and treat them as second-class humans. Dworkin is challenging and probl In Last Days at Hot Slit, editors Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder present excerpts from the work of feminist Andrea Dworkin, well-known in the 1970s-90s for her outspokenness against rape and her strong anti-pornography and anti-prostitution views. Dworkin, a battered woman and victim of rape herself, was audacious and uncompromising in speaking out against the patriarchal systems that tacitly condone violence against women and treat them as second-class humans. Dworkin is challenging and problematic in some of the ways she writes about men and violence. And Dworkin's stances on pornography and prostitution have made her passé with today's Third Wave feminists, who tend to see possibilities for women's empowerment in both those things. The fact that Last Days at Hot Slit is the only Dworkin book available through my library system is evidence of just how buried she and her feminist legacy have become. However, in her introduction to the collection, Johanna Fateman makes a case for revisiting and reconsidering the work of this flawed but influential thinker.

I came away from the collection convinced that Fateman is right: There's absolutely something here that shouldn't be buried and forgotten. I found Dworkin's writing a little uneven in places, but poetic and shining with clarity in others. The fiction excerpts, in particular, failed to connect with me, but I found her nonfiction writing engaging and searing in its truth telling. The essay "I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape," which she delivered as a speech to a men's conference in 1983, is downright electrifying. To put it mildly, it took some serious chutzpah to say the convicting things she did to an audience of 500 men. And "Goodbye to All This" is a first-class "f--- you" to both patriarchy and the emerging "girl" feminism that was starting to overtake the the more overtly political and outspoken women's liberation of the seventies. I thought Dworkin's instincts toward intersectionality were interesting, too. At times, she misses the mark and seems to engage in appropriation in the way she links modern Western women's oppression to American slavery, or to Chinese foot binding practices. But at other times, she seems spot on in her understanding of American patriarchy as a system built on a toxic foundation of both sexism and racism. I also got the distinct feeling that Dworkin could have told us in 1988 that a Donald Trump (or someone very like him) was coming for us. Lucky her, she died in 2005, so didn't live to see it--but I think she wouldn't have been a bit surprised to see an avowed sexual predator elected president.

In any case, I came away a fan. I'd particularly like to read Woman Hating, Letters from a War Zone, and Right Wing Women now. Unfortunately, those are the very out-of-print tomes that seem to be going for $50-$175 on Amazon. I may have to settle for the excerpts for now. ...more

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Jul 05, 2019 Ryan Coleman rated it it was amazing

one of the best writers I have ever read. Andrea Dworkin's prose is incendiary. Clear as glass and just as cutting. she wrote about her own style in "My Life as a Writer," published in 1999:

"I'd like to take what I know and just hand it over. But there is always a problem for a woman: being believed. How can I think I know something? How can I think that what I know might matter? Why would I think that anything I think might make a difference, to anyone, anywhere? My only chance to be believed i one of the best writers I have ever read. Andrea Dworkin's prose is incendiary. Clear as glass and just as cutting. she wrote about her own style in "My Life as a Writer," published in 1999:

"I'd like to take what I know and just hand it over. But there is always a problem for a woman: being believed. How can I think I know something? How can I think that what I know might matter? Why would I think that anything I think might make a difference, to anyone, anywhere? My only chance to be believed is to find a way to writer bolder and stronger than woman hating itself—smarter, deeper, colder. This might mean that I would have to write a prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more evasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography."

the thing that is incredible about Dworkin is that she's able to find pure language for her pure thoughts. the prose feels unmediated by hesitation, fear, or second thought. she resists any kind of capitulation in favor of the most compelling, convincing argumentation style possible. and it's because she cared that much. she couldn't risk losing an iota of power, because that would mean another woman killed, another woman battered, another woman raped. she saw her writing in direct relationship with woman hating. every word, every sentence, essay, and book an effort to smother the wildfire of global misogyny.

she was committed to this fight in a way that compares with no other feminist writer I think I've ever read. in ferocity of ideas, maybe Valerie Solanas. i didn't care much for the anti-pornography writing, or anything from Intercourse. the question of the functions of sex, pleasure, and intercourse in a patriarchal society is an interesting question, but Dworkin makes a lot of ideological leaps that I couldn't follow. denying the value of women's sexual pleasure, insisting that penetration is an inherent violation of privacy and integrity. but she never says all sex is rape! what a humiliating reduction of that phase of her career - flawed as it was, just as fascinating and compelling.

but where I will forever be an Andrea acolyte is for her antirape activism. nobody, then or since compares to her force, her clarity, or her dedication. In particular "A Battered Wife Survives," a 1978 essay published in 'Letters From A War Zone,' her essay on Nicole Simpson Brown for the LA Times during the OJ trial, the included chapters from the 1983 book 'Right Wing Women,' and most of all the incredible 1983 speech "I Want a 24 Hour Truce During Which There is no Rape." ...more

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Oct 14, 2019 Melissa Stacy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, women, history, 2019-reads, nonfiction, women-s-history

Published in 2019, "Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin," is a deeply compelling selection of the published and unpublished work of the feminist author and activist Andrea Dworkin.

Edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, Ms. Fateman's introduction is also quite excellent.

I was astonished that the book even received a positive review in "The New York Times" -- which I'll link here, for those interested --

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/bo...

This is the fourth book Published in 2019, "Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin," is a deeply compelling selection of the published and unpublished work of the feminist author and activist Andrea Dworkin.

Edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, Ms. Fateman's introduction is also quite excellent.

I was astonished that the book even received a positive review in "The New York Times" -- which I'll link here, for those interested --

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/bo...

This is the fourth book I have read by Andrea Dworkin, following "Pornography" (1981), "Intercourse" (1987), and "Woman Hating" (1974). All have been read earlier this year (2019).

"Last Days at Hot Slit" was definitely the darkest Dworkin book I have read, by far. I loved this book, and I felt empowered reading it, but I also cried. This book is so dark that I wasn't able to finish it. I skipped around in the collection and read the material in my own order, and there were a few selections that I didn't read. I checked this book out three times from my library, keeping it for more than two months -- and honestly, I just needed longer to finish it.

Sometimes, written material requires a long, long time for me to emotionally process in order to consume it in full. That was the case with "Last Days at Hot Slit."

It's very tragic to me that Andrea Dworkin is labelled a "radical," when her "extremism" is nothing more than telling the truth. I have never read a writer who can break down power structures so clearly and succinctly as Dworkin can. I don't find Dworkin's work "radical" at all. In the past ten years, I've heard a number of Young Adult/YA authors describe their own fiction work as being "radically honest," but that is the kind of "radical" that Dworkin really is: radically honest.

She is much more than honest, though. This is a writer who saw power clearly. She wrote about power clearly. Reading her work is a gift. She exposes power as it is, and her prose is ruthless and exacting. Other people call that radical. I call it a gift. I call it grace. When I take a walk in the woods or swim in the sea, I feel grace. When I read Andrea Dworkin's work, I feel grace. It's that powerful feeling of Truth washing over me. Dworkin's prose is as clear as a blue summer sky.

Five stars. An excellent read.

And one day, when I'm ready, I'll read the remaining selections. I'll update this review after I finish every page.
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Feb 09, 2020 Amy Layton rated it it was amazing

Shelves: feminism, favorites, essays

Oh man ohhhhhhh man. As I'm sure many of you know, I love Andrea Dworkin. I spent the past year reading through all of her non-fiction (InterLibrary Loan became my best friend) and to reread some of her most cited works as well as a brand new essay ("My Suicide") was absolutely and utterly enchanting. And, now that I've read all of her works, to know just when in her life and politics these works are contextualized made this read much more edifying.

With a well thought out introduction writt ...more

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May 01, 2022 TheyreTakingTheHobbitsToIsengard rated it it was amazing

Pop-culture critics of Andrea Dworkin characterize her as an intercourse-loathing man hater remind me of my pre-teen. When I admonish them, even in the most delicate of terms, they protest preposterously with shill variations of “you don’t love me,” as if loving them meant letting them do whatever the hell they want. However it’s in holding them accountable, in saying “no” in the laborious effort to form them into a decent human being that you in fact show your love. You can see a potential in t Pop-culture critics of Andrea Dworkin characterize her as an intercourse-loathing man hater remind me of my pre-teen. When I admonish them, even in the most delicate of terms, they protest preposterously with shill variations of “you don’t love me,” as if loving them meant letting them do whatever the hell they want. However it’s in holding them accountable, in saying “no” in the laborious effort to form them into a decent human being that you in fact show your love. You can see a potential in them that they themselves are even blind to. Dworkin is anything but delicate with her own admonishments towards men and women alike, but she has her reasons, and loves them both, though she would just as soon dismantle the idea of gender to begin with. Last Days at Hot Slit lets you see into the intense, deeply passionate heart of Andrea Dworkin and “leaves a mark,” as one reviewer wrote, in this well-edited edition of her own efforts to say “no” to men using and abusing women.

The editors chose pieces to paint a broad arc of Dworkin’s life and literary career. It does not have a happy ending. The last sentence left me in chills, on the verge of tears, my heart going out to Andrea and what she suffered, what so many women suffer in our society. Taken from a piece found on her computer after her passing entitled “My Suicide,” I realized that the life she lived, the fight she fought, “left a mark” on Dworkin as well. It had to. Her suicidal contemptlation was ironically in direct proportion to her strong desire to live. She desperately wanted a world where women were respected and loved on their own terms. How could someone who endured as much as she did not contemplate ending it all, in fact, how many women have?

Dworkin makes a compelling case that our culture, language, economy, legal systems, and politics are complicit in the subjugation of women. She means this with all her heart; little in this collection is hyperbole. Even if you don’t agree with all her points, or if her arguments aren’t completely convincing, the tone she strikes, the jolting questions she asks, demand a response. Her pleas are no less urgent than the battered wife, the molested child, the raped woman, for Dworkin was herself all three. She dared to give voice to these women and demand accountability. She would be vilified by men and fellow radical feminists alike. She admired male authors in her youth but saw through their shallowness and brazen disregard for women as she matured. She never would attain their fame but she would attain a kind of notoriety which meant finding a publisher was difficult and in fact her first books were printed in England, and she struggled financially. Her childhood home in Camden, NJ sold for less than $45,000 in 1997. Can the same be said for Norman Mailer or Phillip Roth? Both were rich and famous when they passed. Dworkin was never “rich” by any stretch of the imagination her entire life. For one who refused to live by the rules, made by and for white men, how could she ever be?

When she began her work in the mid-70’s, marital rape was legal and pornography a budding enterprise. However ‘dated’ her work may be, it finds resonance in those who, like her, recognize the baked-in misogyny our society eschews, and she refuses to participate. She seeks the abolition of gender not for its own sake, but because, in her mind, it is the source of male power and domination over women. Destroy gender, and being a “man” loses meaning and power, since sex is political. Her line, “men must give up their precious erections” is both funny and dead serious. For her, male arousal is the epitome of male power which extends not only to the bedroom, but to global empire. To paraphrase Dworkin, in summarizing the male-dominant society’s root view of women, women are meant to be owned and f’d, so too other countries. I do agree that male domination and the concomitant colonial claim to ownership stem from the same warped sense of entitlement and Biblical “dominion” over creation, and that there is no daylight between the political and the intimate in our societal status quo. I’m not so sure, however, this all merely stems from differences in anatomy. The reason certain men act like dicks has less to do with what’s between their legs than what’s between their ears.

Dworkin is very much aware of the intractable problems facing women. Her solution, however, is not for women to merely turn the tables and adopt the ways of men, for women to “man up” and act more masculine and adopt their power dynamic of control through intimidation, force, and fear. Many women, in fact do this, finding a modicum of power, acceptance, and intimacy with men. Pop stars or online “sex workers” trade in bodily integrity and creative freedom for sex appeal and therefore acceptance and a precarious form of power. Lose the sex appeal, lose the power. For Dworkin, it’s her writing that becomes the “weapon” to fight this power imbalance, and she puts it to full effect, to “find a way of writing bolder and stronger than women hating itself.” She’d have to give up the male authors she admired who, she realized, represented the “status quo” she had to “blow up.”

Andrea’s writing is informed by her own physical and sexual abuse at the hands of men, including her first husband. “A little grain of fear” is all it takes to have complete control over someone; a fact dictators and abusers know very well. The excerpts in Last Days are judiciously chosen to highlight both Dworkin’s personal feelings and background, as well as the incendiary text she’s known for, buy also poignant observations. She writes that sex should be “diffuse, tender, whole body, polymorphous,” which I gather is from her own intimate experiences with women, and wonders if “sex can exist outside objectification.” She identifies the pernicious persistence of white male oppression with those who celebrate “freedom” in speech, the market, and politics. She writes extensively about writing, how she wrote from an early age, how it gave her purpose and meaning, and how it saved her from her darkest moments, which were many. Between her own harrowing experiences of rape and abuse and listening to the stories of countless survivors, she carried that heavy narrative burden her whole life. Writing became political action, her books “complex explosives,” against male power. She vowed to use that power to help women after she extracated herself from a terrifyingly abusive husband. She might not be “right” in all her opinions, but she asks the right questions; that is, questions that demand an answer from you, the reader and society more broadly. Why are women still considered second-class citizens? Still, many feminist misunderstand her work.

Many so-called “third-wave” feminists when, among other things, believe pornography is so much female liberation, that such a profession can lead to intimacy and integration, when in fact the exact opposite occurs in plain view, women who a lack any real connection and disintegrate before the camera, women depicted as playthings for men. She points out that these pro feminists decry opposing porn are “puritans,” with the associated connotation of sanctimonous punishment, but Andrea counters it’s the pornographers who punish women for being sexual. Why is female naivete and rebellion both punished sexually? If you’re a woman, whether you’re dumb or talk back, you’re screwed both ways.

Women get into porn to have access to male power, by showing loyalty to it. Why does so much pornography, if not all pornography, cater to the white male heterosexual? Why does it so prominently feature acts of physical abuse, or sexualize violence, skin color, or ethnic tropes? She lays down a convincing argument that porn is actually fascist propaganda reducing both men and women to body parts putting the women, especially, “in their place,” i.e. subservient to men. Why do women feel the need to dress a certain way? For her, women have traded freedom for security, “preparing the body for the f- instead of for freedom,” since for men, intercourse is freedom, so they dictate the terms of freedom. Indeed, psychological analysts of women who objectify themselves are more concerned with how they look to others than how they feel to themselves. Rather than resist, women assimilate. There is a price for assimilation, a woman’s personal psychological and bodily integrity, but it’s a small price to pay when women just want to survive in this brutal men-controlled world. It is this reason, to survive, that a woman’s sense of self depends so much on the masculine definition of sex, beauty and femininity, which usually means quiet, obedient, and thin. It is no coincidence that Andrea embodied none of that.

In an excerpt from her book, “Mercy” you feel the protagonist’s isolation, desperation, her danger. She makes a plan to save herself, and when that falls through she reaches out to a friend who betrays her. There really is no escape from male violence towards women. Whether you survive by your own wits or rely on others, you’re screwed. This could very well be a metaphor for the constant inescapable danger women face every day, of the impossibility of a woman to be truly free to be herself, to be free of violence. Dworkin is sympathic to women who go into so called sex work as she herself prostituted herself for money snd drugs, feeling that she could take anything, that she was unbreakable. That if she could just survive, she would prove her strength. But, in fact, she discovered that she could not take everything. It doesn’t help that there’s little help available for abused women. The part “In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson” brought to the fore the cold reality of our political and legal system; abusers, pornographers, and their enablers are protected by law, but their victims have no such protections and are not believed anyway. At the time, I thought O.J. likely did it, and now, I have no doubt he did, and yet he walks free living in FL to avoid paying Nicole Brown Simpson’s family civil damages.

She writes about growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel and her feelings about it. She points out Israel is a paradox, both existing as a haven for a perennially persecuted and occupied people while simultaneously persecuting and occupying another. She loves Israel the way she loves men; she wants change. She’s by no means the “puritan” her detractors paint her as, but she is less a man hater as she is a rape hater. A speech she gave at a Men’s conference spelled this out specifically: “I want a twenty-four truce during which there is no rape.” The cause of the “ascendancy of fascism in this country…has to do with male supremacy and the control of women; sexual access to women; women as reproductive slaves; private ownership of women.” Rape is a crime of terrorism men employ to establish their superiority and ensure women always have a “grain of fear.”

For someone who’s never read any of her work, Last Days is a great introduction. I recommend reading the introduction twice, as first a preparation, then as an epilogue to assuage the profound bleak sadness the last sentences evoke. Precisely because Dworkin was a champion for women, queer or straight, white or Black, she never reached the levels of fame or fortune her “women-hating” literary counterparts and their modern descendants in popular culture have enjoyed. On the contrary, she was marginalized and vilified, herself become a caricature of her own work. 50 Shades would have nauseated her and the modern-day sexualizing of everything for commercial gain an affirmation of her deepest fears. She hopes for a better world, but we are far from it. On the other hand, I want to live out her legacy in rethinking my own prejudices about sex, gender, objectification, and equality, and teach this to my children. The world is cruel and merciless, most especially towards women, but we can do better. Andrea, in her battered heart of hearts, never gave up hope that we could. ...more

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Jul 09, 2019 Bailorg rated it really liked it

While much of the rest of the book was either too absolutist (this book is not the place to find nuanced analysis), or borderline unreadable (there is literally a 30+ page chapter that is one giant paragraph), the chapter on Nicole Brown Simpson was written with such devastating clarity that I heartily recommend this book.

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Mar 08, 2021 Esther Huntington-Whiteley rated it liked it

I’m not clever enough to understand this

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Aug 27, 2019 Sarah Paolantonio rated it liked it

The cover and title caught my eye. Then the words "radical feminism" made me pick it up. I read a piece about her in The New Yorker my link text so Dworkin was lodged in my brain somewhere.

I was most interested by the introduction, which goes into detail about her life, her life's work, and why this collection was being put together. She lived a complicated, fascinating life. We were both born in Camden, NJ which intrigued me on a personal level.

I did not finish reading Last Days at Hot Slit. The cover and title caught my eye. Then the words "radical feminism" made me pick it up. I read a piece about her in The New Yorker my link text so Dworkin was lodged in my brain somewhere.

I was most interested by the introduction, which goes into detail about her life, her life's work, and why this collection was being put together. She lived a complicated, fascinating life. We were both born in Camden, NJ which intrigued me on a personal level.

I did not finish reading Last Days at Hot Slit. I intended to read all of it all the way through but found myself skipping over sections and to move on. At first the text was very overwhelming because it is sexually and violently graphic. Dworkin is known for being repetitive for to make a point and after reading 100 pages (its just about 400) I felt like I got the point. The piece she 'Pornography: Power' will remain with me forever.

There are speeches, college addresses and lectures in this book in addition to adaptations, essays, and condensed chunks of her books. She was not well liked and I found out one of my heroes was one of her enemies: Ellen Willis. Willis was outspoken and active in the third wave of feminism. (Her and Dworkin did not agree about free speech and pornography.)

It's a great collection to honor her but after a while felt dated. Her piece devoted to rape discusses how martial rape is still legal in all 50 states: it's not anymore. Not that this isn't an issue (never mind that our sitting president is guilty of marital rape) but the context is decades behind politically and legally. It made me disinterested in investing my time in it. This is when I started to move on. But her style of writing, the graphic nature of it, and her philosophies became so intense, violent, and aggressive I started having unsettling dreams (I was reading right before bed) which turned me off from reading it at all.

I'm glad I spent time reading and ruminating on this book. It made me want to engage with all kinds of feminist philosophies and reminded me there is radicalism everywhere, even in my own beliefs, and that it's important to acknowledge and engage with them even if I don't agree. The publication of this book and the press surrounding it declares we need Dworkin now more than ever. I'm not sure she would've liked what our society and culture has become. Her heart would've exploded all over again, again and again. Although it would be great to see her write about Trump, what porn has become, and #MeToo. I genuinely wonder what she'd have to say.

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Apr 05, 2021 Angelina Muller rated it it was amazing

Shelves: activism, non-fiction, 2021, the-best

CW: Violence against women, abuse, sexism, racism, (graphic) rape, sexual assault, suicide, domestic abuse, alcoholism, animal abuse, drug use & addiction, mentions of the Holocaust, murder, pedophilia, incest

I would like to warn anyone before they read this book of the very graphic depictions of rape written in it, as well as graphic descriptions of violence done to women. Dworkin purposefully talks about it crudely because she does not want to lighten the topic or make it seem less horrible t CW: Violence against women, abuse, sexism, racism, (graphic) rape, sexual assault, suicide, domestic abuse, alcoholism, animal abuse, drug use & addiction, mentions of the Holocaust, murder, pedophilia, incest

I would like to warn anyone before they read this book of the very graphic depictions of rape written in it, as well as graphic descriptions of violence done to women. Dworkin purposefully talks about it crudely because she does not want to lighten the topic or make it seem less horrible than it is, she needs the shock and disgust from people so they take those issues seriously. I had to stop reading at multiple moments to calm myself down, so please be very careful if you know you might be sensitive to anything the book addresses.

Dworkin had revolutionary ideas that she knew would only be accepted and openly looked at after her death, and she was right. Her crude imagery and language as well as misandry led to many people rejecting her from the feminist movement at the time, and still today. I would call her a feminist, a radical one. She talks about the issues and doesn't hold back any punches, analysing media and pornography and the way men are socialised to behave the way they do. Rape culture is prominent today as well and she talks about it, because those issues have always existed; people just refused to face them.

Although I do disagree with some of her hardcore and detailed analysis (specifically Story of O, as the author herself had said that the name was not meant to mean anything more), I do agree with her grand main statements. To this day, liberal feminism still goes against many ideas of Marxist feminism and their main ways of approach. I love her writing because of how current it is and how harsh it is, she is an open misandrist and lets us know why, she is against pornography and sex work and lets us know why. She tries to spare the grisly details of her life and even then the audience understands how much she's been through and why she holds her opinions. As angry and miserable as this book made me feel about the world, I feel like it is a necessary read. Dworkin's writing is a classic, timeless. ...more

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Feb 08, 2022 Phoebe rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fic-want-to-read, theory-and-cultural-criticism, tbr-2022

baby's first dworkin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! big things happening for sex negativity this year i reckon

a selection of excerpts of dworkin's major critical works + novels, with an excellent introduction from fateman and scholder. this book chewed me up and spat me out and i loved every second of it. dworkin writes with an avenging force that i find vvvv difficult to resist. why can't all political writing be this readable??? certainly some of the comparisons she draws (e.g. endemicity of domestic violenc ...more

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May 19, 2022 Emma Ratshin rated it really liked it

this is an exquisitely edited collection of some incredibly important works of radical feminist theory. andrea dworkin has been (imo) unfairly caricaturized as the prototypical man-hating lesbian feminist, and this book challenged my preconceptions about her work and what it represents. most troubling to me is how transphobic “radical feminists” have marshaled her ideas out of context in support of their hate project, when dworkin was a dedicated trans ally and would be disgusted with her name b ...more

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Jan 20, 2020 Crystal rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: pub-2019, lgbtqia, zza-audible-studios, read-in-2020, suicide, essays, fiction, audible, za-o-lit-jewish, zp-2019-a-5

While I vehemently disagree with Dworkin on some race, gender, and sex work issues she's far more nuanced than critics would have you believe. I went in skeptical and ready for the worst but finished up the audiobook feeling devastated. & for someone said to be anti-sex she clearly seems to be pro-sex as long as it's not exploitative and/or coerced. ...more

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Feb 21, 2022 Priscilla rated it liked it

Shelves: 2022

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 29, 2020 mark propp rated it really liked it

the early writings, which were mostly unfamiliar to me, feel a bit unfocused and rambling, which is the way it ought to be, i guess.

i didn't find the excerpt from the israel book all that compelling, tbh, but otherwise i found reading this as illuminating and maddening as all the other stuff of hers that i've gone through.

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Feb 02, 2021 Carrie rated it it was amazing

This was a really hard book to read but amazing and broke apart all of the assumptions and preconceived notions I had about Andrea Dworkin. There are a ton of really good reviews that say what I feel so I won’t try to copy. Great for someone wanting to get a taste of her writing.

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May 11, 2021 Dina Alexander rated it it was amazing

A powerful must-read for anyone who considers themselves a feminist. Andrea Dworkin gets right to the heart of matter without mincing words, but expertly slices and dices the actions and words of politicians, male bullies, and pornographers.

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May 14, 2022 Kaitlin rated it it was amazing

It's so nice to have a carefully curated selection of Andrea's unflinching, unapologetic, feminist work in one place! The editors did a great job with their selection. Love to pick this up and read a chapter when I'm craving some Dworkin. ...more

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Apr 08, 2019 Maria rated it really liked it

Intense and difficult to read. Given her background, it's no wonder she had such strong anti-porn and to some extent anti-sex views. Many passages resonate. ...more

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