With feminism back in fashion, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to see Andrea Dworkin’s name being bandied about again. But it is.

The #MeToo movement and men’s violence against women are making international headlines. Misogynoir, and the intersections of racism and sexism, are hot topics in pop culture. The patriarchal nature of right-wing authoritarianism is troubling political analysts. So it makes perfect sense that Dworkin’s work is seen as especially apt, given she spent the best part of her life fighting white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.

But the vision of revolutionary change that Dworkin so passionately advocated for was largely derided ― including by other, usually liberal or libertarian, feminists ― while she was alive. And, today, when radical feminist analysis is shunned in the academy, and radical feminist activists are increasingly no-platformed from public events, it is perplexing to find the work of such a prominent radical feminist thinker being reconsidered in relatively positive terms.

The recent reassessment of Dworkin’s work has, in part, been prompted by the release of a new collection, titled Last Days at Hot Slit. It contains a great mix of pieces from across her career including, my personal favourite, the blistering, “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape” ― an address to a room of 500 men:

Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.

There are several references to (and even the publication of) private letters in the collection and it is from this private correspondence that the book takes its title. We learn that “Hot Slit” is what Dworkin had considered calling the text that would one day become her 1974 feminist classic, Woman Hating. But, clearly, she thought better of it. It therefore seems strange to present a book that is ostensibly honouring her work, with a title she ultimately rejected ― one that currently serves mostly as online click-bait.

The tension between the title and the content mirrors the increasing tension between the things Dworkin loudly and proudly stood for, and the way in which she is slowly morphing into an acceptable emblem of a (supposedly) long-dead brand of feminism. I can’t help but wonder if her words are seen to contain a radicalism that has only become acceptable because she is dead and can no longer talk back.

In many ways it is awkward to address the recent reactions to her work, rather than the work itself, not least because the work itself desperately deserves to be read. It is complex and challenging, accessible and incredible. Numerous women have found her words to be genuinely life changing. As Julia Long puts it, Dworkin was a “giant of a thinker” and if she had been a man, talking about men, we’d likely have dedicated “Dworkin Studies” centres at universities and annual conferences of Dworkin scholars celebrating her ideas.

And there can be little doubt that her ideas remain achingly relevant. Dworkin’s writing has always warranted a much wider, much more sympathetic audience (seriously, go away and read as much of it as you can, if you haven’t already). Many of her published texts have been freely available online, with her permission, for more than two decades.

But I keep returning to the reactions, because there is also something that needs to be picked apart about them now, in this moment.

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The collection, Last Days at Hot Slit, is shrouded in a kind of begrudging respect. The editors ― Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder ― don’t position themselves as radical feminists, and they come across as an unusual duo to have brought this book into the world. There’s an admission in the book, for instance, that perhaps it “wasn’t crazy” for Dworkin to hold grave concerns about the harms of violent pornography. Not because she was right, but because she was “suffocating in women’s stories of sadistic abuse and rape while writing through the night, night after night.” How generous an interpretation to have made room for her sanity!

The introduction, like many of the subsequent reviews, is written from, and for, the perspective of a non-believer. One review begins: “Andrea Dworkin was never my kind of feminist.” And most, more or less, follow something like variations on: “Oh yes, remember how we all despised / laughed at / ignored that ugly, frumpy dyke with the hysterical feminist hyperbole, years ago? Well, it turns out she had a point!” Or, at the very least, they find that her writing was more persuasive than it was given credit for at the time, even if she did wear dungarees.

This approach is difficult to stomach for those of us who have consistently recognised Dworkin’s work as vitally important ― not only to feminist theory and practice, but also to progressive politics and political writing, more generally. That, in 2019, some are unable to move past her, apparently unacceptable, unfeminine appearance (all “frizzy hair” and “dumpy overalls”) rather goes to prove the value of her scathing critique of the role that beauty practices and expectations play in patriarchal socialisation.

Repeating well-worn descriptions of her clothing choices and accusations of her misandry is not an accident, and it operates to limit the enduring power of her words. As Eleanor Gordon-Smith notes in Stop Being Reasonable, when it comes to persuasion, it can be easier to attack the person than the substance of their argument. And, when an unpalatable message is delivered from a source that is socially, culturally or politically devalued, then it is not given appropriate weight, and is subsequently not truly heard. Attacking Dworkin the person is ― and has always been ― a way to mute her message.

These issues have the cumulative effect of positioning Dworkin as some sort of anachronistic curio, an interesting relic from a bygone era of failed feminism. And this is how it is possible for her to become lauded by those who seem otherwise opposed to fundamental parts of her life’s work, particularly her conceptualisation of the sex industry as an integral part of male supremacy and as a form of male violence. One can only imagine what she would make of writers at Bustle musing about her personal experiences of “sex work” ― a politically loaded term that, of course, she never used.

Dworkin has become an icon of feminist bravery in these accounts, only because the threat is gone and it is, apparently, self-evident that we have all given up fighting the harms of pornography and prostitution.

Except, some of us haven’t. There are still radical feminists ― young and old, activist and academic ― who continue to use an holistic understanding of male dominance, in which prostitution and pornography are not mere add-ons, but are central indicators and drivers of economic, racial and sexual inequality. As the global sex industry continues to morph and expand ― creating what Sheila Jeffreys has termed “the industrial vagina” ― such an analysis is more imperative than ever.

Far from being old fashioned, Dworkin’s analysis was prescient. She wasn’t “crazy” when she foresaw the prominence of the pornography industry as a cultural force, long before the invention of PornHub. Or when she called for the abolition of sex roles, and the potential of androgyny, long before talk of identifying as non-binary. Or when she warned of the (re)rise of right-wing politics and its foundation on the control and abuse of women’s bodies ― all examples that can be found in the Hot Slit compilation.

Despite these insights, the radical feminist analysis that Dworkin was such a key figure in forming is arguably even more unpopular now than when Dworkin herself wrote of being ostracised for forming it. If there is anything more we can learn from her work, and the multitude of reactions to it, it’s that some could have ― and should have ― listened earlier. Shutting out feminist voices you don’t want to hear is a sure-fire way of shoring up patriarchal power and limiting the horizons of women’s liberation.

Meagan Tyler is a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University and the Public Officer of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia. She is the author of Selling Sex Short: The Sexological and Pornographic Constructions of Women’s Sexuality in the West, and the co-editor (with Miranda Kiraly) of Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism.