The late Andrea Dworkin pioneered a conservative, anti-sex, pro-censorship strand of feminism. In doing so, she changed the feminist movement, and the political left, forever. A new collection of her writing, Last Days at Hot Slit, was published this year. My review of the book is now online at Quillette.
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I couldn’t bring myself to finish reading Dworkin’s books, and I think because of my parents. It’s not that they disapproved of her writing, but their example of partnership, and their imbuing me with a healthy individualist attitude, primed me to view her works with an extreme skepticism that said: “Really!? That may be your experience as a woman, but not mine.”
Two intellectual (and I use the term loosely) predecessors of Dworkin & MacKinnon are Christabel Pankhurst, who led Britain’s suffrage movement to greater militancy and misandry, and Valerie Solanas with her SCUM Manifesto. Your review compares it to a religion, and that’s not far off the mark. I’ve also seen it as women who never outgrew their childhood attitude of “boys have cooties” but merely infused it with all-consuming rage and built a dogmatic ideology around it.