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All over the net, but not in major news media at all is the news that famous feminist Andrea Dworkin died Saturday. Anyone hear anything?
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The short version is this: if you ever wondered where the image of "feminist" as ugly, sex-hating man-haters, it would likely be because of Andrea Dworkin. Longer version: she definitely made people think. I agreed with almost none of her conclusions, but I can't deny that the problems she brought up were real and that she dragged a lot of issues into the public light that needed to be there.
The American feminist icon, writer and campaigner Andrea Dworkin, who linked pornography to rape and violence, died at the weekend, her agent said today. She was 59 years old. Her radical-feminist critique of pornography began with her first book, Woman Hating, published when she was 27. She campaigned frequently on the subject, helping to draft a law in 1983 that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women.
The law, later overturned by an appeal court as unconstitutional, was inspired by the case of Linda Marchiano, who as Linda Lovelace said she had had been violently coerced into pornography, including the film Deep Throat, but had no recourse to the courts.
The drive of Ms Dworkin's writing and activism was to break the silence around violence against women but her wider career saw her become a figure of adulation and loathing in equal measure. To opponents she was an archetypal man-hater, killjoy and proponent of censorship, but supporters rallied to her impassioned lectures and books. Gloria Steinem, a fellow feminist, said she was one of a handful of writers each century "who help the human race to evolve".
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