I might as well chime in on Dworkin. I met her too, albeit briefly. As some readers might recall, I went to Goucher college which had only really gone co-ed my freshman (freshperson?) year. Goucher was not overrun with angry feminist types, but it should hardly surprise anyone that in a school that small which had been all-women that they’d be over-represented. Anyway, I heard a talk by her in our small auditorium. I asked a question I do not remember. But she was unpleasent. Her talk was quite thoroughly anti-male. She was clearly playing to the audience and she left a poor impression on me. As did her writing. And, most of all, her effect on many of the young women I went to school with and some of the teachers I learned from was anything but admirable or edifying.

I’m sure she was partly the person David and Rick found her to be. But I don’t think that was the whole person. That New York Sun obituary David links to covers the facts well enough. But in summary, I would say she cultivated a persona and a political partnership with Catharine MacKinnon (whom I’ve also met and talked to at length) et al. which perpetuated some horrendous cultural stereotypes of men as thugs and women as victims (and yes, fine, Dworkin didn’t exactly say that “sex is rape”). She trafficked in what amounted to a neo-Victorian feminism — women must be protected by the state from their own choices, etc. But Victorianism at least has charms to go with its faults. Dworkin’s worldview lacked anything even remotely resembling charm. It was all bile, no frosting. That doesn’t mean there aren’t truths undgirding both worldviews: Men are sinful by nature, pornography is degrading, society needs rules (though not necessarily laws) to govern relations between the sexes, etc.

As for the sentiment expressed by both David and Rick that, despite her faults, she was authentic, “she really meant it,” etc. I know where they’re coming from and I agree that intellectual integrity is something to admire in almost all cases. But intellectual integrity is an attribute that cannot overwhelm character, or morality. The devil has intellectual integrity, as do all sorts of Stalinists, Nazis and other vile ideologues and useful idiots. I recall a wonderful interview a few years ago with Eugene Genovese about his days as a youthful Stalinist in academia. When asked if, in his younger days, he would have agreed to the mass executions of his friends and colleagues if the Communists gained power in America, he replied (I’m quoting from memory) “Oh, absolutely.” Genovese grew out of that nonsense, which is an even greater sign of an even more admirable intellectual integrity.

This isn’t to say Dworkin was a vile person. I get the sense that she was more damaged than deranged. But “She stuck to her convictions” isn’t the greatest epitaph if her convictions were wrong.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that Dworkin and MacKinnon were collosal failures in their most famous campaign: pornography. Whatever success they had in combating “date rape,” and date rape sans-quotation-marks, it’s hard to say since lots of people are against rape. But on the pornography front they failed spectacularly. Over the time they were working against pornography, pornography has become mainstream and vastly more profitable, glamorous and corporate. Perhaps if they hadn’t struck such an unlikable, needlessly radical, but authentic! public pose -and behaved more like the woman David and Rick met, they might have had been more successful.

Then again maybe not.