'Decide One More Time': Prostitution and Sexual Intelligence in the Early Writings of Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin’s first book, Woman Hating, was published in 1974, and written while Dworkin was in her 20s. It is experimental, literary, and ultimately hopeful. Right-Wing Women, which had its start as a Ms Magazine article in 1977, was expanded into a book in 1983. The most difficult of Dworkin’s works to find today, it was also her least favourite, owing to the academic conventions demanded by the publisher. It is dense, political and unflinching in its criticism. Despite their differences, these two books demonstrate the evolution of Dworkin’s thinking as she grapples with a central feminist contradiction – the need to remake the world while simultaneously living in it. Dworkin’s message in both books is that sexual liberation without sex equality is not the revolution we need. Women aligned with the male Left fail to understand both that Right-wing women are striking a clear-eyed bargain with their oppressors, but also that Left-wing women are in denial about doing exactly the same thing. Forty years later, the contemporary relevance of the analysis developed in these works is striking, even as the legal and material conditions of women’s lives have changed in many ways from the world that Dworkin describes. This article focuses on the resonance of Dworkin’s analysis for the current feminist debates around prostitution. Dworkin was consistent in her identification of prostitution as incompatible with women’s freedom and equality. Read together, these early writings help us to understand why so many women, on both the Right and the Left, believe that their equality can be achieved while other women continue to be prostituted, and why women continue to look the other way when faced with this expression of male sexual entitlement.