Last Days at Hot Slit by Andrea Dworkin

Last Days at Hot Slit by Andrea Dworkin

Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy, Dworkin was a philosopher outside and against the academy who wrote with a singular, apocalyptic urgency.

Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. The collection charts her path from the militant primer Woman Hating (1974), to the formally complex polemics of Pornography (1979) and Intercourse (1987) and the raw experimentalism of her final novel Mercy (1990). It also includes "Goodbye to All This" (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript that calls out her feminist adversaries, and "My Suicide" (1999), a despairing long-form essay found on her hard drive after her death in 2005.

Andrea Dworkin collaborated on the paper with Catharine A. Civil rights legislation, according to MacKinnon, recognizes pornography as legally actionable sex discrimination. Pornography, Sorrow, and Scapegoat are among her eleven books. In April 2005, she passed away in Washington, D.C. Ariel Levy is the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs and a contributing editor at New York magazine. She currently resides in New York City.