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Andrea Dworkin, 58, died at her home in Washington DC on April 9. She had been suffering from osteoarthritis and obesity. In a New York Times op-ed piece published one week later, her friend Catharine MacKinnon eulogized Dworkin as "the intellectual shock troops, the artistic heavy artillery of the women's movement in our time," and a marginalized "genius."

MacKinnon's perspective overrates Dworkin's gifts, but underestimates her impact on mainstream culture. Intellectually scattershot, artistically unkempt, hated by many, Dworkin was and remains influential. Her critiques of pornography commanded widespread if undeserved respect in the US, Canada, and the UK. She was a rapturous polemicist whose righteous rage was compelling and sometimes transformative. At the first "Take Back the Night" march in 1978, it was Dworkin whose words sent women streaming through the streets.

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The downside of her passion was that she may have done more than any other individual to reduce American justice to revenge therapy; to sanction social engineering through censorship; and to encourage the feminist and gay movements to embrace the politics of victimization and erotophobia. Immersed in left-wing attitudes, Dworkin abetted the rise of right-wing power. Admirably defending female victims of battering and rape, she not-so-admirably elevated victims of wrongdoing to an exalted plane where healing processes trump civil liberties.

Cultural critic Camille Paglia once observed that Dworkin "turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera." Because she was indefatigably self-dramatizing, the facts of much of Dworkin's life are obscured by embellishment and hyperbole.

In 1992, when Dworkin sought to suppress A Woman's Book of Choices, a guide to abortion options by reproductive-rights activists Rebecca Chalker and Carol Downer, the effort had a defensive subtext. One passage illustrating conditions prior to Roe v. Wade described the plight of a woman who faked rape in order to obtain an otherwise illegal abortion in 1950s Florida. Mobilizing against the book, Dworkin accused the authors of spreading the notion that women lie about sexual assault.

Hardly anyone doubts that men mistreated Andrea Dworkin, but her accounts of mistreatment invite speculation. Most plausibly, she recalled being fondled by a man in a movie theatre when she was nine. She later participated in the '60s culture of promiscuity, and probably dabbled in prostitution. Arrested in a 1965 antiwar demonstration outside the US Mission to the United Nations, she said she endured a cavity search by two male physicians who "ripped up my vagina with a steel instrument and told dirty jokes about women while they did it."

She claimed to have been beaten and stalked by an unnamed, apparently Dutch male partner she may (or may not) have married in 1968, before completing her studies at Bennington. The couple may (or may not) have divorced at some undocumented time and place after Dworkin walked out in 1971. At some point, she may have been gang-raped-- an experience reflected in her novel Mercy, an autobiographical chronicle of abuse.

She blamed the disabilities of her last six years on a sexual assault at a Paris hotel in 1999. Her alleged assailants were a bartender and a room service waiter who, she insisted, had served her drugged kir, then fucked her while she was unconscious. The incident followed the plotline of familiar, unverified stories involving "date-rape" drugs such as Rophynol or GHB. Dworkin never notified police, and never revealed which Paris hotel was the site of her ordeal. When some suggested her ordeal was imaginary, she likened her doubters to Holocaust deniers.

Dworkin fused compassion with spite, lucidity with muddle, street smarts with gullibility. Her rhetoric was anti-male, yet she had male friends. She sought not so much to obtain gender equality as to renegotiate gender. She was an avowed lesbian who, to lesbian separatists' dismay, chose a gay male life partner, writer/editor John Stoltenberg, her companion since 1974 and husband since 1998.

Demon penis?

She praised Stoltenberg as a "non-genital man." In Our Blood (1976), she wrote: "I think men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together... that they will have to excise everything in them that they now value as distinctively 'male.'" The quasi-transgendered Stoltenberg, founder of Men Against Pornography, author of Refusing to Be a Man, appears to have done precisely that. Backing Dworkin's view that gay men share straight men's commitment to male dominance, Stoltenberg joined her in deploring gay porn and its penile imagery.

Dworkin habitually described male-female relations in terms of assault, invasion, and colonization. While she never said she viewed all penetrative sex as rape, she did call heterosexual intercourse "the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies," and said that rape is "our primary model for heterosexual relating."

"These ideas are hardly radical," wrote ACLU President Nadine Strossen in a 1995 essay. "Rather, they are a reincarnation of disempowering puritanical, Victorian notions that feminists have long tried to consign to the dustbin of history: woman as sexual victim; man as voracious satyr."

Dworkin saw voracious satyrs everywhere, and attributed their voracity to the availability of pornographic books, magazines, and films. Her anti-porn activism began in the 1970s and intensified in 1976 upon the release of Snuff, a grind-house movie mistakenly thought to show a real murder. Always ready to validate urban legend, Dworkin claimed that "snuff" films were a staple of porn, despite the failure of the FBI, Interpol, and investigative journalists to find such a film.

Testifying in 1986 before the US Attorney General's Commission on Pornography-- the Reagan-era anti-porn juggernaut better known as the Meese Commission-- she asserted that snuff films existed, and that their latest subgenre was "skullfuck" movies "in which a woman is killed and the orifices in her head are penetrated with a man's penis." She described torture porn, attack porn, concentration camp porn. Echoing the dictum formulated by her comrade-in-arms Robin Morgan-- "pornography is the theory, rape is the practice"-- she told the Meese Commission, "Pornography is used in rape-- to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act."

Dworkin vividly impressed the commissioners, notably Rev. James Dobson of Focus on the Family. The Meese Commission's final report, issued in July 1986, quotes her extensively. The whole reactionary document is, in fact, steeped in Dworkinite jargon.

In the early '80s, Dworkin teamed with law professor Catharine MacKinnon. Endorsing Dworkin's assessment of pornography, MacKinnon developed a strategy to circumvent the First Amendment by redefining porn as action rather than speech, and maintaining that its availability abridged women's civil rights. The pair targeted various cities and counties for campaigns to pass an anti-pornography ordinance harnessing Dworkin's view of porn to MacKinnon's mechanism for redress. (Dworkin was the theory, MacKinnon was the practice.)

The scheme was sold by means of a traveling slide show featuring out-of-context images from Playboy, Hustler, and other publications. The ordinance would have enabled women allegedly harmed by "pornography"-- redefined as "graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words"-- to sue producers, distributors, and retailers. In making their agenda dependent upon male-dominated governmental power, Dworkin and MacKinnon, archenemies of the patriarchy, sought to make women's protection a matter of running to Daddy.

Impressionable Canadians

Passed by the Minneapolis City Council but vetoed by the mayor, the MacDworkin ordinance was defeated elsewhere-- except for Indianapolis, where conservative Republicans enacted it in 1984, and Bellingham, Washington, where voters approved it in a 1988 referendum. Both incarnations of the ordinance were struck down in court, however, on First Amendment grounds.

But Dworkin's ideas found acceptance in Canada, where obscenity law was recast in 1992 to reflect the Dworkin-MacKinnon vision of harmful material. As many had predicted, much of what was proscribed by the revised statute had gay, lesbian, and feminist content. Books impounded in Canadian customs included Dworkin's Woman Hating and Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Her response was that seizure of her work was a small price to pay for regulations shutting a broader range of degrading books and films out of Canada.

Dworkin lived to witness wide-ranging curtailment of sexual expression via speech and harassment codes in schools and workplaces. She lived to see a rise in censorship aimed at protecting women and children, accompanied by an attitude, increasingly current among young Americans, that freedom of speech is outmoded and foolish. She lived to see the vigilantism she encouraged against sex offenders ("I have no problem with killing pedophiles") made redundant by spiraling, draconian sex-offender legislation.

Her legacy is a world of coercive kindness and authoritarian solicitude-- a world where everyone's birthright is a warm, asexual, carefully monitored hug.