Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin, author Woman Hating, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and the rather unlikely Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, has died.

Everyone talks about her out-there ideas, and her provocations on things like pornography, marriage ("mandated intercourse"), and the family.

But I'd never realized that her life was as rough as it was. I'm thinking especially of the body cavity search after the anti-war protest at the U.N., as well as the Dutch husband who beat her and burned her with cigarettes. I'm also maybe thinking about her trading sex as a young woman to get bus fare to go from Cherry Hill to New York. She went through all that, but she also aggressively lobbied Washington for some years in the 1980s as part of the anti-pornography crusade.

It would be interesting to read an Andrea Dworkin memoir, but somehow I doubt she would have had time to write one.