Any movement needs both radicals and liberals

So it is with great sadness that Cru-blog notes the death of Andrea Dworkin. The article leads with "she never hated men". Bit odd really, somebody's got to hate men. There are plenty of men out there who hate women. When you consider they have all the good jobs, all the economic power and doing most of the war-mongering and murdering I think I hate men a bit at least. Andrea had also been raped a number of times. If she didn't hate men a bit I would be quite surprised.

She is most famous for fighting against pornography and actually drafted a law defining pornography as discriminative against women. Personally I work in an industry (finance) where taking clients out to strip clubs is a normal way of networking and generating business. I think that sucks. Needless to say her views didn't make her very popular. Instead the "porn establishment", the likes of much-glorified Larry Flint, etc focussed on her appearance as a point of attack, thus confirming all our worst fears about the type of prejudiced society we live in.

Yeah she was fat and wore dungarees, no make-up and didn't get a haircut very often. She didn't exactly go for regular waxing either. Personally I think that's cool. There is a poster in my gym for electrolysis (permanent electrical hair-removal boys) which reads "Imagine if you never needed to wax or shave again...". Underneath I have written "you don't". I don't think people get it anymore.

She said she would like to be remembered thus: "In a museum, when male supremacy is dead. I'd like my work to be an anthropological artefact from an extinct, primitive society". Although desperately unfashionable I think a lot of her ideas still hold a lot of water. I hope they rise again some time and make it a bit further onto the political agenda.