Dworkin

"Violation is a synonym for intercourse."

"In the TV Movie of My Life, the Manchester years would be represented by those cod dreamy flashback sequences in which you can't tell whether what you're seeing is real imagined but you're pretty certain that everyone's wearing a wig. 

What I remember most ls the sheer intensity of it all, the fact that everything seemed like a matter of life and death.  The must emotionally fraught battles were in the area of gender politics, with American author Andrea Dworkin tub-thumping tome Pornography: Men Poessessing Women being required  reading for concerned gender warriors everywhere.

Dworkin hung like a dark shadow over the sexual-politics landscape of the eighties. A terrifying voice of doom who explained in thunderous Moses-like tones that everything l've ever suspected about being a worthless piece of trap was essentially true. 

If you've never read Pornography : Men Possessing Women and you like a good scare then believe me you're  in for a treat - it is one ol the most upsetting books ever written, and will leave you wanting to kill either yourself or others. It is ferociously argued and hectoringly delivered. Leon Trotsky was a lightweight compared to Dworkin. 

Its central thesis (as its title pithily suggests) is that pornography is not only rape, but also the perfect expression of man's wide-ranging subjugation of women over the centuries; a weapon of war, an act of violence, a tool of slavery. 

Over several hunclred incendiary pages, Dworkin conjures a history of prostitution, child abuse, torture, imprisonment and mass murder, and relates - not to say attributes  it all directly to the glossy pages of Hustler magazine and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. 

By the time she gets to the end of the book she is describing her own soul as hating become almost possessed by the demonic presence of porn, and being haunted at night by Gothic apparitions of vile and violent sexuality."

Mark Kermode