Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Interview with Andrea Dworkin

1982; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1057/fr.1982.13

1466-4380

Elizabeth Wilson,

Digital Games and Media

EW How did you first become interested in pornography? AD Well, actually my interest in it goes back quite a long way, in that when I was in high school I thought that pornography had to do with sexual rebellion, and sexual revolution, and so it interested me in that way, and I knew that it was a deep influence on a lot of male writers whom I respected very much Flaubert, Baudelaire you know, writers of that magnitude, and also I knew that the work of writers I very much admired had been called pornographic and very often identified by some people as pornography. So, like many people, I approached it as something literary, something that had to do with intellectual rebellion and with literary life, and with a kind of literary outlawry I was very moved by books like The Stoty of O' and other kinds of v erv high class intellectual pornography. I responded to it absolutely. I thought that it was verv profound, and very full of ideas about sex, and very full of ideas about what love really was, and in fact I remember a male Marxist in college being absolutely outraged with me and saying: 'But that's the ultimate in alienated labour!' And I remember saying to him: 'Oh but you know nothing about love.' And so you know -because I had an interest in literature, and because I had an interest in sex, therefore I had an interest in pornography. And, as I moved more and more into the counterculture in the sixties, and into various areas of bohemian life in New York City I encountered more and more pornography, and more and more intellectual writing about pornography. And when I began to really think about violence against women, and when I myself really experienced such violence in a way that I could not ignore, and I could no longer pretend that it had nothing to do with me, one of the first things that I did was that I went back, and re-read The Sto of 0, and I was absolutely mortified by what had in fact seemed to me a coherent definition of femininity. Also, I had thought that the sex the pornography portrayed was taboo and that pornography contained special, elite, pioneering knowledge that it showed a sexuality that the whole conventional world had to keep from everyone; but artists knew it. I think that for a lot of people, even though they won't admit it, that's really the connection that they see between pornography and art. They know that historically artists have been very deeply influenced by pornography and therefore there is some relationship between pornography and art that they don't quite understand. And