Mercy is, in contrast, devastatingly personal: The formally complex, mostly autobiographical book reads as a torrent released onto the page after years of steely, researched argumentation. Her polemic Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) argues that porn is fascist propaganda, a weapon as crucial to the escalating war on women as Goebbels’s vicious output was to Hitler’s rise and Intercourse, published six years later, is an unflinching treatise on fucking under male supremacy, a seething critique of heterosexuality rendered as literary criticism. Times review aside, Dworkin’s riveting work of experimental fiction received little attention, certainly in contrast to her incendiary works of nonfiction from the previous decade. By then, Andrea Dworkin’s reputation as the obdurate intellectual leader of the sex wars’ losing side was a toxic, insurmountable liability, and the media spotlight had moved on to the fresh provocations of young third wavers. Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men,” wrote Wendy Steiner in a New York Times review of the feminist antipornography writer’s final novel, Mercy (1990).
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