Dworkin did have something of a preacher’s scorched moral indignation, an eloquence borne of her own experiences as a prostitute, rape survivor, and battered wife. And like any great firebrand, she did not brake for nuance ... But Last Days also reveals a more measured writer than many might remember. Dworkin was a talented stylist, and however aggrieved or incensed her arguments, she expressed them with meticulous lucidity. And even occasional wit ... The book also highlights Dworkin’s vulnerability, a trait that subsequent caricatures all but obliterated. Indeed, Last Days at Hot Slit may find a more receptive audience today than Dworkin ever had during her lifetime ... Dworkin was more than the writer of alarming misandrist screeds that critics made her out to be. At her best, she looked with ultraviolet clarity at how much women are forced to endure, to accept, to apologize for, to clean up, to sacrifice, to suffer just because they are women. She understood that a woman’s lot in life is often permanent and has the vivid pathos of a scar.
The hallmarks of Dworkin’s writing are all there: the confident strut; the incantatory repetition; the startling, belligerent language; the ruthless whittling down of options to a single, irrevocable point ('my only chance'). This was someone who thought deeply and read widely and was preoccupied with questions not only of justice but also of style. Last Days at Hot Slit, a new anthology of Dworkin’s work, shows that the caricature of her as a simplistic man-hater, a termagant in overalls, could only be sustained by not reading what she actually wrote ... Dworkin composed her work from a personal place, but she didn’t contain her experience in anecdote; she extrapolated, she deduced, she pronounced ... The women’s movement in Dworkin’s unyielding universe was no mere lifestyle choice; it was a matter of life and death.
Dworkin was a lucid, scarily persuasive writer ... The anthology is as much an account of Dworkin’s life as it is a presentation of her work ... What’s so exciting to watch, reading Last Days, is not [Dworkin's] political trajectory but the way her style crystallized around her beliefs ... [Dworkin's] sentences barrel forward, strong-arming the reader with unlikely pauses or abrupt images; they force 'you to breathe where I do, instead of letting you discover your own natural breath' ... The baroque logic of Dworkin’s arguments is usually balanced by the straightforward conviction that she gave them on the page ... [Dworkin's] prose has a swift, natural fluidity that reveals a holistic view of humanity; on a single page she brings together close readings of novels, historiography, etymology, political crusading, and philosophical meditations that themselves would be at home in a (great) novel.
Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin ... [is] a book that a new generation of feminists should want to get their hands on ... It charts the evolution of a feminist writer and thinker who was so much more than the sometimes-accurate ideas attributed to her. It celebrates, as Fateman writes in the introduction to Last Days at Hot Slit, the 'apocalyptic, middle-finger appeal of her prose.' If you misunderstand Dworkin after reading this anthology, you’re not trying ... Last Days at Hot Slit presents Dworkin as the furious, depressed, inquisitive, dare I say optimist, who she was.
Reading Last Days at Hot Slit ... I girded myself for an intellectual assault. My appreciative reaction surprised me ... I also discovered that the way she shared intimate, sometimes shocking details of her sexual and romantic life...came off as brave and poignant ... Dworkin’s conclusions about porn and sex still felt narrow and joyless. Yet I wasn’t alarmed so much as emotionally kickstarted by her urgency ... It galvanizes me to dispense with likeability and embrace indignation ... Next to the vacant, rah-rah version of sex positivity I grew up with in the ’90s, Dworkin’s rage seems downright clear-eyed ... A foe of nuance, Dworkin nevertheless invites us to complicate our unbridled enthusiasm for sex. Last Days at Hot Slit is a mirror for what I’ve been afraid of for years: being defiant, being ugly, being unloved by men, even being unloved by other feminists like Andrea Dworkin.
The style is strident, enraged, and the conclusions are often stark, bluntly phrased, and difficult to read ... Dworkin has a reputation as the quintessential overzealous radical, imperiously steamrolling over the fault lines of race, of class, of history in her call for universal sisterhood. Yet the writings collected here reveal as much attention to what divides women as to what binds them ... This, I think, is part of why Dworkin remains so unpopular. She wants us to do what she did for the women who spoke with her after her college lectures: to look dead into the fact of what it means to be a woman in this world, into the pain and violence visited on women because they are women. It requires us to know more than we can stand to know.
The cartoon Dworkin is well represented in the collection—it samples her two most famous polemics ... But Last Days at Hot Slit also includes works that ring truer to today’s cultural vernacular ... the collection also captures Dworkin’s more tender moments ... Last Days At Hot Slit pays homage to...Dworkin, to the anachronistic anti-porn persona everyone loves to hate, but along the way, it makes some much-needed jagged cuts.
Fateman and Scholder’s anthology is useful as a primer on works by a figure consigned to the radical fringe of feminist discourse, but its no-holds-barred accounts of misogynistic brutality and uncensored expressions of female rage do not make it a book for the faint of heart. Intense reading most likely to appeal to radical feminist scholars.
