ABSTRACT
Andrea Dworkin's advocacy against pornography is shaped by her commitment to confrontational politics as "the essence of social change." Throughout all of Dworkin's work, she expresses contempt for abstraction and stresses the necessity to understand social phenomena in concrete material terms. Dworkin describes her own approach to political issues as a process of drawing conclusions inductively from lived experiences. Noticeably omitted from Dworkin's textual representations is mention of benign or valued properties of pornography. For Dworkin, discussing pornography's social, educational, political, or entertainment value is akin to discussing Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda in terms of its merits as intellectual, artistic, entertainment, or educational media: in both cases, it requires one to close ones eyes to systematic cruelty and atomistically sever the product from all the ways it harms real people. The absence of competing perspectives within Dworkin's works is a brazen artistic and political choice.
