Radical Feminist Writer Andrea Dworkin Dies (washingtonpost.com) By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post Staff Writer

Ms. Dworkin spent her career exploring what she considered the subordination of women, which she saw everywhere from marriage to pornography to conservative politics.

Using terms such as “gynocide” to describe a cultural holocaust against women, she was adored by some who found in her writings and lectures a refreshing rebelliousness, and decried by others….

“I was good at holding the politicians’ feet to the fire, in private and in public, to excoriate them, to move their constituents, but from a basis of principle. That I can do. I have good practical instincts on where dominant structures are vulnerable. This requires a high tolerance for risk and conflict.”
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[m-pyre writes: Personally, Andrea Dworkin was not my icon.]
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Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | With pot and porn outstripping corn, America’s black economy is flying high

The annual number of hardcore video rentals in the US has risen from 79m in 1985 to 759m in 2001. Hardcore pornography in the shape of videos, the internet, live sex acts and cable television is now estimated to generate around $10bn, roughly the same amount as Hollywood’s US box office receipts.

Americans spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, regional theatres and orchestra performances combined. The industry has mushroomed since the 70s, when a federal study found that it was worth little more than $10m.

Now the US leads the world in pornography; about 211 new films are produced every week. Los Angeles area is the centre of the film boom and many of those in the trade are otherwise respectable citizens.

Nina Hartley, a porn star, told Schlosser: “You’d be surprised how many producers and manufacturers are Republicans.”

The majority of women in the films earn about $400 a scene. At the moment, there is a surplus of women in California hoping to enter the industry.

The internet has provided a fresh and profitable outlet. In 1997 about 22,000 porn websites existed; the number is now closer to 300,000 and growing.
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Reading Group Guide | THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving

“In this dirty-minded world,” Jenny thinks, “you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore–or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don’t fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you.” …

“Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.” … “Between men and women, only death is shared equally.”
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Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace.”