'Decide One More Time': Prostitution and Sexual Intelligence in the Early Writings of Andrea Dworkin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Andrea Dworkin’s first book, Woman Hating, was published in 1974, and written while Dworkin was in her 20s. It is experimental, literary, and ultimately hopeful. Right-Wing Women, which had its start as a Ms Magazine article in 1977, was expanded into a book in 1983. The most difficult of Dworkin’s works to find today, it was also her least favourite, owing to the academic conventions demanded by the publisher. It is dense, political and unflinching in its criticism. Despite their differences, these two books demonstrate the evolution of Dworkin’s thinking as she grapples with a central feminist contradiction – the need to remake the world while simultaneously living in it. Dworkin’s message in both books is that sexual liberation without sex equality is not the revolution we need. Women aligned with the male Left fail to understand both that Right-wing women are striking a clear-eyed bargain with their oppressors, but also that Left-wing women are in denial about doing exactly the same thing. Forty years later, the contemporary relevance of the analysis developed in these works is striking, even as the legal and material conditions of women’s lives have changed in many ways from the world that Dworkin describes. This article focuses on the resonance of Dworkin’s analysis for the current feminist debates around prostitution. Dworkin was consistent in her identification of prostitution as incompatible with women’s freedom and equality. Read together, these early writings help us to understand why so many women, on both the Right and the Left, believe that their equality can be achieved while other women continue to be prostituted, and why women continue to look the other way when faced with this expression of male sexual entitlement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".