Stop the presses! Andrea Dworkin, early radical-feminist activist, writer, and icon, died of currently unknown causes at home on Sunday, in Washington DC. She was 59. We assume her partner of 30 years and husband since 1998, John Stoltenberg, was at her side. Although Dworkin didn’t appear in Inside Deep Throat, she gave her last interview not quite two weeks ago, to World of Wonder, contributing to its AMC late-summer series, Movies That Shook the World. Her topic was Fatal Attraction. (Guardian Unlimited)
Her radical-feminist critique of pornography began with her first book, Woman Hating, published when she was 27. She campaigned frequently on the subject, helping to draft a law in 1983 that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women. The law, later overturned by an appeal court as unconstitutional, was inspired by the case of Linda Marchiano, who, as Linda Lovelace, said she had been violently coerced into pornography, including the film Deep Throat, but had no recourse to the courts.