Why take someone else's word for it?

I was young and buffeted by a maelstrom of politics and new ideas. And so, yours truly was briefly enamoured of the feminists (lesbianists?) who believed that porn should be banned and sex with men was inherently oppressive.

Eventually, a few years later, a new mindset took over, just as dangerously omnipresent, in which empowered grrrrl Third Wavers joined with cocky gay men to argue that all porn is swell and that naughty images do not affect us in any way. We have agency, you know.

I never quite understand the contention that porn has no impact on us, since it's a gazillion-dollar industry precisely because, uhm, it does have an immediate effect. Duh. And don't tell me that there's no desensitization, no resistance built up from seeing the same image over and over again -- or you'd buy one porn mag and get off on it for the rest of your life. (Geez. Did I just write "you"?)

I just want porn proponents to make arguments that make sense. To acknowledge the problems inherent in any theology, rather than to block them right out of conscious existence.

Which brings me to Andrea Dworkin. I did not write about Dworkin upon her death. Ugh, I thought of the task ahead: too complicated. I don't wanna.

American leftie, author and playwright Paula Martinac, who is taking her leave from a distinguished run writing the queer-media syndicated "Lesbian Notions," noted in one of her last columns that "there's been a peculiar shortage of commentary in the LGBT press about the death [in April] of lesbian-feminist writer and theorist Andrea Dworkin. Interestingly, everything I've read has been written by feminist-identified gay men."

Martinac (conflict note: I work with Paula on another project) wonders if women are embarrassed at Dworkin's "loud angry dyke" persona. I think we're embarrassed by her porn hating and man bashing because dykes are desperately busy buying into the idea that gay male culture is an ideal and yay porn!

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Dworkin's followers were guilty of mis-judgments both ridiculous and sickening. Martinac wrote: "When [the lezzie] On Our Backs first began publishing, an ex-lover of mine wrote the editors an angry letter berating them for creating a porn magazine in the first place and then for choosing a name that mocked the revered, P.C. lesbian-feminist publication Off Our Backs. An ex-lover of hers dismissed my experience of forced sex with another woman by asserting that the term 'rape' only applied to men hurting women."

I never read Dworkin back when ( I was far too busy changing the world). That's one of the reasons I didn't want to eulogize her. Martinac did, however, pull out some old tomes: "So it has been fascinating, 20-some years later, to revisit Dworkin. Despite the limitation of views like 'Fucking is the means by which the male colonizes the female,' she was remarkably ahead of her time.... Dworkin was [also] writing that the categories of 'male' and 'female' were social constructs, and was calling for the elimination of gender.

"She was helping to bring violence against women to public consciousness long before there were star-studded readings of 'The Vagina Monologues'. And when it was far from hip for lesbians and gay men to create families together, Dworkin was herself settled down with a gay male life partner."

Dworkin doesn't deserve to be forgotten by her own generation.

Read pornographer Susie Bright's angry and affectionate obituary for Andrea Dworkin. Then read Dworkin in the original. She helped make us -- lesbians, and gay men too -- into who and what we are today.