The Best American Erotica 2006

Introduction
After Andrea


The week I put this edition of The Best American Erotica 2006 to bed, Andrea Dworkin died.

There was a time -- when I started editing and encouraging erotica writers -- that Andrea Dworkin's name would have inevitably been brought up in the first ten minutes of any conversation. Nowadays, I realize that I might have to explain who she was, due to the speed of American historical amnesia.

Andrea Dworkin was an influential political activist and writer, and was so charismatic that she molded a generation of attitudes toward sexual expression. She particularly dissected the image of women in literature, media, and pornography, where she saw it as evidence that our culture thrived on violence toward women as a gender, and humiliation of them. She didn't think sexism was naughty-cute -- she found it deadly, and culpable.

As far as she was concerned, "erotica" could go fuck itself. It was just a prettied-up word for pernicious and patriarchal pornography. Yes, she was that blunt. One of the great whammies of Dworkin's antiporn rhetoric was that she used the most visceral pornographic language to describe and condemn her nemeses. Like Pandora, she invited every woman she encountered to open the lid of sexual magazines, books, and movies, and take a hard look at what came out.

The problem was, we did -- and many of us came to different, or at least more nuanced, conclusions than Andrea. The day after she died, I wrote in my blog:




Dworkin used her considerable intellectual powers to analyze pornography, which was something that no one had done before. No one. The men who made porn didn't. Porn was like a low-culture joke before the feminist revolution kicked its ass. It was beneath discussion.

Here's the irony...every single woman who pioneered the sexual revolution, every erotic-feminist-bad-girl-and-proud-of-it-stiletto-shitkicker, was once a fan of Andrea Dworkin. Until 1984, we all were. She was the one who got us looking at porn with a critical eye; she made you feel like you could just stomp into the adult bookstore and seize everything for inspection and a bonfire.

The funny thing that happened on the way to the X-Rated Sex Palace was that some of us came to different conclusions than Ms. Dworkin. We saw the sexism of the porn business...but we also saw some intriguing possibilities and amazing maverick spirit. We said, "What if we made something that reflected our politics and values, but was just as sexually bold "



I remember walking into an old-fashioned "Adults Only" store in 1977 when I was nineteen years old. I was there (with an older female friend holding my trembling hand) on assignment from my college women's studies class, where we had been told to take a firsthand look at some "pornography," and write an analysis.