Bizarre bedfellows: Andrea Dworkin's ideological intercourse with the right.

• Author: Young, Cathy

The passing of Andrea Dworkin--feminist polemicist, anti-porn crusader, and loony extraordinaire--drew strangely admiring obituaries from several feminists who vehemently disagreed with her in life, including the self-identified "feminist pornographer" Susie Bright and the staunchly anti-censorship Nation columnist Katha Pollitt. Even odder were the plaudits from conservatives. In National Review, David Frum described a meeting with Dworkin in almost glowing terms. In her syndicated column, Maggie Gallagher wrote lyrically about the "gift" of mutual understanding that she and Dworkin had given each other "from the opposite ends of the political spectrum."

But the romance between social conservatives and the far-left feminist goes a long way back. It started in the 1980s, after Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon emerged as leaders of the feminist war on porn. The religious right saw an opportunity to harness this effort to its own crusade against smut. Some were particularly excited about the MacKinnon-Dworkin solution to that pesky First Amendment: Declare "pornography," loosely defined, to be a violation of women's civil rights.

An ordinance based on this concept, which would have allowed any aggrieved woman to seek the suppression of sexually explicit materials and to sue the producers and distributors, passed in Indianapolis in 1984 with strong backing from the right, including the anti-feminist doyenne Phyllis Schlafly. (The federal courts promptly struck it down on First Amendment grounds.) In 1986 Dworkin testified before the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography--a.k.a. the Meese Commission--offering a lurid account of the supposedly routine misogynistic sadism in porn and fielding such trenchant questions as whether an image of a woman performing fellatio on her knees would automatically qualify as female subordination.

Her "moving" testimony was singled out for warm praise by the then-obscure fundamentalist Christian psychologist James C. Dobson (now head of Focus on the Family). The conservatives apparently didn't care that their new anti-porn star didn't care for men or the traditional family, or that she saw life in "Amerika" as a slow-motion Auschwitz for women. Fortuitously, Dworkin and MacKinnon cared just as little that their new friends were very much in favor of female subordination, Biblical style.

This meeting of minds was far more than just a strategic alliance over pornography. Dworkin's general view of sexuality...