The essays, speeches, and books by the right wing’s favorite radical feminist were at least as intolerant and diversity-hostile as those of John Paul II. But unlike JP, Dworkin wasn’t an outspoken anti-Communist, so it’s apparently OK for the mainstream media obits of her to be less than unanimously laudatory.

Other feminists, before and after Dworkin, devoted themselves to liberation, as they variously defined it. Dworkin would have none of that positivity, none of that hope. She was a purist dystopian. Just like the right-wing extremists, she craved the simplistic power of absolutism. In her vision, the entire planet was populated by only a few human character types. All Women were either pathetic victims or strident avengers. All Men were either beasts or domesticated beasts. This one-dimensional zeitgeist had its logical conclusion in the premise that women could only be freed if men were strictly suppressed.

As her many critics frequently stated, her sexism (and, let’s face it, she wasn’t anti-sexist, she was sexist) didn’t allow for the existence of non-rapist men, non-lesbian women, non-violent pornos, heterosexual couples who actually liked one another, and many assorted other wide swaths of the whole mongrel human condition. But to simply repeat these obvious flaws is to ignore the white-hot emotional power of her writings.

I recently reviewed several novels by the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz. He’d survived Nazi slave-labor camps in his teens, and his tragic characters never got over the horror. Dworkin claimed to have suffered through a young life of domestic abuse, insults, and put-downs. She clearly never got over that, either by happenstance or by choice. Kertesz’s protagonists lived out their whole lives still emotionally imprisoned by their victimhood. So did Dworkin. As Regina Hackett wrote in a P-I profile of Dworkin in the ‘90s, there was no sunlight in Dworkin’s writing. She lived in a world defined strictly by fear and hate, a world she could not break out of. Until last week.