A group of conference speakers went to dinner on the first night and we were raucously discussing our various wishlists of ways to end patriarchy.
We hit it off immediately, as we had a similar sense of humour and a number of friends in common. I was one of the organisers of an international conference on violence against women, and Dworkin was a keynote speaker. Had more of us listened to Dworkin during her decades of activism, and taken her work more seriously, more women would have signed up to an uncompromising feminism, as opposed to the fun kind, the sloganeering sort you read on high-street T-shirts, that is all about individual “girl power” and being able to wear trousers, rather than a collective movement to emancipate all women from the tyranny of oppression. She was motivated by an innate desire to rid the world of pain and oppression. “They urge me on, and keep me focused on what needs to be done.” “I keep the stories of the women in my heart,” she would tell me when I asked how she did the work she did and stayed sane.
I knew the real Dworkin, and our decade-long friendship taught me far more about love than hate.
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