Screams and Softness: Why Andrea Dworkin Must Be Read Now

Following the Flow: Femmeness, Patriarchy, and the Sound of a System Cracking

Softness was my resistance. Dworkin’s was the scream. This piece is a call to read her now—not to agree, but to understand the violence of today. Patriarchy hasn’t ended. It’s just changed form. And it still wants us gone.

Introduction

After writing about softness—about femmeness as a neuroqueer stance rooted in movement, in yielding without collapse—I found myself haunted by a voice that was not soft at all. It didn’t whisper. It didn’t flow. It screamed. Andrea Dworkin’s voice. Not the voice of a woman trying to please, or persuade, or perform reasonableness for the comfort of men. A voice that refused to be domesticated. A voice that—once heard—lives in your bones. I hadn’t read her I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape in years, but it returned to me with the clarity of a siren. One line in particular lodged itself in my chest: “Why are you so slow?” Not slow to grasp complex ideology, she clarifies. But slow to grasp the simplest thing—that women are human to the same degree and quality that men are. That single line gutted me.

In the wake of writing about softness as stance, as strength held differently, I found myself needing to sit with this scream. Not as a contradiction to what I’d written, but as its echo in another register. Dworkin does not flow—she erupts. But the ground she stands on is the same one I wrote from: a world that demands we either harden or be broken. A world that punishes our refusal to comply. She names the system in its most brutal forms—rape, battering, silence—and I trace the same power in its quieter coercions: the denial of care, of safety, of legibility. The force that says, this is what a woman is, and punishes you if you’re too much, not enough, or simply unreadable.

This moment in the U.S.—with its anti-trans bills, its “trad wife” nostalgia campaigns, its government medals for reproduction, and the looming shadow of the SAVE Act—demands more than careful observation. It demands a way to decode what is happening. Not just policy by policy, but at the level of power, of pattern. Dworkin saw the shape of this long before we had the language for its latest forms. Her voice is not comfortable. But it is necessary.

Softness and the Scream: Not Opposites, but Complements

When I first began writing about softness, I worried it might be misunderstood—as retreat, as surrender, as something too delicate to matter in a world this brutal. But softness, as I came to understand it, is not the opposite of resistance—it is resistance, simply shaped differently. It does not shout, but it does not yield. And the more I sat with Dworkin’s scream, the more I realised: this is not a divergence, but a duet. Her words are the explosive force; mine are the counterbalance. She is the sharp exhale; I am the slow, rooted breath. Her scream is Yang—fierce, direct, unrelenting. My softness is Yin—absorptive, fluid, enduring. We move differently, but we move within the same cycle.

Dworkin names the system in stark relief: power as domination, male entitlement as law and custom, the very structure of society built on women’s disposability. She doesn’t parse, she pronounces. She demands to be heard. And she’s right to. But what her scream leaves in its wake is the question of what it feels like to live inside that system—not only as a woman, but as someone whose neurology and embodiment are always at odds with the demands of compliance. That’s where my own work begins. Where she charts the violence, I trace its echo in the body: the shutdown, the sensory flood, the unspeakable grief of being made illegible. What Dworkin rages against, I carry in my nervous system. I don’t need her words to describe what it is—I feel its weight every day. But I do need her voice to remind me: I am not imagining it.

If Dworkin’s power lies in her refusal to be silent, then mine lies in how I have chosen to inhabit silence differently. Not as compliance, but as presence. As listening. As motion. In Tai Qi, the yielding form is not passive—it is an active response to force. It flows not because it cannot hold ground, but because it knows how. That is what my softness is. It’s not the absence of fight—it’s the shape that fight takes when you refuse to become the thing you’re resisting.

Today’s Patriarchy Is Dworkin’s Patriarchy—Evolved, Not Gone

What Dworkin called out in the 1980s—the raw, bodily exercise of male power over women—is not a historical relic. It is not metaphor. It is the scaffolding of now. We are watching, in real time, the violent reassertion of that same patriarchal logic, only dressed in newer clothes. The SAVE Act, if enacted, would not merely strip trans women of Title IX protections—it would redefine womanhood in federal law as something we can never be, erasing us through bureaucratic precision and patriarchal spite, no matter how long we’ve fought to belong. The so-called “Mom Medal” and $5,000 baby bonus from the federal government aren’t support—they’re incentives. Bribes, really. They reduce women to wombs, valuable only if they reproduce for the state. And then there’s the saccharine rise of the “Trad Wife”—a weaponised nostalgia campaign dressed in gingham and filtered lighting, peddling submission as empowerment. All of it serves the same end: to reassert control over women’s bodies, lives, and futures under the guise of morality, safety, and tradition.

The logic is chillingly familiar. Women, and those read or expected to perform as women, are being told—again—that our value lies in how well we serve. Whether through birth, beauty, obedience, or silence. Dworkin didn’t need a crystal ball to see this coming. She understood the core mechanism: men exerting control over women because they believe they’re entitled to. She wrote that the power men hold is “real, concrete, exercised from one body to another,” and that it is “protected by law, by religion, by universities, by police, and by the culture’s poets and artists.” That was true then. It is truer now.

Look at Dobbs. Look at the flood of anti-trans and anti-abortion legislation. Look at RFK Jr.’s casual proposal of an autism registry, as if the state should track those of us who are inconvenient, disabled, queer, or unproductive. This isn’t fringe rhetoric—it’s national policy. These are not isolated acts. They are part of a coordinated project to return us to a condition of service: reproductive service, emotional service, aesthetic service. If you do not perform one of those roles—if you are unruly, unreadable, noncompliant—you are positioned as threat, as aberration, as expendable.

And this is where Dworkin must be read now. Not just for her critique of individual male violence, though that alone would be reason enough—but for her relentless indictment of the systems that protect, excuse, and replicate it. She understood that patriarchy doesn’t need to scream to dominate. It can smile. It can hand out medals. It can issue policy. And still, it means to kill us.

Why Dworkin Is Still So Uncomfortable to Read—And That’s the Point

Reading Dworkin is not a comfortable experience—and it isn’t meant to be. Her writing doesn’t coax or persuade; it confronts, wounds, demands. She has been called many things: too angry, too blunt, too essentialist. And yes, she has also been rightly critiqued for the ways her work excludes or misnames trans lives—particularly those of trans women, whom she could not or would not fully see. These critiques matter. We carry them. We should. She is not above reproach. But she is also not discardable. She’s dead; we are the living discourse. It falls to us to read her with discernment, not deference—to contextualise her limitations without losing sight of the clarity she offers.

Because here’s the truth: if we reject Dworkin out of hand, we lose one of the sharpest scalpels ever taken to patriarchy’s facade. Her work is not sacred—but it is surgical. She cuts to the bone of how power operates through bodies, laws, institutions, and unspoken codes of entitlement. She saw clearly what many still refuse to name: that male supremacy is not simply a cultural attitude, but a system of domination enforced through violence, and sanctified by everything from marriage vows to academic norms. Her rage is not a flaw in her logic—it is the logic, given voice. The scream that names what so many others try to dress up in policy language and politeness.

To dismiss her because she didn’t name us all is tempting—but dangerous. It is, ironically, a luxury of those less directly targeted by the systems she described. For those of us trans, neurodivergent, gender-nonconforming—for those whose femmeness does not comfort or conform—there’s something to be learned in her fire, even if it was never lit for us. Because the structure she dissected still governs our lives. The institutions she raged against still silence and erase. We can critique her from where we stand now, with the knowledge and frameworks she didn’t have. But we should do so while still reading her—not because she was always right, but because she was never afraid to be honest.

Neuroqueer Femmeness as a Response to What Dworkin Names

My softness is not a retreat from Dworkin’s rage—it is what survival looks like when the scream is no longer safe, or possible. I don’t write in opposition to her voice, but from the far edge of it. From the place where the system she named so precisely has done its quiet work: not through battering, but through erasure; not through overt assault, but through constant demands to perform, conform, and disappear. My femmeness—neuroqueer, autistic, relational, and shaped by years of martial practice—is not the softness of submission. It is softness as stance. As refusal. As the discipline of flow in a world that wants you to break.

I move the way I do—not because I’ve escaped what Dworkin described, but because I live inside it. Because I’ve felt it not just as politics, but as pressure in my chest, as shutdown, as misgendering, as silence. Where Dworkin saw the visible acts of violence—rape, battering, domination—I’ve been shaped by the invisible ones: the administrative erasures, the linguistic invalidations, the daily recalibrations required just to be read as human. Her analysis names the system. My body bears its impact.

And still, I don’t meet it with blunt force. I meet it the way I was taught in martial Tai Qi—by redirecting, grounding, moving with intention. I meet it through presence, not performance. Through the clarity of stillness, not the noise of spectacle. My resistance flows rather than strikes, but it is no less real. I yield, but I do not give way.

Dworkin didn’t have this language. She couldn’t imagine this shape of resistance—neuroqueer, femme, sensory-informed, flowing rather than shouting. But she named the conditions that made it necessary. Her scream carved space for other forms of response to emerge. And this—this rooted, quiet, unyielding softness—is mine.

Final thoughts …

Don’t read Dworkin to agree with her. Read her so you can see. So you can recognise the structure we are living through—not as some new crisis, but as the continuation of an old and relentless system. The screams she gave voice to haven’t faded; they’ve simply changed register. They echo now in legislative chambers and executive orders. In the calculated cruelty of bills like the SAVE Act. In the forced birth policies cloaked as freedom. In the erasure of trans lives, framed as “protecting children.” In the monetised nostalgia of “Trad Wives” and state-sponsored medals for maternal service. These aren’t cultural quirks. They are infrastructure. Dworkin understood that long before most people were willing to name it.

You don’t have to adopt her whole worldview to understand the urgency in her voice. You only need to be honest enough to hear it. Her words are jagged. They are confrontational. They will not make you comfortable. But comfort is not the point. Not now. Not when our rights are being shredded through amendments and algorithms. Not when womanhood is being redefined in law to exclude anyone who doesn’t fit the state’s ideal. Not when bodies like mine—neurodivergent, trans, femme—are targeted as threats simply for existing outside someone else’s script.

Dworkin didn’t scream so we could turn away. She didn’t write so her anger could be archived and forgotten. She spoke because the world demanded it. She named what too many refused to see. And now, as those same forces rise again—wearing friendlier faces, using newer tools—we need her clarity. We need her fire. Not to replicate her, but to wake the fuck up.

We don’t have time for comfort. But we also don’t have time for ignorance. Dworkin didn’t scream so we could look away. She screamed so we could move.