In the same way anyone interested in either pornography or censorship should study Sade

In the same way, anyone interested in either pornography or censorship should study Sade as a kind of "worst-case" scenario, and remember Simone de Beauvoir's verdict: "Every time we side with a child whose throat has been slit by a sex maniac we take a stand against him." Yes, there are too many seedy old tossers eulogising "The Divine Marquis", but it is significant that de Beauvoir also concluded, in her essay "Must We Burn Sade?", a decided non Does Sade need censoring? Surely his work is its own emetic. The judicial execution of the murderer is pointless and joyless, too. Kieslowski uses a "worst-case" scenario to confound both liberals and reactionaries. Well, why not? Sade would not have found this at all peculiar. Krzysztof Kieslowski chose to portray, in A Short Film About Killing, the worst sort of human vermin, the perpetrator of a pointless, joyless crime. But were his crazed dispatches from the sexual front so alien, or did he just magnify ordinary male sexuality until it became disgusting, the way anything familiar - a flake of skin, a nail-paring - reveals jagged horrors under the microscope? Of course the effect of the lens - or of any art, even Sade's - can so distance the reality, that you can once more admire with detachment the beauty, say, of a virus or diseased organ To the Taoist adept, excrement was as beautiful as amber. If Sade didn't exist, would there be no sadism? He evidently thought he had given birth to something new and monstrous, introducing his 120 Days of Sodom with the words: "Prepare your heart and your mind for the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began, a book the likes of which are met with neither among the ancients nor amongst us moderns." He was right in a way: his catalogues of murders, tortures and rapes were, for sheer scale, unprecedented in the annals of literature. "When anti-Semitism becomes normal, violence against Jews becomes easy; and when woman-hating becomes the norm, then killing and other forms of sexual abuse of women become easy," she says "And I think that's what's happening.".

"Increasingly, people either think it's OK, or they accept that it's there and they don't want to look at it." Dworkin considers this phenomenon of blase acceptance resonant of Hitler's campaign against the Jews. I call it the war room for sexual abuse: How do you hurt her? What are the ways in which you destroy her? That's what I think pornography is and does." To those who suggest that many women freely choose to work in pornography, and should not have their livelihood tampered with, Dworkin counters: "Most of the women in the pornography trade are victims of childhood sexual abuse. If the pornography industry had to depend on having a supply of women who had food and shelter and were treated kindly, there wouldn't be an industry."Pornography, she says, is all the more pernicious because it has been normalised. And she still lectures in the United States, Canada, and any place where women in need call her, and can pay a reasonable fee "People want me to shut up, but I won't.

I believe social change is possible; that's why I'm an activist."Change, though, comes slowly."Pornography is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and they spend a lot of moneylobbying for laws that protect them," Dworkin says. "They see me as their enemy." To those who argue that pornography is a harmless diversion for consenting adults, Dworkin retorts: "It's a social plan for the destruction of women. One of the readers of the manuscript sent Dworkin and MacKinnon a letter lauding their accomplishments in combating pornography "It made me feel sick," Dworkin says. "I feel we have accomplished so little." The bills she and MacKinnon sought to enforce were passed in Minneapolis and in Indianapolis only to be vetoed or lost in appeals.Despite the doubts and the resentments, Dworkin says she still considers herself an optimist "All writers are," she says.

"There's a double standard for women writers that's contemptible." Her books, Mercy and Intercourse should last, Dworkin says. "But," she adds, "they won't."In the face of resounding critical rejection and contempt, Dworkin admits that, lately, she feels discouraged "I have less confidence now than I ever have had," she says. This year, after many years of effort, she at last found a publisher for a book she wrote with her collaborator, the Michigan lawyer Catherine MacKinnon, chronicling their efforts to pass anti-porn bills in several American cities. "If women don't decide their own lives matter, then their own lives won't matter." And so, when critics dismiss her books, Dworkin puts the blame squarely on sexism. It is not she who is out of touch with the real concerns of the women today, she maintains; it is her critics, especially the female critics. "People don't understand the tyranny of media," she explains. "The few women that the media will allow in have to think about male approval, and their own success - and their writing reflects that." Naomi Wolf, she says, is a coward; and she and others who diminish the pervasiveness of discrimination against women have a complacency that most young women do not share "We're in a war that we're losing," Dworkin says.

In her lecture career, she meets many young women on college campuses and at battered women's centres who despair that they cannot find her books in bookshops. "I see my books as a body of work, in my opinion of singular importance, and deeply disrespected in a way that is savagely unfair." Dworkin especially resents the critical dismissal of her work because she believes that women not only benefit by her writings, but need them. "One woman showed me a dog-eared copy of my book Woman Hating that had been read by upwards of 200 women," Dworkin says. Above her desk, stacked with books she is reading to research her book Scapegoat, which examines the similarity of anti-Semitism and misogyny, is a Xerox of alleged rapist William Kennedy Smith, with a rifle target centred on his head. A headline above it reads: DEAD MEN DON'T RAPE.Which of her books is most likely to be remembered, I ask her - a harmless enough question - but her answer surprises me in its force. Framed photographs of Stoltenberg lurk here and there, as well as one of Gertrude Stein. A Cabbage Patch doll sprawls amiably on one shelf, "a present from John," she explains.