American writer, theorist and activist Andrea Dworkin was BOTD in 1946. Born in Camden, New Jersey, she grew up in a liberal middle-class Jewish family, and studied at Bennington College. While a student, she was arrested and brutalised in prison after protesting the Vietnam War, an experience that formed much of her later activism. After graduation she moved to Europe, marrying a Dutch anarchist whom she later claimed subjected her to prolonged physical abuse. Returning to the United States in the early 1970s, she became involved with the emerging radical feminist movement, speaking at the first Take Back the Night March. In her 1974 book Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, she posited that male violence towards women was an essential tool of patriarchal rule. Over the next 30 years, she applied her theories about male violence to the life of Joan of Arc; the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, Leo Tolstoy, the Marquis de Sade, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin; the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his wife Nicole; the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Dworkin is perhaps best known for her criticism of pornography, explored in her 1981 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women. During the 1980s, she and fellow activist Catherine McKinnon made several unsuccessful attempts to tighten censorship laws and restrict access to pornography in the United States, creating an often uneasy alliance with Christian right-wing activists. In her 1987 book Intercourse, she argued that all heterosexual sex was coercive and degrading to women, alienating many mainstream feminists and provoking pushback from sex-positive feminists Pat Califia, Gayle Rubin, Camille Paglia and Susie Bright. In 2000, Dworkin made unsubstantiated claims that she had been drugged and gang-raped in a hotel in Paris, withdrawing from public life for several years. Dworkin lived in a non-sexual partnership with gay writer and activist John Stoltenberg from 1974 until her death, describing him as her life partner. She died in 2005 after years of ill health, aged 55. A polarising figure even after her death, her works continue to be cited in debates around the availability of pornography on the internet and social media.