He is a shameless philanderer, sleeping with his students and even with his daughter's best friend, Rosa (Alice Englert). He actually names his daughter 'Africa'-because women are the dark continent, get it?-so that she has to spend the rest of her life using the nickname Ginger. Since then, he's continued to write and to teach-when Ginger name-drops him to an anti-nuclear activist, the guy just about has a stroke.īut despite all his courage and brilliance-or perhaps because of them-Roland is, as far as his family is concerned, a giant, selfish prick. He was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II. Roland is a dashing activist and political theorist. That critique, and the portrait of Ginger's dad, is gleefully vicious Dworkin would loved it, and it is easily the best thing in the film. This critique of the sexual revolution is embodied in the film by the character Roland (Alessandro Nivola), the father of protagonist Ginger (Elle Fanning.) Her conclusion is that conservatives, correctly, view the sexual revolution for women as in many ways a scam, and that free love is not so much an escape from the inequities of domesticity as an intensification of them. The book, is Dworkin's effort to understand the position and commitments of anti-feminist conservative women. That passage from Andrea Dworkin's 1983 book Right Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females could almost serve as an epigraph for Sally Potter's new British Cold War coming-of-age film Ginger & Rosa. It is fair to say that the silence of the mothers hid a real, tough, unsentimental knowledge of men and intercourse, and that the noisy sexuality of the daughters hid romantic ignorance. The girls of the counterculture Left were wrong not about civil rights or the Viet Nam War or imperial Amerika, but about sex and men.

Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin