Blood (“Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’”), I knew that I was
in for a hard time, but I still did not know how hard it was
going to be.
“Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’” was written for the
National Organization for Women Conference on Sexuality
that took place in New York City on October 12, 1974. I
spoke at the end of a three-hour speakout on sex: women
talking about their sexual experiences, feelings, values.
There were 1100 women in the audience; no men were
present. When I was done, the 1100 women rose to their
feet. Women were crying and shaking and shouting. The
applause lasted nearly ten minutes. It was one of the most
astonishing experiences of my life. Many of the talks I gave
received standing ovations, and this was not the first, but I
had never spoken to such a big audience, and what I said
contradicted rather strongly much of what had been said
before I spoke. So the response was amazing and it
overwhelmed me. The coverage of the speech also overwhelmed me. One New York weekly published two vilifications. One was by a woman who had at least been present.
She suggested that men might die from blue-balls if I were
ever taken seriously. The other was by a man who had not
been present; he had overheard women talking in the lobby.
He was “enraged. ” He could not bear the possibility that “ a
woman might consider masochistic her consent to the means
of my release. ” That was the “danger Dworkin’s ideology
represents. ” Well, yes; but both writers viciously distorted
what I had actually said. Many women, including some
quite famous writers, sent letters deploring the lack of
fairness and honesty in the two articles. None of those
letters were published. Instead, letters from men who had
not been present were published; one of them compared my
speech to H itler’s Final Solution. I had used the words
“limp” and “penis” one after the other: “limp penis. ” Such
usage outraged; it offended so deeply that it warranted a
comparison with an accomplished genocide. Nothing I had
said about women was mentioned, not even in passing. The
speech was about women. The weekly in question has since
never published an article of mine or reviewed a book of
mine or covered a speech of mine (even though some of my
speeches were big events in New York City). * The kind of
fury in those two articles simply saturated the publishing
establishment, and my work was stonewalled. Audiences
around the country, most of them women and men,
continued to rise to their feet; but the journals that one
might expect to take note of a political writer like myself, or
a phenomenon like those speeches, refused to acknowledge
my existence. There were two noteworthy if occasional
exceptions: Ms. and Mother Jones.
In the years following the publication of Woman Hating,
it began to be regarded as a feminist classic. The honor in
this will only be apparent to those who value Mary
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication o f the Rights o f Women or
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. It was a great
honor. Feminists alone were responsible for the survival of
Woman Hating. Feminists occupied the offices of Woman
* After Our Blood was published, I went to this same weekly to beg—yes,
beg—for some attention to the book, which was dying. The male writer
whose “release” had been threatened by “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’ ” asked to meet me. He told me, over and over, how very beautiful Our Blood was. “You know—urn—um, ” I said, “that—urn, urn—That
Speech is in Our Blood—you know, the one you wrote about. ” “So
beautiful, ” he said, “so beautiful. ” The editor-in-chief of the weekly
wrote me that Our Blood was so fine, so moving. But Our Blood did not
get any help, not even a mention, in those pages.
Hating's publisher to demand that the book be published in
paper. Phyllis Chesler contacted feminist writers of reputation all over the country to ask for written statements of support for the book. Those writers responded with astonishing generosity. Feminist newspapers reported the suppression of the book. Feminists who worked in bookstores scavenged distributors’ warehouses for copies of the book and wrote over and over to the publisher to demand
the book. Women’s studies programs began using it.
Women passed the book from hand to hand, bought second
and third and fourth copies to give friends whenever they
could find it. Even though the publisher of Woman Hating
had told me it was “mediocre, ” the pressure finally resulted
in a paperback edition in 1976: 2500 leftover unbound
copies were bound in paper and distributed, sort of.
Problems with distribution continued, and bookstores,
which reported selling the book steadily when it was in
stock, had to wait months for orders to be filled. Woman
Hating is now in its fifth tiny paperback printing. The book
is not another piece of lost women’s literature only because
feminists would not give it up. In a way this story is
heartening, because it shows what activism can accomplish,
even in the Yahoo land of Amerikan publishing.
But I had nowhere to go, no way to continue as a writer.
So I went on the road—to women’s groups who passed a hat
for me at the end of my talk, to schools where feminist
students fought to get me a hundred dollars or so, to
conferences where women sold T-shirts to pay me. I spent
weeks or months writing a talk. I took long, dreary bus rides
to do what appeared to be only an evening’s work and slept
wherever there was room. Being an insomniac, I did not
sleep much. Women shared their homes, their food, their
hearts with me, and I met women in every circumstance,
nice women and mean women, brave women and terrified
women. And the women I met had suffered every crime,
every indignity: and I listened. “The Rape Atrocity and the
Boy Next D oor” (in this volume) always elicited the same
responses: I heard about rape after rape; women’s lives
passed before me, rape after rape; women who had been
raped in homes, in cars, on beaches, in alleys, in classrooms, by one man, by two men, by five men, by eight men, hit, drugged, knifed, tom , women who had been sleeping,
women who had been with their children, women who had
been out for a walk or shopping or going to school or going