Andrea Dworkin
The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
BOOKS BY ANDREA DWORKIN
Woman Hating
Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
the new woman’s broken heart: short stories
Pornography: Men Pos es ing Women
Right-wing Women
Ice and Fire
Intercourse
Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality
(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)
Let ers from a War Zone
Mercy
Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings
On the Continuing War Against Women
In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings
(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Wrmen’s Liberation
To Ricki Abrams and
Catharine A. MacKinnon
To Ruth and Jackie
Continuum
The Tower Building
11 York Road
London SE1 7NX
www. continuumbooks. com
Copyright © 2002 by Andrea Dworkin
This edition first published 2006 in the UK by Continuum
Al rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmit ed
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-8264-9147-2
Typeset by Continuum
Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwal
Je est un autre
Rimbaud
Contents
Preface
xi
Music 1
1
Music 2
5
Music 3
7
The Pedophilic Teacher
12
“Silent Night”
18
Plato
22
The High School Library
27
The Bookstore
32
The Fight
36
The Bomb
40
Cuba 1
45
David Smith
48
Contraception
52
Young Americans for Freedom
55
Cuba 2
60
The Grand Jury
62
The Orient Express
66
Easter
69
Knossos
72
Heartbreak
Kazantzakis
74
Discipline
77
The Freighter
80
Strategy
83
Suf er the Little Children
89
Theory
93
The Vow
96
My Last Leftist Meeting
100
Petra Kel y
104
Capitalist Pig
108
One Woman
112
It Takes a Vil age
117
True Grit
121
Anita
124
Prisons
127
Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?
130
The Women
136
Counting
139
Heartbreak
145
Basics
148
Immoral
155
Memory
158
Acknowledgments
164
X
Preface
I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am
myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to
give if she asserts her will. In the home the question will be
couched in a million cruelties, some subtle, some so egregious
they rival the injuries of organized war.
A woman writer makes herself conspicuous by publishing,
not by writing. Although one could argue - and I would -
that publishing is essential to the development of the writing
itself, there will be exceptions. After al , suppose Max Brod had
burned Kafka’s work as Kafka had wanted? The private writer,
which Kafka was, must be more common among women than
men: few men have Kafka’s stunning self-loathing, but many
women do; then again, there is the obvious - that the public
domain in which the published work lives has been considered
the male domain. In our day, more women publish but many
more do not, and despite the glut of mediocre and worthless
books published each year just in the United States, there
must be a she-Kafka, or more than one, in hiding somewhere,
just as there must be a she-Proust, whose vanity turned robust
when it came to working over so many years on essentially
xi
Heartbreak
one great book. If the she-Proust were lucky enough to live
long enough and could afford the rewards of a purely aesthetic life, aggressive self-publication and promotion would not necessarily fol ow: her secret masterpiece would be just that -
secret, yet no les a masterpiece. The tree fel ; no one heard it
or ever wil ; it exists.
In our day, a published woman’s reputation, if she is alive,
wil depend on many small conformities - in her writing but
especial y in her life. Does she practice the expression of gender in a good way, which is to say, does she convince, in her person, that she is female down to the very mar ow of her
bones? Her supplications may be modest, but most often they
are not. Her lips wil blaze red even if she is old and gnarled.
It’s a declaration: I won’t hurt you; I am deferential; al those
unpleasant things I said, I didn’t mean one of them. In our
benumbed era, which tries for a semblance of civilized, voluntary order after the morbid, systematic chaos of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao - after Pol Pot and the unspeakable starving of Africa
- it is up to women, as it always has been, to embody the
meaning of civilized life on the scale of one to one, each of
those matchings containing within and underneath rivers running with a historical blood. Women in Western societies now take the following loyalty oath: my veil was made by Revlon,
and I wil not show my face; I believe in free speech, which
includes the buying and selling of my sisters in pornography
and prostitution, but if we cal it ‘trafficking, ” Pm agin it -
xi
Preface
how dare one exploit Third World or foreign or exotic women;
my body is mostly skeleton and if anyone wants to write on
it, they must use the finest brush and write the simplest of
haiku; I have sex, I like sex, I am sex, and while being used
may of end me on principle or concretely, I will fight back by
manipulation and lies but deny it from kindergarten to the
grave; I have no sense of honor and, girls, if there’s one thing