me the $60. It wasn’t personal. It was just that any money I
earned came from someone else who also didn’t have enough
money for a T-shirt. Or did she? I guess I’l never know. I
couldn’t embrace being a capitalist pig; I couldn’t accept the
fact - and it was a fact - that the more money I was paid, the
nicer people were. I couldn’t even accept the good fallout -
that charging a fee for a lecture enabled me to do benefits as
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Capitalist Pig
wel . After a while I got the hang of it and when work fel of ,
when the speaking events dried up, when someone was nasty
to me, I just raised my price. It was bad for the karma but
good for this life.
I remember that saying I was poor got me contempt, not
empathy or a few more dol ars. I remember that begging
for money especially brought out the cruelty in people. I
remember that trying to talk about poverty - you show me
yours and I'l show you mine - never brought forth anything
other than insult. Competitive poverty was the lowest negotiation, a fight to the moral death.
In hindsight it is clear to me that I never would have been
able to put in more than a quarter of a century on the road
had I not figured out what I needed. Everyone doesn’t need
what I need, but I do need what I need. Money is a hard
discipline, not easy to learn, especially for the lumpen like me.
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One Woman
I was walking down the street on a bright, sunny day in New
York City sometime in 1975. A woman almost as bright and
sunny was walking toward me. I recognized her, an acquaintance in the world of books. She had been up at my Woodstock speech, which had been about rape. I had started writing out
my speeches because of my frustration at not being able to
find venues for publication. This was cal ed “The Rape Atrocity
and the Boy Next Door, ” subsequently published in 1976 in
a collection of speeches called Our Blood: Prophecies and
Discourses on Sexual Politics. We greeted each other, and then
she started talking: she had been raped on a particular night
in a particular city years before. She had left the window open
just a little for the breeze. The guy climbed in and when she
awoke he had already restrained her wrists and was inside her.
We stood in that one place for an hour or so because she told
me every detail of the rape. Most of them I still remember.
I gave the same speech at a smal community col ege. At the
reception after, the host pulled me aside. She had been gang-
raped some fifteen years before. The rapists were just about to
be released from prison. She was in ter or. One key element in
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One Woman
their convictions was that they had taken photographs of the
rape. The prosecutor was able to use the photographs to show
the jury the brutal fact of the rape.
Some eight years later a founder of one of the early rape
crisis centers told me that she and her colleagues were seeing
increasing numbers of rapes that were photographed; the
photography was part of the rape. The photographs themselves
no longer proved that a rape had taken place. For the rapists,
they intensified pleasure during the rape and after it they were
tokens, happy reminders; but the perception of what the photograph meant had changed. No mat er how violent the rape, the photograph of it seemed to be proof of the victim’s complicity to increasing numbers of jurors.
Everywhere that I traveled, starting from my poorest days
in New York and its environs to my more lucrative days flying
around the country to my sometimes-rich - sometimes-poor
days on the international level, I had women talking to me
about having been raped; then about having been raped and
photographed. One simply cannot imagine the pain. Each
woman told the story in the same way: no detail was left out;
the clock was running and the whole story had to be told to
me, then, there, wherever we were. Six months or a year or
several years could have passed since they had come to hear
me speak; six months or fifteen years could have passed since
the rape or the rape and the photographs.
Women did not stand up after the speech and speak about
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Heartbreak
a personal experience of rape; the questions were socially
acceptable and usually abstract. It was when they saw me
somewhere, anywhere real y, but alone, that they told me,
sometimes in whispers, what had happened to them. I had to
live with what I was being told.
Like death, rape happens to one woman, an individual, a
singular person. Even in circumstances of war when there is
mass rape, each rape happens to one woman. That one woman
can be raped many times by one man or by many. I’ve spent
the larger part of my adult life listening to stories of rape. At
first I listened naively, surprised that a woman walking down
the street on a bright and sunny day, someone I real y did not
know, could, after a greeting, launch into a sickening, detailed
story of a rape that had happened to her. The element of surprise never entirely went away, but later I would be certain to steel myself, balance my body, try to calm my mind. I couldn’t
move, I could barely breathe - I was afraid of hurting her, the
one woman, by a gesture that seemed dismissive or by a look
on my face that might be mistaken for incredulity.
Most of the rapes were unreported; some were inside families; each rape was in some sense a secret; one woman and then one woman and then one woman did not think she would be
believed. The political ground in society as a whole was not
welcoming. The genius of the New York Radical Feminists
was that they organized a speak-out on rape in the early 1970s
before anyone was prepared to listen. They paved the way.
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One Woman
The genius of Susan Brownmil er’s book Against Our Wilclass="underline"
Men, Women and Rape was that it gave rape a history. The
genius of the women’s movement was in demanding that rape
be addressed as a social policy issue. A consequence of that
demand was legal reform, some but not enough. The rules of
evidence shamelessly favor the accused rapist(s) and destroy the
dignity of the rape victim. The rape victim is stil suspect - this
is a prejudice against women as deep as any antiblack prejudice. She lied, she lied, she lied: women lie. The bite marks on her back show that she liked rough sex, not that a sexual predator had chewed up her back. That she went with her school chum to Central Park and her death - she was strangled with
her bra - proved that she liked rough sex. One woman was
tortured and raped by her husband; he was so arrogant that
he videotaped a half hour, including his use of a knife on her