The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
Andrea Dworkin
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
you can count on, you can count on that. If this were not the
common, current practice - if triviality and deceit were not
the coin of the female realm - there would be nothing remarkable in who I am or how I got the way that I am.
It must be admit ed that those who want me to account for
myself are intrigued in hostile, voyeuristic ways, and their
projections of me are not the usual run-of-the-mill rudeness or
arrogance to which writers, especially women writers, become
accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfortunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here’s the deal as I see it: I am ambitious - God knows, not for money; in most
respects but not al I am honorable; and I wear overalls: kil
the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says,
alone in a small room.
xi i
Music 1
I studied music when I was a child, the piano as taught by
Mrs. Smith. She was old with white hair. She represented
culture with every gesture while I was just a plebe kid. But I
learned: discipline and patience from Czerny, the way ideas
can move through sound from Bach, how to say “Fuck you”
from Mozart. Mrs. Smith might have thought herself the
reigning sensibility, and she did get between the student and
the music with a stunning regularity, but if you could hear you
could learn and if you learned it in your body you knew it
forever. The fingers were the wells of musical memory, and
they provided a map for the cognitive faculties. I can remember writing out the notes and eventually grasping the nature of the piano, percussive and string, the richness and range of
the sound. I wanted music in writing but not the way Verlaine
did, not in the syllables themselves; anything pronounced
would have sound and most sound is musical; no, in a different
way. I recognized early on how the great classical composers,
but especially and always Bach, could convey ideas without
using any words at al . Repetition, variation, risk, originality,
and commitment created the piece and conveyed the ideas. I
1
Heartbreak
wanted to do that with writing. I’d walk around with poems
by Rimbaud or Baudelaire in my pocket - bilingual, paperback books with the English translations reading like prose poems - and I'd recognize that the power of the poems was
not unlike the power of music. For a while, I hoped to be a
pianist, and my mother took me into Philadelphia, the big
city, to study with someone a great deal more pretentious and
more expensive than Mrs. Smith. But then I tried to master
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, for which I had developed a somewhat warped passion, and could not. That failure told me that I could not be a musician, although I continued
to study music in col ege.
The problem with that part of my musical education was
that I stopped playing piano, and Bennington, the college I
went to, insisted that one play an instrument. I didn’t like my
piano teacher, and I wasn’t going to play or spend one minute
of one day with him hovering over my shoulder and condemning me with a baronial English that left my prior teachers in my mind as plain-speaking people. I loved the theory classes. Mine was with the composer Vivian fine. The first
assignment, which was lovely, was to write a piece for salt and
pepper shakers. I wrote music away from the piano for the
piano, but after the first piano lesson I never deigned to darken
the piano teacher’s doorway again. At the end of the year, this
strategy of noncompliance turned out to be the equivalent of
not attending physical education in high school: you couldn’t
2
Music 1
graduate without having done the awful crap. When my
adviser, also a musician but never a teacher of music to me,
asked me why I hadn’t shown up for any of the piano
lessons, I felt awkward and stupid but I gave him an honest
answer: “I don’t like the asshole. ” My adviser smiled with
one of his this-is-too-good-to-be-true looks - he was amused
- and said he’d take care of it. He must have, or I would not
have passed.
My adviser, the composer Louis Callabro, taught me a lot
about music, but there was always a kind of cross-fertilization
- I’d bring the poems, the short stories, every now and then a
novel. Lou was a drunkard, much more his style than being
an alcoholic. I had met him without knowing it on first
ar iving at Bennington. I loved the old music building and
sort of haunted it. He came out of his studio, pissing drunk,
stared at me, and said, “Never sleep with a man if you want
to be his friend. ” I adored the guy. Eventually I’d show him
my music and he’d show me his short stories. It was a new
version of I’l -show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. I later
understood that the all-girl Bennington’s expectation was that
the girl, the woman, any female student, should learn how to
be the mistress of an artist, not the artist herself: this in the
college that was the early home of Martha Graham. The
equality between Lou and myself, our mutual recognition,
was no part of the school’s agenda. This is not to suggest that
Lou did not screw his students: he did; they al did. I always
3
Heartbreak
thought that I would go to heaven because at Bennington I
never slept with faculty members, only their wives.
4
Music 2
Mrs. Smith used to give her students stars and points for
memorizing pieces. I was used to being a good student. I got
a lot of stars and a lot of points. But there was a piece I could
never remember. I worked on it for months, and the denouement was in the two terrible black stars she gave me to mark my failure. The piece was Tales from the Vienna Wods by
Strauss. I like to think that my inability to stomach that piece
was a repudiation of the later Strauss’s Nazi politics, even
though I didn’t know about the former or the lat er’s politics
at the time (and they’re not related). In the same way, there
was a recur ent nightmare I had when I stayed with my
mother’s mother, Sadie Spiegel. The room got smaller and
smaller and I had trouble breathing. The tin soldiers I associated with Tales were like a drum corps around the shrinking room. Later, cousins told me about their father’s sexual
molestation of them. Their father was Sadie’s favorite, the
youngest of her children; he was bril iant as well as blond
and beautiful, had a role in inventing the microchip, and he
stuck his penis down the throats of at least two of his children
when they were very young, including when they were infants
5
Heartbreak
- I assume to elicit the involuntary sucking response. Even
though my cousins told me this horror years later, I like to
think that reality runs like a stream, except that time isn’t linear and the nightmare was a synthesis, Strauss and my uncle, Nazis both. And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in
an inf
ant’s mouth belongs in Himmler’s circle of hel .
6
Music 3
There was jazz and Bessie Smith. When I'd cut high school or
college and go to Eighth Street in New York City, I'd find
used albums. I listened to every jazz great I could find. My
best friend in high school particularly liked Maynard
Fergusson, a white jazz man. I went to hear him at the Steel
Pier in Atlantic City when I was a kid. (I also went to hear
Ricky Nelson at the Steel Pier. I stood among hundreds of
screaming girl teens but up front. The teens who fainted, I am
here to tel you, fainted from the heat of a South Jersey
summer misspent in a closed bal room. Still, I adored Ricky
and Pat Boone and, special among specials, Tab Hunter with
his cover of “Red Sails in the Sunset. ”) There was no gambling then, just miles of boardwalk with penny arcades, cotton candy, saltwater taf y, root-beer sodas in frosted-glass mugs; and sand, ocean, music. I listened to Coltrane, had a
visceral love of Charlie Parker that I still have, listened to
“K. C. Blues” covers wherever I could find them. When I was
a teen, I also came across Bil ie Holiday, and her voice haunts
me to this day - I can hear it in my head anytime - and with
“Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child” she sounded more
7
Heartbreak
like a blues singer than a jazz woman; but the bulk of her
work, which I heard later, was jazz. It was her voice that was
blues. When her voice wasn’t blues, it meant the heroin had
dragged her way down and she couldn’t go lower. “Strange
Fruit” was worth anything it took from her, and so was “God
Bless the Child. ” I’m not happy with art as necrophilia, but I
think these two songs, and “Strange Fruit” in particular, were
worth her life. They’d be worth mine.
My brother, Mark, and I both had a taste for the Ahmad
Jamal Quartet. I loved the live jazz in the clubs, the informal
jazz I found live in the apartments of various lovers, and I
wanted to hear anyone I was lucky enough to hear about. I
craved jazz music, and the black world was where one found
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