The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

by Andrea Dworkin

  Eventually she would tel me that the worst mistake she had

  made in raising me was in teaching me how to read; she had a

  mordant sense of humor that she rarely exercised. The public

  library in the newly hatched suburb of Delaware Township,

  later to become Cherry Hill, was in the police station or next

  door to it; and my mother found herself writing notes giving

  me permission to take out Lolita or Peyton Place. To her credit

  she did write those notes each and every time I wanted to read

  a book that was forbidden for children. Or I think it’s to her

  credit. I don’t know why later she would not let me see the

  film A Summer Place with Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue (the

  two are teenaged lovers and Sandra gets pregnant) when I had

  20

  “Silent Night”

  already read the book. We had a screaming match that lasted

  several days. She won, of course. It was the sheer exercise of

  parental authority that gave her the victory, and I despised her

  for not being able to win the argument on the merits. She’d

  blow up at my curiosity or precociousness, and it seemed to

  come out of nowhere to me. What she hated wasn’t what I

  read or the movies I saw but what I started writing, because

  sixth grade was the beginning of writing my own poems.

  They’d be small and imitative, but they were piss-perfect,

  in-your-face acts of rebellion. The adults could keep lying, but

  I wouldn’t. My mother’s real failure was in telling me not to

  lie. I had a literalist sense of the meaning of the admonition.

  I was a “kike” and would continue to be one: never once have

  I sung “Silent Night” nor will I. I recognized that there were

  a lot of ways of lying, and pretending that Christmas and Easter

  were secular holidays was a big lie, not a small one. Whether

  the issue was segregation or abortion, I, the sixth-grader, was

  going to deal with it, and my vehicle was going to be truth:

  not a global, self-deluded truth, not a truth that only I knew

  and that I wanted other people to follow, but the truth that

  came from not lying. Like “do no harm, ” not lying is a big one,

  a hard discipline, a practice of spartan ethics too often mistaken

  for self-righteousness. If put ing my body there when it ought

  to be here was required but to do so was to lie, I wasn’t going

  to do it. I’d write and I wouldn’t lie. So when self-help writers

  tel one to find the child within, I assume they don’t mean me.

  21

  Plato

  A girl is faced with hard decisions. What is writ en inside

  those decisions is inscrutable to her; by necessity - her age,

  time, place, sex discrimination in general - she sees or knows

  only the surfaces. So in junior high school I was thrilled when

  I was allowed to wear lipstick for the first time, a rite of passage that has nothing to do with sexuality but everything to do with maturity, becoming an adult fast and easy. My first

  lipstick was cal ed Tangerine, and like other girls I spent hours

  thinking about what it went with, what it meant, and how my

  life was final y beginning to cohere. It was also the first recognition from my mother - al -important, the whole deal has little to do with men or boys at al - that I was nearly adult

  but certainly no child.

  I'd wear Tangerine, along with a favorite dress that let me

  see my own breasts, a deep V-neck, a cut I stil like, and I’d

  be making my way through Plato’s Symposium. It had been

  communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of

  women that a female’s nose must never shine. In war, in

  famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick

  without the requisite face powder. On my own I added my

  22

  Plato

  own favorite, Erase, which went over the powder (or was it

  under? ) and got the lines under your eyes to disappear. In this

  way I could hide my late-night reading from my parents -

  circles under the eyes were a dead giveaway. I would pretend

  to go to sleep; I'd wait for them to go to sleep; I'd turn on my

  reading light, read, and simultaneously listen for any movement at their end of the house, at which point I'd get rid of any light in my room, hide the book, and wait until I heard

  my mother or father return to their bed.

  I was taunted by this problem: how could someone write

  something like the Symposium and make sure that her nose did

  not shine at the same time? It didn’t mat er to me that I was

  reading a translation. I'd read Plato’s brilliant, dense prose and

  not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose

  shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either

  one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi

  Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose.

  It didn’t hurt, it didn’t make noise, it didn’t incapacitate in any

  way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough

  time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one.

  Plato was my idea of a paperback writer: the Beatles were not

  yet on the horizon, and anyway I’m sure that John would have

  agreed with me. There was nothing I wanted so much in life

  as to write the way Plato wrote: words inside ideas inside words,

  the calzone approach at enuated with Bach. I'd look at my

  cheap Modigliani reproductions or the reproduced females by

  23

  Heartbreak

  Rodin or Manet, and I didn’t see the shine, except for that of

  the paper itself; but more to the point, in no book about the

  artists themselves that I could find was the problem of the

  shine addressed. These were the kind of girl-things that preoccupied me.

  Or, for instance, when it came to lying: in elementary

  school one would play checkers with the boys. My mother

  had said don’t lie and had also told me that I had to lose at

  games to the boys if I wanted them to like me. These were

  irreconcilable opposites. It was, first of al , virtually impossible to lose to the boys in an honest game of checkers. Second, who wanted to? Third, how would I ever respect him or them

  in the morning? It did strike me that the boys you had to lose

  to weren’t worth having, but my argument made no impression on my mother nor on anyone else I was ever to meet until the women’s movement. And it was damned hard to lose

  at checkers to the pimply or prepimply dolts. I now think of

  the having-to-lose part as SWAT-team training in strategy,

  how to lose being harder than how to win. It was hideous for

  a girl to be brazenly out for the kil or to enjoy the status of

  victor or to enjoy her own intelligence and its application in

  real time.

  I stil remember how in the eighth or ninth grade Miss Fox,

  one of my nemeses among English teachers, made us skip the

  first three pages of Romeo and Juliet - the part about the maidenheads - only to read aloud Juliet herself throughout the rest of

  24

  Plato

  the play, partnered with the captain of the footbal team as

  Romeo. Stereotypes aside, his reading was not delightful. And

  yet we al had to sit there and wait while he tried manfully, as<
br />
  it were, to sound out words. Her pedagogy was to encourage

  him while let ing the rest of us rot.

  I, true to form, wanted to know what a maidenhead was,

  and to say that I was relentless on the subject would be to understate. Miss Fox’s retaliation was authoritarian and extreme. I had been out of class sick and had to take a makeup vocabulary test, multiple choice. I failed. I did not just fail: I got a zero. I was pained but respectful on my first five or ten trips

  up to her desk to ask her how it was possible to get a zero on

  a multiple-choice test, even if one did not know the meaning

  of one word on the test. Final y, exhausted, I just asked her to

  regrade the test. Since she was sure of her rightness in al things

  English, we struck a deal: she’d regrade the test and whatever

  the outcome I’d shut up. She glistened with superiority, Eve

  the second after biting into the apple; I was tense now that the

  challenge had been taken up. It turned out that she had used

  the wrong key in grading the test; the answers she wanted me to

  give were for some other test. I was good but not that good.

  I wanted out, Tangerine lipstick notwithstanding. I wanted

  smart people whether or not their noses shined enough to

  illuminate a room or a house or a city. I wanted someone who

  cared about me in particular, as an individual, enough to

  notice that I could not get a zero on a vocabulary test because

  25

  Heartbreak

  I had too big a vocabulary. I was so worn out by Miss Fox that

  when she graded an essay on contemporary education a B

  because, as she said to me, some commas were wrong and it

  wasn’t anything personal, after a halfhearted and utterly futile

  argument I accepted the B. She even put her arm around me,

  genuinely adding insult to injury. I knew I’d get her someday

  and this is it: eat shit, bitch. No one said that sisterhood was

  easy.

  26

  The High School

  Library

  Nowadays librarians actively try to get students Internet access

  to pornography, at least in the United States. Organized as a

  First Amendment lobby group, librarians go to court - or their

  professional organizations do - to defend pornographers and

  pornography. Truly, this does not happen because James Joyce

  and Henry Miller were banned as obscene a hundred years

  ago; I once wrote an affidavit for a court on the differences

  between Nabokov’s Lolita and a pimp’s pictorial with words,

  “Lolita Pissing. ” These are some of life’s easier distinctions. I

  used to ask groups of folks how the retailers of pornography

  could tell the difference between Joyce and hard-core visual

  pornography. I noted that although, generally speaking, they

  weren’t the best and the brightest, they managed never to

  stock Ulysses. If they could do it, I thought, so could the rest

  of us. Instead, the idea seems to be that keeping a child -

  someone underaged - away from anything is akin to treason.

  One is violating sacred constitutional rights and assassinating

  Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln (for the second time).

  27

  Heartbreak

  In my high school days, librarians were the militia, the first

  line of defense in keeping the underaged away from books, al

  sorts of books in every field.

  My high school library was tall, I remember, as if piles of

  books held up the ceiling; it was dense with books organized

  according to the Dewey decimal system. I liked to look at and

  to touch the books. I believed I could feel the heat emanating

  from them, and no heat meant no light. My father had told

  me I had to read everything, that to read books of only one

  view was the equivalent of a moral wrong. When I asked why,

  he uttered the incomprehensible words: “Sometimes writers

  lie.” In my early years, my parents made up for the latitude

  they gave me in reading by seeing to it that I read on a continuum, both political and literary. When I went weak in the knees for Dostoyevsky, my dad gave me some Mark Twain or

  my mother one of Eric Bentley’s books on the theater. I just

  wanted to read everything; there was never enough. It wasn’t

  quite as simple as it sounds. My mother was more tense about

  what I read than my father, but then, she was in the thick of

  it: my bad attitudes, bad habits, and bad behavior. I did get

  ideas from books: that’s what they’re for. I’ve been astonished

  by the pro-pornography argument that people are not influenced by what they read or see. Why, then, bother writing or making films? One wants to persuade. One wants to knock

  the reader senseless with the shock of the new or the old

  reconceived. Rimbaud articulated the writing ambition when

  28

  The High School Library

  he wanted to derange the senses, though he meant his own.

  Sometimes it’s the rawness of the writing that makes everything inside shake and break; sometimes it’s the delicacy of the writing that makes everything inside simply recognize a reality

  different from the known one or experience a lyricism heretofore unknown. For me, subtle writing was almost always anti-urban; it took me to the steppes of Russia or Huck Finn*s

  South.

  The library brought the world to me: I went with Darwin

  on the HMS Beagle and I dived with Freud into the mind and

  I plot ed with Marx about how to end poverty. I had read

  most of Freud, al of Darwin, and most of Marx before I graduated from high school. This was not with the help of the high school librarians.

  Instead, I learned their work schedules, because we were not

  allowed to take out more than two books a day and I needed

  a bigger fix than that. Al records were kept by hand. So if I

  went into the library during a new shift, I could get two more

  books, then two more, then two more. The librarians treated

  the books like contraband, and so did I. My friends and I had

  a commitment to Catcher in the Rye, which was not allowed

  in the library. We bought a lot of copies over time. We shelved

  them. Each time it would be a different one of us who had

  the responsibility for get ing the book into the library, on the

  shelves. Sometimes we catalogued the book - what was gained

  if no one knew it was there? - and other times we shelved it

  29

  Heartbreak

  as if it were plastique. Eventually the head librarian would

  find it; we’d know by the dirty looks we got from her long

  before we got to check on the book itself.

  Catcher was a rallying point for our high school intelligentsia. I remember going to my parents for help: I asked if they would fight with the school board to get the book in the

  library. They would not. I found this refusal confusing, an

  abrogation of everything they had taught me. Actually it

  outraged me. One of my friends had his editorial removed

  from the school paper because it was about the wrongness of

  banning Catcher from the high school library. So we fought

  on, invisible guardians of one orphan book.

  Then one day it happened: the school board took things

  in hand themselves. They went through the library to get rid

  of al soc
ialistic, communistic, anti-God books. Surveying the

  damage when they had finished, I saw no Eugene V Debs or

  Norman Thomas, certainly no Darwin, Freud, or Marx; but

  one slim volume cal ed Guerril a Warfare by a person named

  Che Guevara had escaped the purge. I was bound for life to

  the man. I studied that book the way the Chinese were forced

  to study Chairman Mao. I planned revolutionary attacks on

  the local shopping mall. We had a paucity of mountains in

  the suburbs, so it was hard to apply many of Che’s strategic

  points; the land was flat, flat, flat; the mall - the first in the

  country - was boring, boring, boring, emphatical y not Havana.

  I studied Che’s principles of revolution day in and day out,

  30

  The High School Library

  and the school board was none the wiser. The shelves in the

  library now were roomy, and the room itself seemed lower.

  There weren’t books in piles to hold up the ceiling, nor were

  there books that emanated heat and with the heat enough

  light to be a candle in the darkness. It was as if anything the

  school board recognized it did away with. I was almost out.

  My term of imprisonment was almost up. My own hard time

  was coming to an end. The pedophilic teacher had a lot of

  anger and despair to fool around with, and he didn’t let any

  of it go to waste. He’d tell you any story you wanted to hear,

  give you the narrative of any book gone missing; Anna

  Karenina went from being Tolstoy’s to being his.

  31

  The Bookstore

  Sometime during high school the very best thing happened:

  at the mal a bookstore opened. This was a spectacular bookstore, independent, few hardcover books but they were out of my socioeconomic league anyway; and there was a whole rack

  of City Lights books, yes, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and

  Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn and Gregory Corso and

  Yevteshenko - anything City Lights published would show up

  on that rack. It was al contemporary, al poetry, al incendiary,

  al revolutionary, each book a Molotov cocktail. I'd be down