The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

by Andrea Dworkin

  and the owners would point me to something, and I'd be up

  and they’d point me to something else. It was a whole world

  of books that I never dreamed could be so close to me, to

  where I was physical y on the planet: this horrible, awful, stupid

  suburb. The store was owned and run by two adults, Stan and

  Phyl is Pogran, who were not trying to get between you and

  the books; they brought you right to the trough and let you

  drink. You could read the books in the store (there were no

  chairs in bookstores back then); you didn’t have to buy and I

  rarely could, although any money I had went to buy books or

  music, which is stil the case. I had never met adults like Stan

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  The Bookstore

  and Phyllis. Later they separated and divorced, but I swear

  they kept me alive and kicking: I never had a mood I couldn’t

  find on their shelves.

  There was never a book they tried to hide from you. At the

  same time, they weren’t trying to use you - you weren’t the

  day’s kick for them; they were the opposite of the pedophilic

  teacher. They let me talk to them about books and about

  being a writer and they talked right back about books and

  writing. Amid the vulgarity of the shopping mall, with its

  caged birds and fountains, its gushing-over department stores

  and restaurants, there was this one island of insanity, since the

  rest passed for normal. You could get close to any poet you

  wanted and they, the booksellers, didn’t enforce the law on

  you: they didn’t bayonet your guts until al the poetry had

  spilled out, al the desire for poetry had been bled to death, al

  the music in your heart had been lanced, al your dreams

  trounced on and ripped to pieces. I found James Baldwin there

  and read everything he had writ en; I breathed with him. I

  found Mailer and Gore Vidal. I found Tennessee Williams and

  Edward Albee. I’d walk over from my house in any spare time

  I had - “I’m going to the mall, Ma” had its own legitimacy, a

  reassuring, implicit conformity - and I’d haunt the shelves and

  I’d find the world outside the world in which I was living.

  I’d find a world of beauty and ideas. Corso liked Shel ey, so

  I read Shelley and from him Byron and Keats. I read Joyce

  and Miller and Homer and Euripides and Hemingway and

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  Heartbreak

  Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. They were al there, in this one

  tiny bookstore, and my love af air with books became a wild

  and long ride, bucking bronco after bucking bronco; I found

  Genet and Burroughs; I read The Blacks and Naked Lunch.

  Literature exploded. I found and read the early pirated edition

  of The Story of O.

  The only bad part was that I couldn’t live there, sleep in a

  corner resting my head on a messed-up coat; the store would

  close and I had to go home. By the next day I’d barely be able

  to breathe from the thrill of knowing I was going to find a

  way to get back to the bookstore and find another book and

  one after that, another author and one after that.

  It would be a few years before the feminist ferment would

  begin to produce a renaissance of luminous and groundbreaking books; and Sexual Politics by Kate Millett did change my life. I was one of the ones it was writ en for, because I had

  absorbed the writers she exposed, I had believed in them; in

  the euphoria of finding what I thought were truth-tellers, I

  had forgotten my father’s warning that some writers lie. But

  stil , one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know, even Mailer,

  even Albee. It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can

  see and so one can say, “There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten

  by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone wil fil

  in the empty patch and I’l find what I need, what I must

  know in order to lead a ful and honorable life. ” These writers,

  Stein excepted, did not acknowledge women as other than

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  The Bookstore

  subhuman monsters of sex and predation; and their prose and

  chutzpah made me a fellow traveler. Al one can do is to fight

  illegitimate authority, expressed in my world by adults, and

  find a church. Books were my church but even more my native

  land, my place of refuge, my DP camp. I was an exile early on,

  but exile welcomed me; it was where I belonged.

  35

  The Fight

  I loved Al en Ginsberg with the passion that only a teenager

  knows, but that passion did not end when adolescence did. I

  sent him poems when I was in high school and barely

  breathed until I heard back from him. He critiqued the poems

  I sent on a postcard that I got about three weeks later, though

  it seemed like ten years. I thought I would die - he acknowledged me as if I were a writer and we lived in the same world.

  In col ege I went to every reading of his that I could. My heart

  breathed with his, or so I thought, but I was too shy ever to

  introduce myself to him or hang around him until the one

  reading after which I did introduce myself. “Call me, ” he said

  to me a half dozen times as I was walking backward out of the

  large room, backward so that he could keep talking to me.

  “Cal me, ” he had said, “but don’t come to New York just to

  cal me or you’l drive me mad. ” He had scribbled his phone

  number on a piece of paper. “Call me, ” he repeated over and

  over. I could have happily died then and there.

  I did go to New York just to see him, but when I got to

  New York I was too shy to cal him. I'd spend every waking

  hour worrying about how to make the cal . I picked a rainy

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  The Fight

  night. He answered the phone. “Come on over now, ” he said.

  I told him that he was much too busy. I told him that it was

  raining. I went anyway, shaking on the wet sidewalks, shaking

  on the bus, so nervous on the five flights up to his apartment

  that I could barely keep my balance. As always when I was

  nervous, I broke into a cold sweat.

  He had warned me that he was working on proofs for a

  new book of poems and would have very little time for me,

  but we spent the whole night talking - well, okay, not al of it

  but many hours of it. He then walked me down to the bus

  in the rain and told me he loved me. I counted. He told me

  eleven times.

  I called him one more time many months later. I had a

  standing invitation to see him, but I never went back. I stayed

  infatuated but I stayed out of his way. I did not know that this

  was a shrewd move on my part for the writer I wanted to be.

  Being in thrall to an icon keeps you from becoming yourself.

  When Woman Hating was published in 1974, I met the

  photographer Elsa Dorfman. She was a close friend of Allen’s

  and had photographed him and other writers over years, not

  days. She photographed me for the first time as a writer. When

  Elsa had a baby I was asked to be his godmother and Ginsberg

  was his godfather. We were now, metaphysically speaking,

  joined i
n unholy matrimony. And still I stayed away from

  him. I did not see him again, since that time in college, until

  my godson was bar mitzvahed. By this time I had published

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  Heartbreak

  many books, including my work attacking pornography - the

  artifacts, the philosophy, the politics.

  On the day of the bar mitzvah newspapers reported in huge

  headlines that the Supreme Court had ruled child pornography il egal. I was thrilled. I knew that Allen would not be.

  I did think he was a civil libertarian. But in fact, he was a

  pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man-

  Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction

  that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from

  what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I

  made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck

  children and his constant pursuit of underage boys.

  I did everything I could to avoid Allen and to avoid

  conflict. This was my godson’s day. He did not need a political struggle to the death breaking out al over.

  Ginsberg would not leave me alone. He followed me everywhere I went from the lobby of the hotel through the whole reception, then during the dinner. He photographed me constantly with a vicious little camera he wore around his neck. He sat next to me and wanted to know details of sexual abuse I

  had suf ered. A lovely woman, not knowing that his interest was

  entirely pornographic, told a terrible story of being molested

  by a neighbor. He ignored her. She had thought, “This is

  Al en Ginsberg, the great beat poet and a prince of empathy. ”

  Wrong. Ginsberg told me that he had never met an intelligent

  person who had the ideas I did. I told him he didn’t get

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  The Fight

  around enough. He pointed to the friends of my godson and

  said they were old enough to fuck. They were twelve and

  thirteen. He said that al sex was good, including forced sex.

  I am good at get ing rid of men, strictly in the above-board

  sense. I couldn’t get rid of Allen. Finally I had had it. Referring

  back to the Supreme Court’s decision banning child pornography he said, “The right wants to put me in jail. ” I said, “Yes, they’re very sentimental; I’d kil you. ” The next day he’d point

  at me in crowded rooms and screech, “She wants to put me in

  jail. ” I’d say, “No, Allen, you still don’t get it. The right wants

  to put you in jail. I want you dead. ”

  He told everyone his fucked-up version of the story (“You

  want to put me in jail”) for years. When he died he stopped.

  39

  The Bomb

  There is one reason for the 1960s generation, virtually al of

  its attitudes and behaviors: the bomb. From kindergarten

  through the twelfth grade, every U. S. child born in 1946 or

  the decade or so after had to hide from the nuclear bomb.

  None of us knew life without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In

  K-3 we hid under our school desks, elbows covering our ears.

  From grades four or five through graduation, we were lined

  up three- or four- or five-thick against wal s without windows,

  elbows over our ears. We were supposed to believe that these

  poses would save us from the bomb the Soviets were going to

  drop on us sometime after the warning bel rang. In the later

  grades, our teachers herded us, then stood around and talked.

  They didn’t seem to think that they were going to die, let

  alone melt, any minute. They seemed more as if they were

  going to chat until the bel rang and the next class began. In

  the earlier grades the teachers would walk up and down the

  aisles and tel us an elbow was outside the boundary of a desk

  or we should stop giggling. Any child too big to get under the

  desk wholly and ful y might wish the Soviets would nuke us;

  after al , who wanted to be in school, in rotten school with

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  The Bomb

  rot en teachers and rot en classmates? By the time I was being

  herded in the seventh or eighth grade, I simply refused to go.

  Not one teacher could explain the logic of elbows over ears in

  the face of a nuclear onslaught. Not one teacher could explain

  why they themselves had not flung their bodies up against a

  wall or why their ears were bare naked and their elbows calmly

  down by their sides. More to the point as far as I was concerned, not one teacher could explain why, if these were our last few minutes, we should spend them in such an idiotic

  way. “I'd rather take a walk,” I would say, “if I'm about to die

  now. ” My father was called in, a scene he described to me

  shortly before he died at eighty-five: “I asked them what the

  hell they expected me to do. ” The real question was, What

  was one to do with these grown-ups, these liars, these thieves

  of time and life - my teachers, not the Soviets? Did they

  expect us to be so dim and dull?

  They were helped by the saturation propaganda about both

  the Soviets and the bomb. On the Beach was a really scary

  novel by Nevil Shute about the last survivors down in

  Australia. I remember just computing that it wasn’t going to

  be me and maintaining an at itude of anger and disgust at the

  adults. There were endless television discussions and debates

  about whether or not one should build a bomb shelter and

  fil it with canned food and water. The moral question was

  whether or not one should let the neighbors in, had they

  been obtuse enough not to build a shelter. Everything was

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  Heartbreak

  calculated to make one afraid enough to conform. I can

  remember times wanting my father to build a bomb shelter

  for the family. Of course that’s hard to do in the cement of the

  city, and by the time we had soil in the suburbs I had decided

  it was al a scam. Maybe al the students except me and a few

  others rested wearily against wal s and kept quiet, but most of

  us knew we were being lied to, being scared on purpose, and

  being treated like chumps, just stupid children. Those boys

  who didn’t know ended up in Vietnam.

  I’d read in newspapers and magazines about the people in

  cities like New York who would not take shelter when the

  alarms were sounded. Following on the model of the London

  blitz, sirens would scream and everyone was expected to find

  hiding in an underground shelter. But some people refused,

  and they were arrested. I remember writing to Judith Malina

  of the Living Theatre when she was in the Women’s House of

  Detention in New York City for refusing to take shelter and I

  was a junior in high school. The thrilling thing was that she

  wrote me back. This letter back from her was absolute proof

  that there was a different world and in it were different people

  than the ones around me. Her let er was a lot of different

  colors, and she drew some of the nouns so that her sentences

  were delightful and fil ed with imagination. Since I had already

  made myself into a resister, she affirmed for me that resistance

  was real outside the bounds of my tiny real world. Her letter

  was mailed from a boat. She wa
s crossing the ocean to

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  The Bomb

  Europe. She wouldn’t stay in the United States, where she

  was expected to hide underground from a nuke. She was part

  of what she called “the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution, ” and I was going to be part of it, too. I'd follow her to the Women’s House of Detention, though my protest was

  against the Vietnam War, and then to Europe, because I could

  not stay in the United States any more than she could. She

  probably didn’t have my relatives, who were so ashamed that

  I went to jail; and she probably didn’t have my mother, who

  said I needed to be caged up like an animal - bad politics twice

  over. I would not meet Judith for another fifteen years, but

  she remained an icon to me, the opposite of the loathsome Miss

  Fox, and I knew whose side I was on, where my bread was

  but ered, and which one I would rather be. I did not care what

  it cost: I liked the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution,

  and so did most of my generation - even if “anarchist” was a

  hard word and “nonviolent” was an even harder discipline.

  There was another kind of bomb scare. Someone would

  phone the school and claim to have hidden a bomb in it. The

  students would be evacuated and, when the teachers got tired

  of keeping us in lines, left to roam on the grass. There never

  was a bomb, and there was no context of terrorism, and the

  threats seemed only to come in nice weather - otherwise we

  might al have got en cranky. We discussed whether or not the

  grass under our feet felt pain, which teachers had infatuations

  with each other, how we were going to thrive on poetry and

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  Heartbreak

  revolution. These were the good bomb scares, after which

  we’d be remilitarized into study hal s and classes and time

  would pass slowly and then more slowly. There was never anything good about the nuclear-bomb scares, and even the conformists with elbows over ears did not like them. I was appalled that the United States had used nuclear weapons and

  was now both stockpiling and testing them. My father said