The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

by Andrea Dworkin

that he would have died if not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

  because he shortly would have been sent to “the war in the

  Pacific” as it was cal ed. When Truman used the nuclear bombs,

  he saved my father’s life. I thought my father was pretty selfish

  to hold his own life to be more important than so many other

  lives. I thought it would be a good idea not to have war

  anymore. I could feel nuclear winter chilling my bones, even

  though the expression did not yet exist, and I had a vivid

  picture of people melting. I’ve never got en over it.

  44

  Cuba 1

  There was one day when al my schoolmates and I knew that

  we were going to die. According to historians the Cuban

  missile crisis lasted thirteen days, but to us it was one day

  because we knew we were going to die then, that day. I don’t

  know which of the thirteen it was, and I don’t know if I’m

  col apsing several days into one, but I remember nothing

  before the one day and nothing after. In the back of the school

  bus al the girls gathered in a semicircle. We talked about the

  sadness of dying virgins, though some of us weren’t. We spoke

  with deep regret, like old people looking back on our lives; we

  enumerated al that we had not managed to do, the wishes we

  had, the dreams that were unfulfilled. No one talked about

  get ing mar ied. Children came up in passing.

  The Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The

  missiles were pointed at the United States, and the range of

  the ICBMs was about from Cuba to the school bus - the

  northeast corridor of the United States. For probably the first

  time, I kept my Che-loving politics to myself. I don’t think

  I even had any politics on that day. I don’t remember

  the geopolitical blah-blah or the commie-versus-good-guy

  45

  Heartbreak

  rhetoric - except that it existed - or how the United States was

  the white hat standing up for the purity of the Americas. I do

  remember television, black-and-white, and the images of stil

  photographs, a grainy black-and-white, showing the bombs or

  the silos. The United States had been untouchable, and now

  it could be touched, and we’d feel our own bones melt and in

  the particle of a second see our own cities drowned in fire. I

  wasn’t afraid to die, but sitting stil and waiting for it was not

  good. I still feel that way. We al , including me, felt a little

  sorry for ourselves, because everything we had ever known

  had been touched by nuclear war; it was the shadow on every

  street, in every house, in every dinnertime conversation, in

  every current-events reprise; it was always there as threat, and

  now it was going to happen, that day, then, there, to us. The

  school bus was bright yellow with black markings on the outside, just the way they are now, but everything was different because we were kids who knew that we were going to be

  cremated and killed in the same split second. I could see my

  arm withered, the flesh coming off in paper-thin layers, while

  my chest was already ash, and there’d be no blood - it would

  evaporate before we’d even be dead. Inside the bus the boys

  were up front, boisterous, fil ed with bravado. I guess they

  expected to pull the missiles out of the air one by one, new

  superheroes. The girls were serious and upset. Even those who

  didn’t like each other talked quietly and respectful y. There

  was one laugh: a joke about the only girl in the school we

  46

  Cuba 1

  were sure was no virgin. She was famous as the school whore,

  and she was widely envied though shunned on a normal day,

  since she knew the big secret; but on this day, the last day, she

  could have been crowned queen, sovereign of the girls. She

  represented everything we wanted: she knew how to do it and

  how it felt; she knew a lot of boys; she was really pret y and

  laughed a lot, even though the other girls would not talk to

  her. She had beautiful y curly brown hair and an hourglass

  figure, but thin. She was Eve’s true descendant, the symbol of

  what it meant to bite the apple. Tomorrow she would go back

  to being the local slut, but on the day we were al going to die

  she was Cinderel a an hour before midnight. I wished that

  I could grow up, but I could not entirely remember why. I

  waited with my schoolmates to die.

  47

  David Smith

  He was one of the United States' greatest sculptors, not paid

  attention to now but in my high school and college years he

  was a giant of an artist. He was especially at ached to

  Bennington College, where he had taught and near where he

  lived. One night I went to a lecture by art critic Clement

  Greenberg, probably the most famous visual arts writer of his

  time. Greenberg was a name-dropping guy, and most of his

  lecture was about the habits of his bet ers, the artists he

  deigned to crown king or prince. At some point during the

  lecture, Greenberg said that great sculptors never drew. A

  huge man stood up, overshadowing the audience, and in a

  deep bass said, “I do. " While Greenberg turned beet red and

  apologized, the big guy talked about how important drawing

  was, how sensual it was; he gave specifics about how it felt to

  draw; he said that drawing taught one how to see and that

  drawing was part of a continuous process of making art, like

  breathing when you were asleep was part of life. After the

  lecture a friend who was a painting student asked if I wanted

  to go with her to meet David Smith. “I wouldn't want to

  bother him, " I said, not having a clue that the big guy was

  48

  David Smith

  David Smith and he was staying that night in Robert

  Frost’s old house, owned by painter Kenneth Noland, rented

  by the English sculptor Anthony Caro, who was teaching at

  Bennington. We got into my friend’s truck and went. I felt

  shielded by my painter friend. The visit was her brazen act,

  not mine.

  It was my first year at Bennington, and I did not know the

  anthropology of the place. Anyone famous who came to

  Bennington was provided with one or more Bennington girls;

  my college was the archetypical brothel, which may have been

  why, the semester before I matriculated, the English seniors

  recreated the brothel in Joyce’s Ulys es as a senior project and

  for the enjoyment of the professors.

  So my friend and I got to the old Robert Frost house. It

  was deep in the Vermont countryside, old, simple, painted

  white, with hooks from the ceiling on which, I was told, animals

  had been hung and salted. There were bookshelves, but they

  were mostly empty, with only a few books about Kenneth

  Noland, at least in the living room. Mr. Smith was deep in a

  bot le of 100-proof Stolichnaya and scat ered like inanimate

  dolls were some of my fellow students from Bennington,

  each in a black sheath, each awaiting the pleasure of her host,

  Anthony Caro, and his guest, David Smith. As happens with

  habit
ually drunk fuckers of women, Smith could not have been

  more indif erent to the women who were there for him, and

  he wanted to talk to me. I was trying to leave, embarrassed for

  49

  Heartbreak

  my classmates and too shy to talk to Smith. But Smith did not

  have to be nice to the women acquired for him, so he wasn’t.

  He dismissed my fellow students with a gesture of the hand

  and told me and my friend to sit down and drink with him.

  He said that he had always wanted to provide Bennington

  with a graduate school in art; that his name had been on a

  pro-Cuba petition signed by artists and intellectuals; that John

  Kennedy had cal ed him up and told him to get his name of

  of that petition or he’d never get his graduate school; that

  he had removed his name and in so doing he had whored.

  “Never whore, ” he said; “it ruins your art. ” He told me never

  to tell anyone and until now, with some private exceptions,

  I haven’t. He’s been dead a long time, and that puts him

  beyond the shame he felt that night. He said that taking his

  signature off the pro-Cuba petition had made him a whore

  and he couldn’t work anymore because of it. “Work” was

  literal - it meant making sculptures; “whore” was a metaphor

  - it meant not compromising one’s art. He warned me repeatedly; I only wish he had meant it literally as wel as metaphorical y because I might have listened. Since then - since I was eighteen - I’ve always measured my writing against his admonition: never whore. He also taught me how to drink 100-proof Stoli, my drink of choice until in the late 1970s I switched to

  bottled water and the occasional glass of champagne. He was

  talking to me, not to my painter friend; I’ve never known

  why. I always hoped it was because he saw an artist in me. A

  50

  David Smith

  week and a half later he died, crashing his motorcycle into a

  tree, the kind of death police regard as suicide.

  51

  Contraception

  At some point when I was in junior high or high school, my

  father gave me the inevitable books on intercourse, more

  commonly called “how babies are made. ” He was embarrassed; I rejected the books; he shoved them at me and left the room. I read the books about the sperm and the egg. There

  were a few missing moments, including how the sperm got to

  the egg before it was inside the vaginal tract, for example,

  intercourse, and how not to become pregnant. By the time I

  was sixteen, I understood the former but not the lat er. When

  I asked my mother, she said that one must never let a man use

  a rubber because it decreased his pleasure and the purpose was

  to give him pleasure. Always ready to beat a dead horse into

  the ground, I elicited from my unwilling mother the fact that

  she had never let my father use a condom and that she had

  used birth control. Beyond this she would not go, no hints as

  to how or what.

  One night I was summarily sent to the local Jewish

  Community Center by my parents acting in tandem. There

  was to be a lecture on sex education, and I was going to be

  forced to listen to it. I cried and begged and screamed. I

  52

  Contraception

  couldn’t stand being treated as a child, and I couldn’t stand

  the thought of being bored to death by adults tiptoeing

  through the tulips. I had learned that adults never told one the

  real stuff on any subject no mat er what it was. It stood to

  reason that the sex education lecture was going to be stupid

  and dull, and so it was. There was the sperm and the egg and

  they met on a blackboard.

  By that time I had learned always to listen to what was not

  being said, to the empty space, as it were, to the verbal void.

  The key to al adult pedagogy was not in what they did say but

  in what they would not say. They would say the word “contraception, ” but they would not say what it was. This was a time in the United States when contraception and abortion

  were both still illegal. I knew about abortion, or enough

  about it to suit me then. I asked about contraception and got

  an awkward runaround. I fucking wanted to know what it

  was, and they fucking were not going to tell me. I couldn’t let

  it go, as usual, and so got from them the statement that they

  discussed contraception only with married people. The group

  that sponsored the lecture, with its almost-famous woman

  speaker, would not come clean; now that group, headed by

  the same woman until she died in the last decade, is part of

  the free speech lobby in the United States protecting the

  rights of pornographers.

  What I learned was simple and eventually evolved into my

  own pedagogy: listen to what adults refuse to say; find the

  53

  Heartbreak

  answers they won’t give; note the manipulative ways they

  have of using authority to cut the child or student or teenager

  of at the knees; notice their immoral, sneaky reliance on peer

  pressure to shut up a questioner (because, of course, if one

  persists, the others in the audience get mad or embarrassed).

  The writing is in the configuration of white around print; the

  verbal answer is buried in silence, a purposeful and wicked

  silence, a lying, cheating silence. Every pregnant girl owes her

  pregnancy not to the heroic lover who figured out how the

  sperm gets inside her but to the adults who will not show her

  a diaphragm, an IUD, a female condom, and - sor y, Ma - a

  rubber. I left the lecture that night with the certain knowledge

  that I did not know what contraception was even if I knew the

  word and that adults were not going to tell me.

  Miss Bel , my physical education teacher who also taught

  health, had the only method that successful y resisted both my

  Socratic urgency and emerging Kabalistic axioms: on one test

  paper she mimeographed a huge drawing of the male genitals,

  and the students had to write on the drawing the name of

  each part - “scrotum, ” for instance. In an equivalent test on

  female sexuality, she had this true-or-false statement for extra

  credit of twenty points: if a girl is not a virgin when she gets

  married, she wil go to hel . I was the only student in my class

  not to get the extra twenty points.

  54

  Young Americans for

  Freedom

  I wanted to know what a conservative was. I read William

  Buckley’s right-wing magazine National Review, as I stil do. I

  knew about the KKK, and I had an idea of what white

  supremacy was. One girl in my class had neighbors who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, which she seemed to find reasonable.

  I had an English teacher in honors English who was the

  equivalent of Miss Bell, the gym-health teacher; but because

  he was more literate there were many paths to hell, not just sex

  outside of mar iage. Told to stay after school one day, I faced

  Mr. Sullivan as he opposed my reading Voltaire’s Candide,

  which was proscribed for Catholics, which I wasn’t but he

  was. He told me I would go to hell for reading it. I stood up

 
; to him. I thought he was narrow-minded, but conservatism

  seemed something different, Buckley’s magazine notwithstanding. What was it exactly, and why didn’t history teachers or political science types or civics teachers talk about it?

  It was a mess just to try to think about it. Walking home

  from high school one day, I passed a neighbor, Mr. Kane. No

  55

  Heartbreak

  one on the street talked to him or his wife, an auburn-haired

  model. They painted their ranch house lavender, which was

  downright unusual, though it framed Mrs. Kane’s auburn hair

  beautiful y. Mr. Kane cal ed out to me and asked me to come

  inside the side door to his house. I knew that I was never

  supposed to talk with strange men or go anywhere with them,

  and Mr. Kane was strange as hel . But I couldn’t resist, because

  curiosity is such a strong force in a child, or in me. Inside Mr.

  Kane had literature: he wasn’t the sexual child molester, no, he

  was the political child molester, with endless pamphlets on

  how JFK, a candidate for president, was the Catholic Church’s

  running dog, so to speak; on how whites were bet er than

  what he cal ed niggers; on how kikes were running the media

  and the country. He gave me leaflets to take home: these went

  easy on the kikes but hit the Catholics hard. At home I felt

  ashamed to have even touched the things, and also I knew

  that I had broken a big law, not a small one, by going with a

  strange man. I tried to flush the leaflets down our toilet and

  when they wouldn’t flush I tried to burn them. Wel , yes, I did

  get that in the wrong order but I was guilty of fairly heinous

  crimes and was desperate to get rid of the evidence. I was just

  trying to find a shovel to dig a hole in the backyard where I

  could bury them when my mother came home. She saw the

  stuf , dripping wet al over, an additional sin I hadn’t thought

  of, and sent me to my bedroom to wait for my father. I knew

  the stuff was filthy and bad, my own behavior a mere footnote

  56

  Young Americans for Freedom

  to the sinister material I had brought into the house. It’s