The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

by Andrea Dworkin

  can be 100, 000 others with their names on it, too, but that

  doesn’t get you off the hook.

  I spoke in small rooms fil ed with women, and afterward

  someone would pass a hat. I remember a crowd of about fifty

  in Woodstock, New York, that chipped in about $60. I slept

  on the floor of whoever had asked me or organized the event,

  and I ate whatever I was given - bad tabbouleh stands out

  in my mind. I needed money to live on but didn’t believe in

  asking for it from women, because women were poor. Women’s

  centers in towns and on college campuses were poor.

  Sometimes a woman would pass me a note that had a check

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  in it for $25 or some such sum; the highest I remember was

  $150, and that was a fortune in my eyes.

  I had to travel to wherever the speech was in the hope that

  I'd be able to collect enough money to pay for my expenses.

  Flo Kennedy often talked about how if you did not demand

  money people would treat you badly. I did not believe that

  could be true, but for the most part it was. I can remember

  the gut-wrenching decision to ask for a fee up front, first $200,

  then $500. A few years later I got a speaking agent, Phyllis

  Langer, who had been an editor at Ms. She took a 25 percent

  commission, whereas most speaking or lecture agents took a

  full 33 percent. By the time I hired her, I was making in the

  $ l, 500-$3, 000 range. She made sure that I got paid, that the

  event was handled okay, with publicity, and that expenses were

  reimbursed. She was kind and also provided perspective.

  When she went to work at an agency that I didn’t particularly like, I decided to represent myself. By this time my nervousness about money had disappeared, a Darwinian adaptation, although my stage fright - which has run me ragged over the

  years - never did.

  I would cal whoever wanted me to speak on the phone. I'd

  get an idea of how much money they could raise. I stil wanted

  them to be comfortable, and it was a horror to me that anyone

  would think I was ripping them off. By the time I took over

  making al the ar angements myself, I had developed a fixed

  set of necessities: a good hotel room in a good hotel, enough

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  money for meals and ground transportation (taxis, not buses

  or subways). Eventually I graduated to the best hotel I could

  find, and I'd also buy myself a first-class ticket.

  Representing myself, I would fold an estimate of expenses

  into a fee so that the sponsor had to pay me only one amount,

  after I spoke on the night that I spoke. I had developed an

  aversion to having organizers vet my expenses, even though I

  was scrupulous. If I watched an in-room movie, I paid for it

  myself.

  In the first years, I was so poor that if I spoke at a conference I usually could not afford a ticket for the inevitable concert scheduled as part of the conference. I didn’t know that I could get one for free. If I wanted a T-shirt from the conference, I couldn’t buy it. My favorite women’s movement button - “Don’t Suck. Bite” - cost too much for me to have one.

  I was scraping by, and the skin was pret y torn from my

  fingers.

  Even during the early years, I got letters from women

  telling me that I was a capitalist pig; yeah, they did begrudge

  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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  The genius of Susan Brownmil er’s book Against Our Will:

  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

  breasts. The jury, which had eight women on it, acquit ed -

  they thought that he needed help. He. Needed. Help.

  In the old days - or, to use the beautiful black expression,

  “back in the day” - it was presumed that the woman was

  sexually provocative or was trying to destroy the man with a

  phony charge of rape. Now in the United States the question

  is repeated ad nauseam: is she credible? For this question to

  have any meaning, one would have to believe that rapists

  pick their victims based on the victims' credibility. “Oh, she’s

  credible; I'l rape her. ” Or, “No, she’s not credible; I’l wait

  until a credible one comes by. ”

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  The raped woman stil stands accused in the media, especial y if she has named the rapist. For one woman to say "I was raped" is easier than for one woman, Juanita Broderick,

  to say “I was raped by William Jefferson Clinton. " Ms.

  Broderick told us that she was raped and by whom; no one

  has held him accountable in any way that matters.

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  It Takes a Vil age

  It happens so often that I, at least, cannot keep track of it.

  A woman is only believed if and when other women come

  forward to say the man or men raped them, too. The oddness

  of this should be transparent: if I'm robbed and my neighbor

  isn’t, I’m still robbed - there is no legal or social agreement

  that in order for me, the victim of a robbery, to be believed,

  the burglar has to have robbed my neighbors. As writer Chris

  Matthews said, “There are banks that Willy Sut on didn’t rob. ”

  I remember an early, ter ible case in which a woman with a

  history of mental upheaval due to her father’s incestuous rape

  of her was raped by her psychiatrist. She had no credibility,

  as they say, and the jury was doing a full-tilt boogie toward

  vindicating the accused.

  No one noticed a famous character actor who came to the

  trial every day. The actor sat quietly and used her formidable

  skil to help herself disappear. As the case was heading to the

  jury, which was going to acquit, the actor came forward:

  exactly the same thing had happened to her - father-daughter

  incest and rape by this same psychiatrist. The actor testified

  and the media printed pictures of her. Because of the actor’s

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  familiarity to a large audience and the obvious ter or she felt

  in exposing herself, the jury did not find for the rapist. How

  do I know that the ter or was real? I talked with her.

  In that case what no one seemed to understand was why the

  victim, raped twice now by persons who were supposed to

  protect and care for her, raped twice now by figures of power

  and authority, was unstable - of course she was. Since she had

  no credibility precisely because of the ef ects of the two rapes

  on her, she needed rescue by the actor. Once the actor testified,

  there were other women prepared to testify, and it was because

  of the other women waiting in the wings that the defense

  collapsed. In fact, the psychiatrist knew by virtue of his learning and expertise that incested women were staggeringly vulnerable and easy to shame; he bet his reputation and

  professional life that shame would shut them up no mat er

  how egregious his sexual abuse of them.

  It takes a vil age of women to nail a rapist. Some rapists of

  children have molested or assaulted hundreds of children before

  they are caught for their first offense. Rapists of adult women

  are high-brow and low-brow, white trash and black trash,

  cunning and brutal, smart and stupid; some are high achievers;

  some are rich; some are famous. Since the woman is always

  on trial - this time to be evaluated on her credibility - there

  almost always needs to be more than one of her to attest to

  the abuser’s predatory patterns.

  This was one of the great roles that rape crisis centers played:

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  pat erns would emerge; women who could not bring themselves to go to the law could provide a lot of data on active rapists; even wi
thout appearing in court, the knowledge that

  there were other victims might give a prosecutor some bal s

  in bringing a case and trying to get a conviction for the one

  woman, by definition not credible enough. In the early days,

  it was still thought that women could not argue court cases,

  so there were virtually no female prosecutors.

  Each time the women’s movement achieves success in providing a way for a woman to speak out, in court or in the media, the prorape constituency lobbies against her: against her

  credibility. It’s as if we’re going to have a vote on it, the new

  reality TV: are we for her or against her? Is she a liar or - let’s

  be kind - merely disturbed? In the United States it is increasingly common to have the lawyers defending the accused rapist on television talk shows. The victim is slimed; the jury pool is

  contaminated; what happens to the woman after the trial is

  lost; she’s gone, disappeared, as if her larynx had been ripped

  out of her throat and even her shadow had been rent.

  The credibility issue is gender specific: it’s amazing how

  with al the rapes there are so few rapists. If one follows the

  misogynistic reporting on rape, one has to conclude that maybe

  there are five guys. The worst thing about a legal system that

  puts the worth of the accused above the worth of the victim

  is that the creep almost always looks clean: somebody’s father,

  somebody’s brother, somebody’s son. Don’t you care? we used

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  to ask; she’s somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister. The

  answer was unequivocal: no, we don’t give a fuck. Worse was

  the saccharine sweetness of those who pretended to care about

  somebody’s mother, somebody’s sister. I’ve heard at least a

  dozen criminal defense lawyers say, “I have a sister; I have a

  daughter; I have a wife.” The rapists they defend use the same

  locution. They want us to believe that the problem is that this

  one woman wasn’t raped and the accused didn’t do it. Even

  though criminal defense lawyers will admit that they rarely