The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

by Andrea Dworkin

  have innocent clients, each time the public takes the sucker

  punch: I have a sister; he has a sister; see his pretty suit; look

  at how wel groomed he is. Her, she’s a mess. Wel , yes, she’s

  been raped; it kind of messes you up. Oh, now we’re playing

  victim, are we? Advice to young women: try not to be his first,

  because then there aren’t others to confirm your story. You

  can’t earn credibility; you can’t buy it; you can’t fake it; and

  you’re a fucking fool if you think you have any.

  Hillary Rodham Clinton’s husband is so good at sliming

  the women he’s abused - and he has had so much help - that

  it might take two vil ages.

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  True Grit

  Becoming a feminist - seeing women through the prism of

  feminism - meant changing and developing a new stance. For

  instance, I hate prisons, but the process of becoming a feminist made me face the fact that I thought some people should be in jail. Years later, after watching rapists and batterers go free

  almost al the time, my pacifism would collapse like a glass

  tower, leaving me with jagged cuts everywhere inside and out

  and half-buried as well. I began to believe that the bad guys

  should be executed - not by the state but by the victim, if she

  desired, one shot to the head.

  When I was still a baby feminist (this being the lingo of the

  movement), I was asked to go and interview a felon named

  Tommy Trantino, who had published a book of drawings and

  stories called Unlock the Lock. The person who had asked me

  to go thought that I could write something about Trantino

  that might help to get him out.

  I went to Rahway State Prison, a maximum-security prison

  in New Jersey. I talked to Trantino in a small, transparent

  room, almost al glass. I was surrounded by the prison population, not in lockdown. Trantino had been convicted of killing

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  Heartbreak

  two cops. I read a lot about him before I went. The same

  day on which he had kil ed the cops he had also beaten up a

  couple of women.

  I asked Trantino al the obvious questions, including “Did

  you do it?” His response was that he didn’t remember. Then

  I departed from the script. I said that I knew he had been in

  jail a long time, but had he heard of the women’s movement

  and what did he think of it? Hands in his pants pockets, he

  spread his legs wide open and said, “Wel , I'm good with women

  and I'm bad with women.” That was enough for me, but ever

  the intrepid reporter I said that I had noted that he had beat

  up two women on the day of the killings; did he think he

  would stil beat up on women if he was out? His answer was

  an equivocating no, but I heard yes as clear as church bel s on

  a Sunday, and as far as I was concerned he could stay in jail

  forever. I didn’t think that this was the right way to think, but

  I couldn’t stop thinking it.

  I began the Socratic course of discussing the problem with

  my friends, stil mostly on the pacifist left. Everyone told me,

  in different ways, that I had an obligation to help Trantino get

  out: prison was the larger evil. Here I was, virtually overlooking the murders of the two policemen; but he hit those women, and I didn’t think there was anything to suggest that if or

  when he was out he wouldn’t hit more women.

  One weekend someone took me to a benefit for one of the

  pacifist groups. I was so offended by the anti woman lyrics to

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  True Grit

  a song that I got up and walked out. Someone else did, too.

  We reached the pavement at approximately the same time.

  “I have a question I'd like to ask you, ” I said to the stranger.

  I then presented the Trantino problem, which was really

  gnawing at me. “It sounds like you already know what you

  want to do, ” he said. Yes, I nodded. “You want him to stay in,

  right? ” “Yes, ” I said out loud. The man was John Stoltenberg,

  and I've lived with him for nearly twenty-seven years. I called

  up the friend who had asked me to write the piece and said I

  couldn’t do it. I told her the true reason: the women, not the

  police.

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  Anita

  The same friend asked me to go talk with Anita Hoffman,

  whose husband, Abbie, had just gone underground after being

  busted for selling cocaine. I had donated some money to

  Abbie’s defense fund and said he should just keep running.

  I didn’t real y know why I was going to see Anita.

  The apartment was small and crowded, distinguished only

  by a television set the size of a smal country. Anita’s child with

  Abbie, America, was playing. She and I sat on what was her

  bed to talk.

  She and Abbie had not been together for a while. It was

  clear that she was poor. She said that she didn’t know what to

  do, that a friend of Abbie’s had offered her work as a prostitute (“escort, ” high end of the line) and was put ing a lot of pressure on her. Abbie’s latest caper had left her destitute. This

  guy was a friend of Abbie’s, so he had to be okay, right? She

  had thought of doing organizing - poor, single mothers like

  herself who had no political power in the system; but real y,

  what was wrong with prostituting? She could earn a lot of

  money and she was lonely. Honey, I thought, you don’t begin

  to know what lonely is.

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  Anita

  I told her about my own experiences in the trade, especial y

  about the dissociation that was essential to doing the deed.

  You had to separate your mind from your body. Your consciousness had to be hovering somewhere near the ceiling behind you or on the far side of the room watching your body.

  No one got through it without having that happen. I also told

  her that she’d begin to hate men; at first manipulating them

  would seem like power, but eventually and inevitably the day

  would come when one perceived them as coarse and brutal,

  smel y, dirty bullies. She had said that she liked sex and that

  she had had sex with the guy who was now trying to pimp

  her. I told her that the sex with Abbie’s friend was a setup to

  make her more pliant and that in prostituting one lost the

  ability to feel, so if one liked sex it was the last thing, not the

  first thing, that one should do. I told her that most people

  thought that women prostituted in order to get money

  for drugs, but it was the other way around; the prostitution

  became so vile, so ugly, so hard, that drugs provided the only

  soft: landing, a kind of embrace - and on the literal level they

  took away the pain, physical and mental.

  I didn’t see or talk to Anita again after that night, but the

  friend who had asked me to go said that Anita had moved to

  California and had a job as an editor. I don’t know if Anita

  ever tried the prostituting, but if so I helped her get out fast

  and if not I helped with that, too. I was lucky to have the

  chance to talk with her, and I began to understand that my

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  own experiences could have meaning f
or other women in

  ways that mattered. I began to trust myself more.

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  Prisons

  Perhaps because I came from the pacifist left, I had an intense

  and abiding hatred for prisons (even though the U. S. prison

  system was developed by the Quakers). After the publication

  of Our Blood, I wrote a proposal for a book on prisons. I was

  struck by the way prisons stayed the same through time and

  place: the confinement of an individual in bad circumstances

  with a sadistic edge and including al the prison rites of passage.

  I was struck by how prisons were the only places in which men

  were threatened with rape in a way analogous to the female

  experience. I was struck by the common sadomasochistic

  structure of the prison experience no mat er what the crime

  or country or historical era. That proposal was rejected by a

  slew of publishers. I found myself at a dead end.

  But an odd redemption was at hand. I had noticed that in

  al pornography one also found the prison as leitmotif, the

  sexualization of confining and beating women, the ubiquitous

  rape, the dominance and submission of the social world in

  which women were literally and metaphorically imprisoned.

  I decided to write on pornography because I could make

  the same points - show the same inequities - as with prisons.

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  Pornography and prisons were built on cruelty and brutalization; the demeaning of the human body as a form of punishment; the worthlessness of the individual human being; restraint, confinement, tying, whipping, branding, torture,

  penetration, and kicking as commonplace ordeals. Each was a

  social construction that could be different but was not; each

  incorporated and exploited isolation, dominance and submission, humiliation, and dehumanization. In each the effort was to control a human being by attacking human dignity. In each

  the guilt of the imprisoned provided a license to animalize

  persons, which in turn led to a recognition of the ways in

  which animals were misused outside the prison, outside the

  pornography. Arguably (but not always), those in prison had

  commit ed an offense; the offense of women in pornography was in being women. In both prisons and pornography, sadomasochism was a universal dynamic; there was no chance for reciprocity or mutuality or an equality of communication.

  In prison populations and in pornography, the most

  aggressive rapist was at the top of the social structure. In

  prison populations gender was created by who got fucked; so,

  too, in pornography. It amazed me that in pornography the

  prison was recreated repeatedly as the sexual environment

  most conducive to the rape of women.

  The one dif erence, unbridgeable, intractable, between prisons

  and pornography was that prisoners were not expected to like

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  Prisons

  being in prison, whereas women were supposed to like each

  and every abuse suffered in pornography.

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  Sister, Can You

  Spare a Dime?

  In 1983 Catharine A. MacKinnon and I drafted, and the City

  of Minneapolis passed, a civil law that held pornographers

  responsible for the sexual abuse associated with the making

  and consuming of pornography If a woman or girl was forced

  into making pornography or if a woman or girl was raped or

  assaulted because of pornography, the pornographer or retailer

  could be held responsible for civil damages. If a woman

  was forced to view pornography (commonplace in situations

  of domestic abuse), the person or institution (a school, for

  instance) that forced her could be held responsible. The burden

  of proof was on the victim. In addition, the law defined

  pornography as sex discrimination; this meant that pornography helped to create and maintain the second-class status of women in society - that turning a woman into an object or

  using her body in violent, sexual y explicit ways contributed

  to the devaluing of women in every part of life. The pornography itself was defined in the statute as a series of concrete scenarios in which women were sexual y subordinated to men.

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  Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?

  In 1984 I went with a group of activists and organizers to

  the convention of the National Organization for Women in

  order to get NOW’s support for this new approach to fighting

  pornography.

  The convention was held in New Orleans in a posh hotel.

  Sonia Johnson, an activist especially associated with a radical

  crusade to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, was running

  for president of NOW, and she sur endered her time and space

  so that I could address the convention on her behalf; our

  understanding was that I would talk about pornography and

  the new approach MacKinnon and I had developed.

  It was a hot, hot city in every sense. Leaving the hotel one

  saw the trafficking in women in virtually every venue along

  Bourbon Street. The whole French Quarter, and Bourbon

  Street in particular, was crowded with middle-aged men in

  suits roving as if in gangs, dripping sweat, going from one sex

  show to the next, searching for prostitutes and strippers.

  In the hotel, NOW women were herded into caucuses and

  divided into cliques. I'm a member of NOW, even though its

  milksop politics deeply offend me. Now I was going to try to

  persuade the members that they should pursue the difficult

  and dangerous task of addressing pornography as a civil rights

  issue for women.

  It is hard to describe how insular NOW is. It is run on the

  national level by women who want to play politics with the

  big boys in Washington, D. C., where NOW’s national of ice

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  is located. I had, over the years, spoken at ral ies and events

  organized by many local NOW chapters al over the country.

  On the local level, my experience with NOW was entirely

  wonderful. The members were valiant women, often the sole

  staf for battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers,

  often the only organized progressive group in a smal town or

  city. I’ve never met better women or bet er feminists. Those

  who run the nationally visible NOW are different in kind:

  they stick to safe issues and mimic the politics and strategies

  of professional political lobbyists.

  Soon after I came back from Amsterdam, I spoke at a ral y

  organized by the local NOW chapter in Washington, D. C. At

  the time the burning issue was the Equal Rights Amendment,

  a proposed amendment to the U. S. Constitution that would

  have given women a basic right to equality. There was a lot

  of of icial (national) NOW literature on the Equal Rights

  Amendment that I saw for the first time in D. C. I couldn’t

  understand why reading it made me question the ERA - a

  question I had only on contact with national NOW, its literature and its spokespeople. But of course, I did understand - I just wasn’t schooled yet in the ways of this duplicitous feminist organization. The literature was al about how the ERA would benefit men. Guts were sorely lacking even back then.

  A decade later, the organization was torn o
ver pornography.

  The big girls in the big of ice didn’t want to get their hands

  dirty - the issue demanded at least an imagined descent down

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  Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?

  the social ladder. Lots of local NOW activists were fully

  engaged in the fight against pornography and brought those

  politics to the convention. Then there were what I take to be

  honorable women who believed the pornographers' propaganda that the civil rights approach would hurt freedom of speech. Then there were the women, a small but determined

  group, who thought that equality meant women using

  pornography in the same ways that men did. We wanted a

  resolution from NOW supporting the civil rights approach.

  We got it, but, speaking for myself, at great emotional cost.

  NOW runs its meetings using Robert’s rules of order,

  which is democracy at its most degraded. One had to know

  whether to hold up a red poster or a green poster or a yellow

  poster to be recognized by the chair to speak. I can’t even now

  articulate the points of order involved. When I got home, I

  dreamt about those posters for months.

  A vote was held on whether I could speak for Sonia Johnson.

  The women voted no. So much for free speech. In place of

  addressing the whole convention, we organized a meeting to

  which anyone interested could come. I was speaking, and in

  the middle NOW cut off the electricity for the mike. More

  free speech. I was in tears, real y. The woman who cut off the

  juice and then physically repossessed the mike - just following

  orders, she said - claimed that we had not followed the rules

  for holding our meeting. We had, but never mind.

  Then the most miraculous thing happened. We had a suite

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  in the hotel, as did other subgroups of NOW, so that people

  could come by, talk, pick up literature, find out for themselves

  who we were and what we believed.

  I was approached by a black woman who worked in the

  hotel and asked if we would march down Bourbon Street