Last Days at Hot Slit

by Andrea Dworkin

  (9)

  Everything I read about these rape drugs talks about young women and date rape. I knew it was important but it was on rung two, not up front. I thought, maybe this is different, this kind of rape, and if so I should try to figure out how and why. I left the thought to simmer on a back burner. I wasn’t facing it straight on, because what did it have to do with me, I’m too old.

  Once you really think about it, that logic couldn’t be more wrong. Just as now people are thinking that it’s if you drink alcohol when anyone could put it in anything, coffee or tea or anything and there’s nothing that says you have to be in a bar, they only drug and rape women, young women, in bars. Everyone wants to think that it’s punishment for cheap or hedonistic behavior. No matter how many times I say that God made the hangover—not rape—to punish getting drunk, I don’t even assimilate it myself. Everyone wants to think it’s because of something the woman did, banal stuff, how she dresses, where or when she walks, she shouldn’t be at a bar, she shouldn’t be out after dark, she shouldn’t be being raucous with men or being where men are, she shouldn’t, she shouldn’t onto ad infinitum. It’s as if the woman enters into a contract to be raped just by walking outside or opening a window or what clothes she wears or by liking men at all.

  It’s the rapist, stupid. It’s always the rapist. He decides how, when, where, who, why. He decides by what means. He picks the target. He creates the opportunity. He puts the drug in the fucking drink, hello. He knows and you don’t. He decides what to do, you can’t stop him once you’re out.

  Most rape victims need to face what happened but with drug rape you can’t face it because it’s not imprinted on your brain at all, it’s not that it’s lost, it’s not as if you have to recover it, it was never there.

  This rape makes my life a lie, everything I care about, everything I fought for, it’s all a lie or a laugh. I can’t give another speech or write another book. Saying what? Saying fight back? Saying they hate you? Saying rape is about power? Saying that for the rapist the rape is sex but not for the victim? Saying that rapists are ordinary men, nothing to distinguish them, you can’t buy a little decoder ring and see anyone’s real intentions. It’s hard enough to look young women in the face with how much we have all failed them. They have grace and they fight a good fight but how to tell them that thirty years can go by, forty years, and the rapist gets new weapons and the rape victims can barely keep up.

  There are dozens of studies of college men who are asked if they would rape if they could get away with it. Consistently, thirty percent say yes. Well, now they can. Is the drug rapist different from the overt physical force rapist? Do we start longing for the good old days when the violence was overt and explicit? Do we wish we were in Bosnia or Kosovo where the rape is military, a straightforward act of war that is not in dispute? Where someone might mourn what’s happened to you? Where there is a collective memory, a history, a record, a crime scene, where each woman doesn’t have to make the case herself?

  The worst thing is how they rape us because we’re part of a group but we have to fight back as individuals. I can’t do it for you, she can’t do it for me. The rape itself isolates you, because who can you tell, how can you make it real even though it was real?

  (…)

  (11)

  These rape drugs are an advance in war weaponry. They are a new day in sexual assault, a new front line, a new moment for women and girls. Memory is all the rape victim has. Memory is required by law. Memory and language are everything. Together they are human intelligence and human will and human history. What would have happened if the Nazis had had Rohypnol and had used it strategically? Would any survivor remember? Would the human history of 1939–1945 in Europe exist? Suppose the Serbs had had it and used it in the Bosnian rapes? It is inevitable.

  Then the question becomes, what kind of rapist wants no resistance, doesn’t want to use physical force, wants muscles relaxed, including vaginal muscles? Who is the guy who prefers coma to intimidation, dead weight as opposed to terror? Have rapists just wanted to masturbate inside women all this time? Is it true that it doesn’t matter to them if we’re dead or alive? Do they just want to ejaculate in the presence of a female form?

  Doesn’t anyone care that this is not a world girls and women can live in? I can see the defense lawyers. She consented because she didn’t “protect” herself. I can hear him asking, did you tell your girlfriend to watch your drink, well, if you didn’t but you knew about the possibility of being surreptitiously drugged doesn’t that suggest that you wanted it? It’s hopeless. How can we survive this? What will happen to all the girls?

  (…)

  (12)

  (…)

  I thought I’d go to Paris to write a first chapter for a new book, because I love Paris, I walked a minimum of two miles a day, I went to bookstores and movies, I saw a friend several times and had dinner with a prospective publisher, then I was drugged and raped, and I was too tired to walk, I just couldn’t find any energy at all, there was time missing, I was confused, I had been reading in what seemed to be a Zen garden, I had been drinking champagne with kir, the drink didn’t taste right, I decided to go to my room to lie down, I remember standing in front of the elevator and praying in my mind, just let me get to my room, just let me get there, I remember my feeling of relief when I got in the room and locked the door behind me, I ordered room service and apparently conked out, I opened my eyes and the boy was in the room delivering the dinner and I got up but couldn’t really stand up, I signed the room service bill while having to use the wall to hold myself up and then I went back to the bed, the boy went out, I couldn’t get up to lock the door behind him, when I came to it was dark, it had been light out when I came into the room, I didn’t know where I was, there was this pain inside me, internal pain, I went to the toilet, I found blood on my right hand, it was bright and new red blood, I found gashes on my right leg and I saw a huge black and blue bruise on my left breast, it was like a big hickey, not a regular bruise, I said to Paul over the phone, I feel like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, I have marks all over me and I don’t know why, I had been working every night on my chapter but now couldn’t, I had no energy, I sat, I stared, I took pills to go to sleep, oh, the irony of it.

  I want to live but I don’t know how. I don’t want more violence to my body, even by me. But I can’t bear knowing what I know, in all regards. I ask God to forgive me. Please forgive me all my stupidities and my cruelties. Please don’t let there be karma because I don’t want to have to do this again. Please take care of Paul and my cats. Please help the women. Please let me die now.

  Notes

  Introduction by Johanna Fateman

  1. Andrea Dworkin to Harry and Sylvia Dworkin, 7 April 1969, folder 9.9, Papers of Andrea Dworkin, 1914–2007, MC 540, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (hereafter cited as Dworkin Papers).

  2. Photographs of Andrea Dworkin’s wedding to Cornelius “Iwan” de Bruin, February 1969, PD.23–PD.24, Dworkin Papers.

  3. Ellen Willis, “Hearing,” New Yorker, 22 February 1969, 28.

  4. Andrea Dworkin to Harry and Sylvia Dworkin, 10 September 1971, folder 9.11, Dworkin Papers.

  5. Andrea Dworkin to Harry and Sylvia Dworkin, 3 April 1973, folder 9.13, Dworkin Papers.

  6. We have not included excerpts from Dworkin’s the new woman’s broken heart: short stories (1980), Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation (2000), and Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002), nor from two books she coauthored with Catharine MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (1988) and In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (1990).

  7. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Plume, 1989), 69.

  8. Passages of this essay are adapted from Johanna Fateman, “Andrea Dworkin,” in Icon, ed. Amy Scholder (New York: Feminist Press, 2014), 33–65.

  9. Andrea Dworkin, “My Life as a Writer,
” in Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War against Women. (New York: Free Press, 2002), 20.

  10. Ibid., 23.

  11. William E. Farrell, “Inquiry Ordered at Women’s Jail,” New York Times, 6 March 1965.

  12. Andrea Dworkin, Notes on Burning Boyfriend (unpublished book manuscript of writings, 1963–68), n.d., folder 64.12, Dworkin Papers.

  13. Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (New York: Perigee Books, 1987), xi.

  14. Photographs of Andrea Dworkin and John Stoltenberg, 1975–81, PD.26, Dworkin Papers.

  15. Andrea Dworkin to Lily Tomlin, 7 January 1976, folder 11.6, Dworkin Papers.

  16. For the most part, we have avoided internally editing our selections. In some cases, notably in “The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door,” we have omitted lengthy citations of now-outdated research and passages that echo ideas expressed at more length elsewhere in the collection. Bracketed ellipses denote where we have condensed the text in this way. In some cases, our excerpts do not start at the beginning of the original text, beginning after section breaks or omitting epigraphs.

  17. Dworkin, Our Blood, xvii.

  18. Andrea Dworkin, “Pornography: The New Terrorism,” in Letters from a War Zone (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1988), 201.

  19. For a comprehensive history of the groups Women Against Violence Against Women and Women Against Pornography, see Carolyn Bronstein, Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement; 1976–1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  20. Andrea Dworkin, “Pornography and Grief,” in Letters from a War Zone, 19.

  21. Ellen Willis, “Nature’s Revenge,” New York Times, 12 July 1981.

  22. Dorchen Leidholdt, “Invidious Comparison,” New York Times, 23 August 1981.

  23. Andrea Dworkin, Ruins (unpublished manuscript), 1978–83, folders 75.5–75.7, Dworkin Papers.

  24. Andrea Dworkin, “Reviewing Andrea Dworkin,” New York Times, 24 May 1987.

  25. Carol Sternhell, “Male and Female, Men and Women,” New York Times, 3 May 1987.

  26. John Stoltenberg, “Living with Andrea Dworkin,” Lambda Book Report, May–June 1994.

  27. Dworkin, “My Life as a Writer,” 13.

  28. Wendy Steiner, “Declaring War on Men,” New York Times, 15 September 1991.

  29. Dworkin, “My Life as a Writer,” 13.

  30. Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 3.

  31. At John Stoltenberg’s request on behalf of The Estate of Andrea Dworkin, the director and dramaturg Adam Thorburn edited My Suicide for the stage, shortening it to a 90-minute theater piece titled Aftermath. The piece was first presented as a staged reading May 1–3 and May 8–10, 2014, in The Willa Cather Room at The Jefferson Market Library in New York City.

  32. John Stoltenberg, “Andrea Dworkin’s Last Rape,” Feminist Times, 14 July 2014, http://archive.feministtimes.com/andrea-dworkins-last-rape.

  33. Andrea Dworkin, “Andrea Dworkin: The Day I Was Drugged and Raped,” New Statesman, 5 June 2000, https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2013/03/day-iwas-drugged-and-raped.

  WOMAN HATING

  Woman as Victim: Story of O

  1. Newsweek, 21 March 1966, 108.

  2. Pauline Reage, Story of O (New York: Grove, 1965), xxi.

  3. Ibid., 80.

  4. Ibid., 93.

  5. Ibid., 187.

  6. Ibid., 32.

  7. Ibid., 106.

  8. Robert S. de Ropp, Sex Energy: The Sexual Force in Man and Animals (New York: Dell, 1969), 134.

  OUR BLOOD

  Renouncing Sexual “Equality”

  1. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).

  2. Sophie Tolstoy, diary entry, 12 September 1865, in Revelations: Diaries of Women, ed. Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter (New York: Random House, 1974), 143–44.

  The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door

  1. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in Women and Analysis, ed. Jean Strouse (New York: Grossman, 1974), 90.

  2. The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 243–44.

  3. Ibid., 245.

  4. Cited by Carol V. Horos, Rape (New Canaan, CT: Tobey, 1974), 3.

  5. Cited by Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson, Against Rape (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974), 27.

  6. Horos, Rape, 6.

  7. William Matthews, The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Inquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 17.

  8. Medea and Thompson, Against Rape, 13.

  9. “Forcible and Statutory Rape: An Exploration of the Operation and Objectives of the Consent Standard,” Yale Law Journal 62 (December 1952): 52–83.

  10. Ibid., 72–73.

  11. Medea and Thompson, Against Rape, 26.

  12. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 8, 9, 33, 37, 47–49, 100, 106, and 167.

  13. New York Radical Feminists, Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women, ed. Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson (New York: New American Library, 1974), 165.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Medea and Thompson, Against Rape, 16.

  16. The Institute for Sex Research, Sex Offenders (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 205.

  17. Sgt. Henry T. O’Reilly, New York City Police Department Sex Crimes Analysis Unit, cited in Joyce Wadler, “Cop, Students Talk About Rape,” New York Post, 10 May 1975, 7.

  18. Horos, Rape, 13.

  19. Menachim Amir, Patterns of Forcible Rape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 200.

  20. Medea and Thompson, Against Rape, 34–35.

  21. Robert Sam Anson, “That Championship Season,” New Times, 20 September 1974, 46–51.

  22. Ibid., 48.

  23. Angelina Grimke, speaking before the Massachusetts State Legislature, 1838, cited in Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman’s Rights and Abolition (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 8.

  24. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968), 26.

  25. New York Radical Feminists, Rape, 164–69.

  26. George Gilder, Sexual Suicide (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), 18.

  27. Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years (Indianapolis and Kansas City: Bowen-Merrill, 1898), 1:366.

  PORNOGRAPHY

  Introduction

  1. Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Himmler (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 105.

  2. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 61.

  3. George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1877), 65–66.

  Power

  1. Arthur Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell,” in A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat, trans. Louise Varese (Norfolk, CT: New Directions Books, 1961), 3.

  Pornography

  1. Kate Millett, Tbe Prostitution Papers (New York: Avon Books, 1973), 95.

  Whores

  1. H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1922), 187.

  2. William Acton, Prostitution (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), 118.

  3. Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 40.

  4. Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters: Tbe Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 503.

  5. Rene Guyon, Sexual Freedom, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 239.

  6. Guyon, Sexual Freedom, 198.

  7. Ibid., 200.

  8. Ibid., 204.

  9. John Wolfenden, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Offi
ce, 1957), 80.

  10. Alberto Moravia, The Woman of Rome, trans. Lydia Holland (New York: Manor Books, 1974), 88.

  11. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), 219.

  12. D. H. Lawrence, Sex, Literature and Censorship, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York: Twayne, 1953), 69.

  13. Ibid., 69.

  14. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon Books, 1971), 119.

  15. Max Lerner, “Playboy: An American Revolution of Morality,” New York Post, 10 January 1979.

  RIGHT WING WOMEN

  The Promise of the Ultra-Right

  1. Cited by Norman Mailer, Marilyn: A Biography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973), 17.

  2. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), vi.

  3. Leah Fritz, Thinking Like a Woman (Rifton, NY: Win Books, 1975), 130.

  4. Anita Bryant, Bless This House (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), 26.

  5. Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman (New York: Pocket Books, 1975), 57.

  6. Ruth Carter Stapleton, The Gift of Inner Healing (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1976), 32.

  7. Ibid., 18.

  8. Morgan, Total Woman, 8.

  9. Ibid., 96.

  10. Ibid., 60.

  11. Ibid., 161.

  12. Ibid., 140-41.

  13. Anita Bryant, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1970), 26–27.

  14. Ibid., 84.

  15. Bryant, Bless This House, 42.

  16. Bryant, Mine Eyes, 83.

  17. Bryant, Bless This House, 51–52 .

  18. “Battle Over Gay Rights,” Newsweek, 6 June 1977, 20.

  19. Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1977), 89.

  INTERCOURSE

  Occupation/Collaboration

  1. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove, 1961), 22.

  2. Shere Hite, The Hite Report (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 196.

  3. Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 8.