KMBT_C XXXXXXXXXX
Andrea Dworkin
The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
BOOKS BY ANDREA DWORKIN
Woman Hating
Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
the new woman’s
oken heart: short stories
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Right-wing Women
Ice and Fire
Intercourse
Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality
(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)
Letters from a War Zone
Mercy
Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings
On the Continuing War Against Women
In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings
(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Wrmen’s Liberation
To Ricki A
ams and
Catharine A. MacKinnon
To Ruth and Jackie
Continuum
The Tower Building
11 York Road
London SE1 7NX
www. continuumbooks. com
Copyright © 2002 by Andrea Dworkin
This edition first published 2006 in the UK by Continuum
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
ecording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
from the publishers.
British Li
ary Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Li
ary.
ISBN XXXXXXXXXX
Typeset by Continuum
Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall
http:
www.continuumbooks.com
Je est un autre
Rimbaud
Contents
Preface xi
Music 1 1
Music 2 5
Music 3 7
The Pedophilic Teacher 12
“Silent Night” 18
Plato 22
The High School Li
ary 27
The Bookstore 32
The Fight 36
The Bomb 40
Cuba 1 45
David Smith 48
Contraception 52
Young Americans for Freedom 55
Cuba 2 60
The Grand Jury 62
The Orient Express 66
Easter 69
Knossos 72
Heart
eak
Kazantzakis 74
Discipline 77
The Freighter 80
Strategy 83
Suffer the Little Children 89
Theory 93
The Vow 96
My Last Leftist Meeting 100
Petra Kelly 104
Capitalist Pig 108
One Woman 112
It Takes a Village 117
True Grit 121
Anita 124
Prisons 127
Sister, Can You Spare a Dime? 130
The Women 136
Counting 139
Heart
eak 145
Basics 148
Immoral 155
Memory 158
Acknowledgments 164
X
Preface
I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am
myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to
give if she asserts her will. In the home the question will be
couched in a million cruelties, some subtle, some so egregious
they rival the injuries of organized war.
A woman writer makes herself conspicuous by publishing,
not by writing. Although one could argue - and I would -
that publishing is essential to the development of the writing
itself, there will be exceptions. After all, suppose Max Brod had
urned Kafka’s work as Kafka had wanted? The private writer,
which Kafka was, must be more common among women than
men: few men have Kafka’s stunning self-loathing, but many
women do; then again, there is the obvious - that the public
domain in which the published work lives has been considered
the male domain. In our day, more women publish but many
more do not, and despite the glut of mediocre and worthless
ooks published each year just in the United States, there
must be a she-Kafka, or more than one, in hiding somewhere,
just as there must be a she-Proust, whose vanity turned robust
when it came to working over so many years on essentially
xi
Heart
eak
one great book. If the she-Proust were lucky enough to live
long enough and could afford the rewards of a purely aesth
etic life, aggressive self-publication and promotion would not
necessarily follow: her secret masterpiece would be just that -
secret, yet no less a masterpiece. The tree fell; no one heard it
or ever will; it exists.
In our day, a published woman’s reputation, if she is alive,
will depend on many small conformities - in her writing but
especially in her life. Does she practice the expression of gen
der in a good way, which is to say, does she convince, in her
person, that she is female down to the very ma
ow of her
ones? Her supplications may be modest, but most often they
are not. Her lips will blaze red even if she is old and gnarled.
It’s a declaration: I won’t hurt you; I am deferential; all those
unpleasant things I said, I didn’t mean one of them. In our
enumbed era, which tries for a semblance of civilized, volun
tary order after the mo
id, systematic chaos of Hitler, Stalin,
and Mao - after Pol Pot and the unspeakable starving of Africa
- it is up to women, as it always has been, to embody the
meaning of civilized life on the scale of one to one, each of
those matchings containing within and underneath rivers run
ning with a historical blood. Women in Western societies now
take the following loyalty oath: my veil was made by Revlon,
and I will not show my face; I believe in free speech, which
includes the buying and selling of my sisters in pornography
and prostitution, but if we call it ‘‘trafficking, ” Pm agin it -
xii
Preface
how dare one exploit Third World or foreign or exotic women;
my body is mostly skeleton and if anyone wants to write on
it, they must use the finest
ush and write the simplest of
haiku; I have sex, I like sex, I am sex, and while being used
may offend me on principle or concretely, I will fight back by
manipulation and lies but deny it from kindergarten to the
grave; I have no sense of honor and, girls, if there’s one thing
you can count on, you can count on that. If this were not the
common, cu
ent practice - if triviality and deceit were not
the coin of the female realm - there would be nothing remark
able in who I am or how I got the way that I am.
It must be admitted that those who want me to account for
myself are intrigued in hostile, voyeuristic ways, and their
projections of me are not the usual run-of-the-mill rudeness or
a
ogance to which writers, especially women writers, become
accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfor
tunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here’s the deal as I see
it: I am ambitious - God knows, not for money; in most
espects but not all I am honorable; and I wear overalls: kill
the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says,
alone in a small room.
xiii
Music 1
I studied music when I was a child, the piano as taught by
Mrs. Smith. She was old with white hair. She represented
culture with every gesture while I was just a plebe kid. But I
learned: discipline and patience from Czerny, the way ideas
can move through sound from Bach, how to say “Fuck you”
from Mozart. Mrs. Smith might have thought herself the
eigning sensibility, and she did get between the student and
the music with a stunning regularity, but if you could hear you
could learn and if you learned it in your body you knew it
forever. The fingers were the wells of musical memory, and
they provided a map for the cognitive faculties. I can remem
er writing out the notes and eventually grasping the nature
of the piano, percussive and string, the richness and range of
the sound. I wanted music in writing but not the way Verlaine
did, not in the syllables themselves; anything pronounced
would have sound and most sound is musical; no, in a different
way. I recognized early on how the great classical composers,
ut especially and always Bach, could convey ideas without
using any words at all. Repetition, variation, risk, originality,
and commitment created the piece and conveyed the ideas. I
1
Heart
eak
wanted to do that with writing. I’d walk around with poems
y Rimbaud or Baudelaire in my pocket - bilingual, paper
ack books with the English translations reading like prose
poems - and I'd recognize that the power of the poems was
not unlike the power of music. For a while, I hoped to be a
pianist, and my mother took me into Philadelphia, the big
city, to study with someone a great deal more pretentious and
more expensive than Mrs. Smith. But then I tried to master
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, for which I had devel
oped a somewhat warped passion, and could not. That failure
told me that I could not be a musician, although I continued
to study music in college.
The problem with that part of my musical education was
that I stopped playing piano, and Bennington, the college I
went to, insisted that one play an instrument. I didn’t like my
piano teacher, and I wasn’t going to play or spend one minute
of one day with him hovering over my shoulder and con
demning me with a baronial English that left my prior teach
ers in my mind as plain-speaking people. I loved the theory
classes. Mine was with the composer Vivian fine. The first
assignment, which was lovely, was to write a piece for salt and
pepper shakers. I wrote music away from the piano for the
piano, but after the first piano lesson I never deigned to darken
the piano teacher’s doorway again. At the end of the year, this
strategy of noncompliance turned out to be the equivalent of
not attending physical education in high school: you couldn’t
2
Music 1
graduate without having done the awful crap. When my
adviser, also a musician but never a teacher of music to me,
asked me why I hadn’t shown up for any of the piano
lessons, I felt awkward and stupid but I gave him an honest
answer: “I don’t like the asshole. ” My adviser smiled with
one of his this-is-too-good-to-be-true looks - he was amused
- and said he’d take care of it. He must have, or I would not
have passed.
My adviser, the composer Louis Calla
o, taught me a lot
about music, but there was always a kind of cross-fertilization
- I’d
ing the poems, the short stories, every now and then a
novel. Lou was a drunkard,