The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant Read online

  The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

  Andrea Dworkin

  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 broken heart: short stories

  Pornography: Men Pos es ing Women

  Right-wing Women

  Ice and Fire

  Intercourse

  Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality

  (with Catharine A. MacKinnon)

  Let ers 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 Abrams 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

  Al rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmit ed

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

  recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission

  from the publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 0-8264-9147-2

  Typeset by Continuum

  Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwal

  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 Library

  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

  Heartbreak

  Kazantzakis

  74

  Discipline

  77

  The Freighter

  80

  Strategy

  83

  Suf er the Little Children

  89

  Theory

  93

  The Vow

  96

  My Last Leftist Meeting

  100

  Petra Kel y

  104

  Capitalist Pig

  108

  One Woman

  112

  It Takes a Vil age

  117

  True Grit

  121

  Anita

  124

  Prisons

  127

  Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?

  130

  The Women

  136

  Counting

  139

  Heartbreak

  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 al , suppose Max Brod had

  burned 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

  books 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

  Heartbreak

  one great book. If the she-Proust were lucky enough to live

  long enough and could afford the rewards of a purely aesthetic life, aggressive self-publication and promotion would not necessarily fol ow: her secret masterpiece would be just that -

  secret, yet no les a masterpiece. The tree fel ; no one heard it

  or ever wil ; it exists.

  In our day, a published woman’s reputation, if she is alive,

  wil depend on many small conformities - in her writing but

  especial y in her life. Does she practice the expression of gender in a good way, which is to say, does she convince, in her person, that she is female down to the very mar ow of her

  bones? Her supplications may be modest, but most often they

  are not. Her lips wil blaze red even if she is old and gnarled.

  It’s a declaration: I won’t hurt you; I am deferential; al those

  unpleasant things I said, I didn’t mean one of them. In our

  benumbed era, which tries for a semblance of civilized, voluntary order after the morbid, 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 running with a historical blood. Women in Western societies now take the following loyalty oath: my veil was made by Revlon,

  and I wil 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 cal it ‘trafficking, ” Pm agin it -

  xi

  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 brush and write the simplest of

  haiku; I have sex, I like sex, I am sex, and while being used

  may of end 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, current practice - if triviality and deceit were not

  the coin of the female realm - there would be nothing remarkable in who I am or how I got the way that I am.

  It must be admit ed 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

  arrogance to which writers, especially women writers, become

  accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfortunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here’s the deal as I see it: I am ambitious - God knows, not for money; in most

  respects but not al I am honorable; and I wear overalls: kil

  the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says,

  alone in a small room.

  xi i

  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

  reigning 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 remember 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,

  but especially and always Bach, could convey ideas without

  using any words at al . Repetition, variation, risk, originality,

  and commitment created the piece and conveyed the ideas. I

  1

  Heartbreak

  wanted to do that with writing. I’d walk around with poems

  by Rimbaud or Baudelaire in my pocket - bilingual, paperback 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 developed 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 col ege.

  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 condemning me with a baronial English that left my prior teachers 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 Callabro, taught me a lot

  about music, but there was always a kind of cross-fertilization

  - I’d bring the poems, the short stories, every now and then a

  novel. Lou was a drunkard, much more his style than being

  an alcoholic. I had met him without knowing it on first

  ar iving at Bennington. I loved the old music building and

  sort of haunted it. He came out of his studio, pissing drunk,

  stared at me, and said, “Never sleep with a man if you want

  to be his friend. ” I adored the guy. Eventually I’d show him

  my music and he’d show me his short stories. It was a new

  version of I’l -show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. I later

  understood that the all-girl Bennington’s expectation was that

  the girl, the woman, any female student, should learn how to

  be the mistress of an artist, not the artist herself: this in the

  college that was the early home of Martha Graham. The

  equality between Lou and myself, our mutual recognition,

  was no part of the school’s agenda. This is not to suggest that

  Lou did not screw his students: he did; they al did. I always

  3

  Heartbreak

  thought that I would go to heaven because at Bennington I

  never slept with faculty members, only their wives.

  4

  Music 2

  Mrs. Smith used to give her students stars and points for

  memorizing pieces. I was used to being a good student. I got

  a lot of stars and a lot of points. But there was a piece I could

  never remember. I worked on it for months, and the denouement was in the two terrible black stars she gave me to mark my failure. The piece was Tales from the Vienna Wods by

  Strauss. I like to think that my inability to stomach that piece

  was a repudiation of the later Strauss’s Nazi politics, even

  though I didn’t know about the former or the lat er’s politics

  at the time (and they’re not related). In the same way, there

  was a recur ent nightmare I had when I stayed with my

  mother’s mother, Sadie Spiegel. The room got smaller and

  smaller and I had trouble breathing. The tin soldiers I associated with Tales were like a drum corps around the shrinking room. Later, cousins told me about their father’s sexual

  molestation of them. Their father was Sadie’s favorite, the

  youngest of her children; he was bril iant as well as blond

  and beautiful, had a role in inventing the microchip, and he

  stuck his penis down the throats of at least two of his children

  when they were very young, including when they were infants

  5

  Heartbreak

  - I assume to elicit the involuntary sucking response. Even

  though my cousins told me this horror years later, I like to

  think that reality runs like a stream, except that time isn’t linear and the nightmare was a synthesis, Strauss and my uncle, Nazis both. And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in

  an inf
ant’s mouth belongs in Himmler’s circle of hel .

  6

  Music 3

  There was jazz and Bessie Smith. When I'd cut high school or

  college and go to Eighth Street in New York City, I'd find

  used albums. I listened to every jazz great I could find. My

  best friend in high school particularly liked Maynard

  Fergusson, a white jazz man. I went to hear him at the Steel

  Pier in Atlantic City when I was a kid. (I also went to hear

  Ricky Nelson at the Steel Pier. I stood among hundreds of

  screaming girl teens but up front. The teens who fainted, I am

  here to tel you, fainted from the heat of a South Jersey

  summer misspent in a closed bal room. Still, I adored Ricky

  and Pat Boone and, special among specials, Tab Hunter with

  his cover of “Red Sails in the Sunset. ”) There was no gambling then, just miles of boardwalk with penny arcades, cotton candy, saltwater taf y, root-beer sodas in frosted-glass mugs; and sand, ocean, music. I listened to Coltrane, had a

  visceral love of Charlie Parker that I still have, listened to

  “K. C. Blues” covers wherever I could find them. When I was

  a teen, I also came across Bil ie Holiday, and her voice haunts

  me to this day - I can hear it in my head anytime - and with

  “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child” she sounded more

  7

  Heartbreak

  like a blues singer than a jazz woman; but the bulk of her

  work, which I heard later, was jazz. It was her voice that was

  blues. When her voice wasn’t blues, it meant the heroin had

  dragged her way down and she couldn’t go lower. “Strange

  Fruit” was worth anything it took from her, and so was “God

  Bless the Child. ” I’m not happy with art as necrophilia, but I

  think these two songs, and “Strange Fruit” in particular, were

  worth her life. They’d be worth mine.

  My brother, Mark, and I both had a taste for the Ahmad

  Jamal Quartet. I loved the live jazz in the clubs, the informal

  jazz I found live in the apartments of various lovers, and I

  wanted to hear anyone I was lucky enough to hear about. I

  craved jazz music, and the black world was where one found