Last Days at Hot Slit Read online

  Selection and compilation copyright © 2019 by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder. Introduction copyright © 2019 by Johanna Fateman.

  Texts by Andrea Dworkin copyright © 2005, 2007, 2014 by The Estate of Andrea Dworkin. All rights reserved.

  This edition © Semiotext(e) 2019

  See Permissions on page 405

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

  Published by Semiotext(e)

  PO BOX 629, South Pasadena, CA 91031

  www.semiotexte.com

  Special thanks to Robert Dewhurst and John Ebert.

  Cover Design: Lauren Mackler

  Back Cover Photograph: Robert Giard, “Andrea Dworkin,” 1992

  Layout: Hedi El Kholti

  ISBN: 978-1-63590-080-4

  Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England

  Printed in the United States of America

  The Radical Feminism of ANDREA DWORKIN

  Edited by

  JOHANNA FATEMAN AND

  AMY SCHOLDER

  semiotext(e)

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction by Johanna Fateman

  Postcard to Mom and Dad, 1973

  WOMAN HATING, 1974

  Introduction

  The Herstory

  Androgyny

  Woman as Victim: Story of O

  Afterword: The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle

  OUR BLOOD, 1976

  Renouncing Sexual “Equality,” 1974

  The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door, 1975

  Letter to Mom and Dad, 1978

  LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE, 1988

  A Battered Wife Survives, 1978

  PORNOGRAPHY: MEN POSSESSING WOMEN, 1979–1989

  Introduction

  Power

  Men and Boys

  Pornography

  Whores

  RIGHT-WING WOMEN, 1983

  The Promise of the Ultra-Right

  LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE, 1988

  I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape, 1983

  RUINS, 1978–1983

  Goodbye to All This, 1983

  ICE AND FIRE, 1986

  INTERCOURSE, 1987–1995

  Preface to Second Edition

  Occupation/Collaboration 117

  MERCY, 1990

  Chapter 6: In June 1967 (Age 20)

  LIFE AND DEATH, 1997

  My Life as a Writer, 1995

  In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson, 1994–1995

  Israel: Whose Country Is It Anyway?, 1990

  MY SUICIDE, 1999

  Notes

  Permissions

  Acknowledgments

  introduction by Johanna Fateman

  LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT:

  The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

  Black-and-white photos show a hippie couple in a city-hall ceremony in Amsterdam. The bride is not the Andrea Dworkin we know, who wore a uniform of denim overalls and sneakers, militant and unmitigated by a single capitulation to feminine beauty standards. This one is very young, just twenty-two, with black-rimmed eyes and a chin-length hair cut with bangs. In a letter from April 1969, she writes to her parents in New Jersey about her wedding, “no one gave me away. in the ceremony we promised to respect each other.”1 In a group shot, the newlyweds, dressed in embroidered robes (hers Turkish, his Tibetan), stand seriously at the center of their long-haired friends. Oddly, the groom’s hand isn’t around Dworkin’s shoulder or waist, but gripping her neck. It’s also on her neck in the photo of them standing before a canal kissing.2

  In New York, the women’s movement was charging forward, still in its first exhilarating years. Just two months before Dworkin said “I do,” Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone founded the action-oriented radical-feminist group Redstockings. And soon after, Willis reports, from a fly-on-the-wall perspective for the New Yorker,3 a group of some thirty women wreaked havoc on an abortion-law hearing of the all-male New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Public Health, demanding to testify as the “real experts” on illegal abortion. Though one day Willis would become Dworkin’s enemy, Firestone would first become her hero for writing The Dialetic of Sex (1970). And the Redstockings’ winning tactic—of which their disruption that day was just one early example—would become Dworkin’s guiding principle, her religion: The advance guard of the second wave showed that by casting off stigma and shame, by forcing their stories into the public record, they could open the floodgates of women’s rage to change the culture and the law.

  In September 1971 Dworkin writes home in tall, fast cursive.4 It’s her handwriting, but not the writer we know. Composed in the aftermath of a cataclysmic visit from her parents—during which they witnessed her husband’s rage and saw him hit her; during which she begged them to take her away and they refused—the long letter is an excruciating document of concealments, excuses, and apologies—all things she would eradicate from her prose shortly. By November, she’s living as a fugitive. At her husband’s hands she’s been disabused—almost fatally—of her faith in the male-led Left. Now she hides from him on a farm, on a freezing houseboat, or in the basement of a nightclub, with the help of a new lover. Ricki Abrams brings her books—Firestone’s, which introduces the concept of the sex-class system, Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, from the same year—and together the two women begin to work on one of their own.

  In between her letters home, in which she puts on a brave face and asks for money until she can get back on her feet, Dworkin writes with Abrams about fairy tales, foot binding, witch burning, and porn. Until finally, in 1972, desperate and destitute, she agrees to carry a briefcase of heroin through customs in exchange for a thousand dollars and a ticket to New York. The dope-smuggling plan falls through, but Dworkin keeps the money and gets away, carrying with her a ticket to a writer’s life—an unfinished manuscript she’s thinking of calling Last Days at Hot Slit.

  The draft she arrived in New York with would ultimately become Woman Hating, published in 1974 (Abrams would decide not to be part of the final version), and this collection is titled for her abandoned idea—chosen to memorialize her escape, the high stakes of her literary debut, and the apocalyptic, middle-finger appeal of her prose. It opens with a postcard written four years after her wedding.5 In New York with Gringo, the beloved German shepherd she somehow rescued from Amsterdam, she’s divorced and ecstatic, working as an assistant to the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Dworkin thanks her parents for their money and solicits their pride, brazenly demanding to be loved for who she really is—now, the author of a truly incendiary feminist text.

  _____

  Through chronological selections from Dworkin’s lifetime of restless output—excerpts from her most infamous nonfiction works and examples of her overlooked fiction, as well as two previously unpublished works—Last Days at Hot Slit aims to put the contentious positions she’s best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre.6 An iconic figure of so-called anti-sex feminism, Dworkin still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom. In her singular scorched-earth theory of representation, pornography is fascist propaganda, a weapon as crucial to the ever-escalating war on women as Goebbels’s caricatures were to Hitler’s rise. In her analysis of the sex-class system, prostitution is a founding institution, the bottom rung of hell. And in her vision of sexual liberation, there’s no honor in squeezing pleasure from the status quo—s/m is n
ihilistic playacting founded on farcical consent or craven collaboration, “Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated.”7

  And so, in the feminist insistence that women have the right to make and use pornography, to choose sex work, to engage in every kind of consensual act without shame, and to do so as revolutionaries, Dworkin is the censorial demagogue to shoot down. But nearly four decades after the historic Barnard Conference on Sexuality, which drew the battle lines of the feminist sex wars—pro-sex feminists staking out territory for the investigation of pleasure, while Women Against Pornography protested outside—and nearly three decades since the ascendance of the third wave signaled her definitive defeat, we hope it’s possible to consider what was lost in the fray.

  This collection is the product of years of conversation. When Amy Scholder, my co-editor, invited me to contribute to Icon (2014)8—a collection of nine personal essays, for which each author chose a public figure who influenced, intrigued, or haunted her—she reignited a teenage obsession of mine, which proved to be contagious. By choosing Dworkin as my subject, I returned to a moment in the 1990s, when my discovery of her militant voice fueled my nascent feminist rage, and when I quickly disavowed her politics with the kind of clean, capricious break that youth affords. But for Amy and me both, in reading Dworkin’s books with fresh eyes—measuring them against her lingering presence in feminist discourse as a symbol, frozen in time at the helm of a failed crusade—we found much more than the antiporn intransigence she’s reviled or revered for.

  Dworkin was a philosopher outside of and against the academy, one of the first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy. With astonishing vulnerability and searching rigor, she wrote of fucking, whoring, and the atrocity of rape; she wrote without apology, wielding the blunt, ugly language most appropriate to the bitter subject matter of her life. And while her work is by no means all autobiographical, her lifelong, unflinching inquiry into women’s subjugation was founded on a simple desire: “I wanted to find out what happened to me and why.”9

  _____

  Born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Camden, New Jersey, in 1946, Dworkin was raised under the specter of the Holocaust, in the hushed home of a frequently bedridden mother. Sylvia Dworkin’s heart condition is prominent in Andrea’s portrayal of her childhood. She and her brother Mark are separated and sent to live with relatives during Sylvia’s hospital stays; Harry, their father, is often absent, working two or more jobs so his wife can see the best doctors. Andrea keeps Sylvia alive through psychic vigilance and peaceful conformity, she thinks. Conversely, she makes her sicker with the disruptive force of her true personality.

  Childhood is a long, drawn-out loss of girlish illusions, as it becomes clear, through a series of painful lessons, that her ambitions—to be a poet, to obey only her instinct for adventure—are categorically male. There’s a mythic dimension to this narrative: The female hero’s journey is a search for greatness and meaning, in which rebellion and naiveté alike are punished by stunning sexual cruelty. And there is no home to return to, transformed or not.

  Her life comes into focus through the overlapping accounts of her essays and fiction. At age nine, left alone for the first time to see a movie, a paperback of Baudelaire in her pocket, she is sexually assaulted in the dark of the theater. “The commitment of the child molester is absolute,” she writes, regarding the incident in My Life as a Writer (1995), “and both his insistence and his victory communicate to the child his experience of her—a breachable, breakable thing any stranger can wipe his dick on.”10 Her novel Mercy (1990) complements that cold indictment with the flustered anguish of a child. Narrated by her first-person protagonist, also named Andrea, it opens with a long scene in which the trauma of that day is defined by the twin horrors of the molester’s violation and her mother’s shame-tinged panic to confirm that “nothing happened,” i.e., that he only wiped his dick on her daughter, didn’t force it inside.

  Dworkin has a book with her when she’s jailed in 1965, too—a volume of Charles Olson’s poetry. While a freshman at Bennington, participating in the college’s work program as a volunteer for the Student Peace Union in New York, she’s arrested protesting the Vietnam war outside the U.N. and held at the Women’s House of Detention for four days, where she is subjected to a sadistic pelvic exam, a gynecological rape. Upon her release, bleeding, she writes outraged letters to the papers about her ordeal. Her efforts lead to a highly publicized grand jury hearing about the jail’s conditions, at which she testifies. In a New York Times article—one of the many reports that would mortify her parents—Dworkin is a “plump girl with black hair and dark eyes,” who describes how the leering, brutal doctor questioned her. “He asked me where I went to school. Then he wanted to know how many Bennington girls were virgins.”11 In an apt foreshadowing of what’s to come—at age eighteen, before her feminist awakening is even on the horizon—she’s willing to brand herself with an image of sexual shame in the name of justice.

  Fleeing her parents’ humiliation and disapproval, Dworkin exiles herself to Crete, arriving almost penniless. The trip marks the start of a period of sporadic survival sex and prostitution. There she writes poetry, self-publishing a number of chapbooks, including such seething juvenilia as Notes on Burning Boyfriend,12 a surreal homage to the Quaker activist Norman Morrison, who set himself on fire below Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office window. Her teenage poetry is antiwar, anticapitalist, and sexually explicit, influenced by the dramatic landscape of her surroundings and the intensity of the love affair that consumed her during this sojourn. Though she returns to Bennington to finish her course work, she’s gone again before commencement—to Amsterdam, to write about the Dutch-anarchist movement Provo. She falls in love with one of its members—but now we can skip to a better beginning.

  _____

  “This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. It has no other purpose,” Dworkin writes in Woman Hating—a sentiment that might preface every one of her works. The book is steeped in the anti-imperialist, socialist vision of her countercultural milieu, informed by the tactics and rhetorical style of the Black Power movement, and profoundly indebted to Firestone and Millett. Dworkin writes with palpable hope, believing that the women’s movement can build upon the radical ideas of the day, bring new truths and momentum to global struggles. Among the five short excerpts included here is a portion of the introduction, which lays out Dworkin’s planetary agenda for revolution and makes explicit her expectations of the reader. “One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an unfree world, and in the course of redefining family, church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. To attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.”

  Dworkin presents a vision of American—or rather Amerikan—feminist history as one inextricable from Black liberation, beginning with “prototypal revolutionary models” such as of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. And while her account of the first wave and the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 glosses over the rift between its white organizers and Black suffragists, we find her grappling with the importance of class and race in a revolutionary analysis of her own time. She names the biases of the women’s movement as its “most awful failure”—even as she echoes the mistakes of her white feminist peers. Readers will find a simplification of the thorny issues, a comparison of (implicitly white) women’s degraded social role to that of a “shuffling” caricature of minstrelsy, and a jarring deployment of racial slurs to make a point. Dworkin’s concept of “primary emergency” though, a rudimentary, intersectional distinction that acknowledges a woman’s most acute oppression may not be as a woman, while not groundbreaking, represents a challenge to the arrogant myopia of many of the white second wave’s loudest voices. Her antiracist ethos is rooted in her upbringing—her parents’ vocal support for the civil rights movement—an
d informed by her own work to end the war, but Dworkin’s evolving attunement to race, apparent in her subsequent writing, will arise from her close study of pornography’s favorite tropes—its sexualization of skin color, dependence on ethnic caricature, and interest in enslavement.

  She writes in the fresh tradition established in Sexual Politics by Millett, whose literary analysis of the male canon illuminates the political character of sex. Dworkin will use it as a model throughout her career, expanding its application to systematically dissect patriarchal artifacts, whether canonical works such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or the unacclaimed novels Black Fashion Model and Whip Chick. “Woman as Victim: Story of O,” is emblematic of her sensibility. Her treatment of Pauline Réage’s 1954 classic of sadomasochistic literature in Woman Hating obviates the need to debate its status as art or pornography—either way, Story of O is allegorical, the distinguishing details of its story easily boiled off to reveal its essence as a perniciously instructive schema of sexual metaphysics. Dworkin uses the word cunt and refers to fucking, cocksucking, gangbanging, and rape without relent, in a rebuke to Réage’s vocabulary of erotic euphemism as well as the official language of philosophical abstraction. Though she refines her execution of such analyses over the years—and calibrates them with varying degrees of artistic reverence and castrating bravado—the strategy is fully formed in her seductively rough-hewn first book.

  Her afterword, “The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle,” is a rebuke of standard punctuation, offering an alternate vision of her text—a glimmer of how she had wanted it to appear on the page. “Ive attacked male dominance, thats ok,” she writes of her fight with the publisher, “Ive attacked every heterosexual notion of relation, thats ok. Ive in effect advocated the use of drugs, thats ok … lower case letters are not. it does make one wonder.” Though she was prevented from delivering the body of Woman Hating in an overtly experimental form, we have included her concluding, unconventionally punctuated statement, in hopes that it will draw out the formally innovative qualities of subsequent works, too—her scant commas, never-ending sentences, her use of repetition, about-face confrontations, and deadpan absurdism. She cared about style.