Last Days at Hot Slit Page 2
Though it found an appreciative feminist audience, Woman Hating didn’t earn enough to support her, nor did it result in paid writing opportunities. “I was convinced that it was the publishing establishment—timid and powerless women editors, the superstructure of men who make the real decisions, misogynistic reviewers—that stood between me and a public particularly of women that I knew was there,” she reflects. “The publishing establishment was a formidable blockade, and my plan was to swim around it.”13 Speaking gigs became a way to survive, and to reach women.
Of the many talks Dworkin gave, at feminist conferences, colleges, and for women’s groups that passed a hat around after Q&A’s, we’ve included “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality,’” from 1974, in which she calls for “an absolute transformation of human sexuality,” a demand in line with her expanding understanding of patriarchy’s incursions into every aspect of life, the institutional nature of even our most intimate dynamics and acts. Here, she introduces a vision of sex that would rankle and repel many, a scenario of ostensible liberation that came to represent, as feminist debates around pleasure and desire unfolded, a sharply constrained and prescriptive menu of behavior. Speaking of the profound changes required to realize a just society, she says, “For men I suspect that this transformation begins in the place they most dread—that is, in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together.” Such presumptions regarding how women do or should make love together would cause her trouble—though not as much as her perceived threats to male orgasm. But if she left hazy the controversial specifics of revolutionary sex at this juncture, her understanding of the ancient, hidden epidemic of male sexual violence was achieving a level of devastating precision.
Dworkin had some stability by now. She lived with the writer John Stoltenberg, a gay man who would be her partner until she died in 2005. (They married in 1998.) Polaroids from this period show a life of pets and books—Gringo with a Frisbee in the sun; Stoltenberg with a kitten on his chest; Dworkin armored in overalls, reading in an armchair, a tuxedo cat and an orange tabby standing guard at the window. In another image, they lounge with her on the bed, a SMASH PATRIARCHY poster on the wall behind them.14 After seeing Lily Tomlin perform at Lincoln Center, Dworkin sent her a copy of Woman Hating and a note (“I feel so shy about writing to you. I love your work enormously. It means so much to me”).15 Looking through the writer’s papers, I was always happy to find evidence of joy, because by all accounts, the terror and numb despair of her past were always close, constantly brought to the fore by the nature of her work.
“The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door,”16 a longer speech, which she wrote in 1975, the same year that Susan Brownmiller’s landmark book Against Our Will was published, is a striking document from a time when marital rape was legal in all fifty states, and when women’s radical candor was still just beginning to reveal the depth and ubiquity of sexual violence. The title—the word atrocity—underscores Dworkin’s insistence on reframing the commonplace and infrequently prosecuted act of rape as not just a tool of political control, but as a war crime, committed on dates, in respectable households, and everywhere else you can imagine. “I am here tonight to try to tell you what you are up against as women in your efforts to live decent, worthwhile, and productive human lives,” she explained to her college audiences. “Once you understand what rape is, you will be able to resist all attempts to mystify and mislead you into believing that the crimes committed against you as women are trivial, comic, irrelevant.” Dworkin labored against a backdrop of naturalized, normalized, invisible misogyny to illuminate the genocidal character of violence against women, and while there were legions that would charge her with hyperbole, there was also a growing feminist army who found, in her electrifying indictments of male supremacy, the truth at last. Delivering a talk like “Rape Atrocity,” came at a great cost, though.
I heard about rape after rape; women’s lives passed before me, rape after rape; women who had been raped in homes, in cars, on beaches, in alleys, in classrooms, by one man, by two men, by five men, by eight men, hit, drugged, knifed, torn, women who had been sleeping, women who had been with their children, women who had been out for a walk or shopping or going to school or going home from school or in their offices working or in factories or in stockrooms, young women, girls, old women, thin women, fat women, housewives, secretaries, hookers, teachers, students. I simply could not bear it. So I stopped giving the speech. I thought I would die from it. I learned what I had to know, and more than I could stand to know.17
Knowing more than she could stand became a default state, because Dworkin was morally compelled to speak out about the most difficult, the most painful things for the rest of her life. Just as women, to win the right to abortion, had spoken out about facing death in motel rooms and back alleys to terminate pregnancies, or of being forced as teenagers to carry their rapists’ babies to term, she would have to talk about the violence of her marriage in order to help other women. “A Battered Wife Survives” is her first public account of that time in Amsterdam, and we preface it with her letter to her parents, in which she warns them of their cameo appearance in her story.
At the same time, her focus on pornography intensified. In the late 1970s, her thundering speeches—delivered at conferences and colleges, also rallies and marches—named porn as terrorism, as material created to demonstrate women’s inferiority through the unrelenting depiction of them as whores hungry for violation and punishment, designed to make men sexually reliant on such portrayals and to teach them to act out the scenarios. “Images of women bound, bruised, and maimed on virtually every street corner, on every magazine rack, in every drug store, in movie house after movie house, on billboards, on posters posted on walls, are death threats to a female population in rebellion,” she explained to a small group of students at the University of Massachusetts in the winter of 1977. “Female rebellion against male sexual despotism, female rebellion against male sexual authority, is now a reality throughout this country,” she continued, perhaps too optimistically, assessing the state of the women’s movement. “The men,” she accused, “meeting rebellion with an escalation of terror, hang pictures of maimed female bodies in every place.”18
To put such a dramatic pronouncement in context: In 1975, the producer of Snuff, a low-budget film about a Manson Family–like satanic biker gang had courted publicity with the claim that the movie showed the real dismemberment and murder of a woman; and the next year a Sunset Boulevard billboard advertising the Rolling Stones’ new album Black and Blue showed model Anita Russell in bondage, her legs spread, a dark mark on her inner thigh, and beside her, the text, “I’m ‘Black and Blue’ from the Rolling Stones—and I love it!” A new group called Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) organized letter-writing campaigns and consumer boycotts, initiating a model of feminist media critique and action that caught on. More groups would soon form, specifically focused on porn, and interested in legal interventions.19
The Equal Rights Amendment was still on the table, and with nearly a decade of feminist cultural and legislative victories adding up, it wasn’t crazy to view such violent material, particularly its new mainstream presence, as dangerous political retaliation—especially if you were suffocating in women’s stories of sadistic abuse and rape while writing through the night, night after night, as Dworkin was. In 1978, she addressed a packed auditorium before the first national “Take Back the Night” march, in which thousands of women walked through San Francisco’s red-light district after dark, their protest banners mingling with the neon signs. “If a woman has any sense of her own intrinsic worth, seeing pornography in small bits and pieces can bring her to a useful rage,” she said. “Studying pornography in quantity and depth, as I have been doing for more months than I care to remember, will turn that same woman into a mourner.”20
Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) is the sophisticated descendant of Woman
Hating, a more intricate argument that does not stop with the dissection of patriarchal artifacts. In it, porn is formulated as propaganda on a par with that of any genocidal regime, relying as it does on an identical vocabulary of dehumanizing racial, ethnic, and sexual stereotypes to justify the persecution of a group. It is also evidence of persecution—a literal documentation of abuse and degradation in some cases, and a faithful representation of commonplace practices, such as rape, in others. “The force depicted in pornography is objective and real because force is so used against women,” Dworkin writes. “The debasing of women depicted in pornography and intrinsic to it is objective and real in that women are so debased. The uses of women depicted in pornography are objective and real because women are so used. The women used in pornography are used in pornography.” In her logic, the production of the image, the image itself, and the sexual-ideological use of the image in white-male supremacist society are folded together in pornography as a cultural practice. The book is difficult to excerpt—and difficult to read—because much of its power is derived from what it asks you to weather as a reader, tracking the progression of her argument through a punishing, cumulative process of rhetorical extremes and unsparing descriptions of cruelty.
While the instinctual response to Dworkin’s central argument is the procurement of real or theoretical counter-examples to her generalizations about pornography as a genre rooted in the debasement of women, such efforts are futile—debasement is baked into her definition. At one fell swoop in her preface, with a characteristically startling and pointed transhistorical flourish, she damns both Ancient Greece and the ACLU by invoking porn’s etymology—its origin in the word pornai, which denotes the lowest caste of prostitute, the brothel slave. “This is not a book about the First Amendment. By definition the First Amendment protects only those who can exercise the rights it protects. Pornography by definition—‘the graphic depiction of whores’—is trade in a class of persons who have been systematically denied the rights protected by the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights.” Sexually explicit images portraying true equality, made by choice under fair working conditions—should they exist—are not pornography, but something else. The feminist pornography movement would emerge later, in the mid-1980s, with such endeavors as Candida Royalle’s woman-centered film production company or the lesbian magazine On Our Backs. And though Dworkin would be hostile to their material too, it wasn’t what she was talking about in 1981.
While it may be possible now to read Pornography in a number of ways—as experimental literature, durational cultural criticism, a provocation dramatizing the representational crises posed by a rapidly expanding porn industry—in its day Dworkin’s book was anchored in a vocal and prominent antipornography faction of the feminist movement, defined by dogged grassroots action and an uncompromising view of media that depict sexual subordination. Linda Marchiano, known as Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat (1972), had, in 1980, come out with a shocking account of her abuse and coercion during its filming, and the slogan “Pornography is violence against women” had become doctrine. Dismayed feminist detractors felt antipornography activism had sucked the air out of discussions of sexuality and added to the prohibitions on women’s behavior, while also flirting dangerously with pro-censorship positions. Any chance of a substantive discussion of Pornography’s innovative structure, Dworkin’s aesthetics of rage, or theoretical nuance was lost—the text was inextricable from her public persona within the rancorous melee of the women’s movement, splintering as it entered the Reagan era.
The author of the book’s negative New York Times review is none other than Ellen Willis. She opens with a pointed rhetorical question: “Who would have predicted that just now, when the far right has launched an all-out attack on women’s basic civil rights, the issue eliciting the most passionate public outrage from feminists should be not abortion, not “pro-family” fundamentalism, but pornography?”21 To Willis, unmoved and alarmed by Dworkin’s polemic, the “peculiar confluence” of the feminist antipornography movement and the cultural agenda of the Right was “evidence that feminists have been affected by the conservative climate and are unconsciously moving with the cultural tide.” In her view, both religious moralism and Dworkin’s metaphysical absolute of male power offered no path forward for women’s sexual liberation. And while “The misogyny Andrea Dworkin decries is real enough,” she grants, the author’s vision is, Willis writes, “less inspiring than numbing, less a call to arms than a counsel of despair.”
The next year, Willis participated in the Barnard Conference on Sexuality, an event organized by Columbia University professor Carole S. Vance, who was explicit in her mission to critique the feminist antipornography movement and to regroup around such open-ended questions as, “How do women get sexual pleasure in patriarchy?” Outside, protestors stated one way women should not get it: Their t-shirts read FOR A FEMINIST SEXUALITY on the front and AGAINST S/M on the back. In general, Dworkin’s writing does not directly engage with the positions of her feminist adversaries; she might argue that her rebuttals are implicit in her broader critique of male supremacy. And publicly, her allies took up for her. (Women Against Pornography leader Dorchen Leidholdt responded to Willis’s review in a letter to the editor.)22 But this is not to say that the opposition of pro-sex feminists did not enrage and grieve Dworkin, that she was above private attacks and demands for ideological fealty, or that accusations of political and sexual conservatism escaped her notice.
In the unpublished manuscript Ruins (1978–83), a novel structured as a series of letters to people from her past, there is one piece titled “Goodbye to All That.” Published here for the first time, it was written in 1983, calling out, with livid sarcasm, the biggest names associated with the antipornography counter-movement, skewering them as false renegades. “Goodbye, Ellen, baaad baaad Ellen,” she writes. Though she addresses her critics by first name only, they are, undoubtedly, in addition to Willis, sex radical Patrick Califia, queer activist Amber Hollibaugh, and Gayle Rubin, a cultural anthropologist associated with queer BDSM groups. More generally, Dworkin bids adieu to “all you swastika-wielding dykettes, all you tough dangerous feminist leatherettes, all you sexy, nonmonogamous (it does take the breath away) pierced, whipped, bitten, fist-fucked and fist-fucking wild wonderful heretofore unimaginable feminist Girls.” And in heartbroken half-resignation to the changing tides, she also says goodbye to her friends and comrades. “Goodbye to the dummies who thought sex could express reciprocity and equality and still be sexy. Goodbye to the dummies who thought this movement could change the world.”23
But these rifts, and the academic trends precipitating the emergence of gender studies programs and queer theory, could not distract her from the real war for long. That same year, she addressed an audience of hundreds of men, at a National Organization for Changing Men conference. “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape” is a rare appeal to the unfair sex, illustrating her vivid sense of women’s unrelenting emergency. “We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us.”
She didn’t broker a détente that day or ever, but the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance that she coauthored later in 1983, with feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, represented a new battlefield strategy. It was an attempt to reframe pornography as a form of sex discrimination, a civil rights violation, allowing those harmed by it to sue for damages. High profile but doomed campaigns to enact the law in various cities throughout the eighties took Dworkin beyond the polarizing skirmishes of the women’s movement, and put her at the center of a larger public debate. The 1986 Meese Commission’s report on pornography included a transcription of thirty minutes of her brutal
, poetic testimony; her image would never recover from this strategic alignment with anti-obscenity conservatism.
Dworkin’s apparent—or suspected—sympathy for the Right was perhaps, more accurately, a profound resentment of the progressive pretensions of the Left, dating back to her teen experiences with the radical lip-service of men who’d fucked her over. The booming porn industry of the 1970s was rooted in a fraternal counterculture, she often pointed out, led by cynical entrepreneurs of the so-called sexual revolution. Her book Right Wing Women, published that same pivotal year—1983—explores women’s fate at the other end of the political spectrum. What is perhaps most notable about the book in the context of her career at this point is her use of the misogynist cruelty of the Right as a foil to the sexist betrayals of the civil-libertarian Left—each side harbors a virulent strain of antifeminism, and she doesn’t really have a preference. Her position is, in some ways, a confrontational for-the-sake-of-argument pose. Dworkin was functionally, on all other issues, left of the Left. But her involvement with proposed antipornography legislation made her bipartisan disdain suspicious.
The book, expanded from a 1977 article published in Ms., is a compassionate exploration of mostly white, Evangelical women. Dworkin’s chapter on abortion and anti-abortion women is brutally thorough; another titled “The Coming Gynocide” is, as the title suggests, a harrowing presentation of her predictions for the near future, where male supremacist ideology realizes its logical extreme. We’ve included her first chapter, “The Promise of the Ultra-Right,” in which she looks at women’s embrace of religious absolutism and conformity as a savvy calculation made to better their chances of physical and social survival. It is some of Dworkin’s funniest writing, as she acerbically summarizes the positions of her right-wing sisters and their instructions for how to love and submit—or, to look at it another way, how to use a career of antigay activism (Anita Bryant) or born-again therapy (Ruth Carter Stapleton) to escape forced childbearing and the prison of the home.