Last Days at Hot Slit Read online

  Right Wing Women gets a backhanded compliment in the paper of record four years after its release, in a double pan of Dworkin’s nonfiction work Intercourse and her first novel Ice and Fire, published simultaneously in the United States in 1987. Dworkin writes her own letter to the editor this time:

  I despair of being treated with respect, let alone fairly, in your pages. The review of “Ice and Fire” and “Intercourse” (May 3) is contemptuous beyond belief. In an adjacent column, Walter Kendrick, who has written a pro-pornography book and has equated me with Hitler in the pages of The Village Voice, is congratulated for insulting me. Thirteen years after its publication, your reviewer comments that “Woman Hating” is brilliant—thanks. And only four years after the publication of “Right-Wing Women,” it too is called brilliant. Don’t get ahead of yourselves. Neither book, by the way, was reviewed by The New York Times.24

  Carol Sternhell’s review reflects the cultural forces working against Dworkin’s legibility as a thinker by this time. “Sexual intercourse should be abolished. It’s the cause of many (most? all?) of women’s problems. It’s a lousy idea for the human race,” she glibly mischaracterizes the argument of Intercourse (and, as she sees it, the implicit message of Ice and Fire as well). “Besides, men are such creeps—all they want to do is ‘occupy,’ ‘violate,’ ‘invade’ and ‘colonize’ women’s bodies,”25 she mocks. Dworkin’s untempered prose, her focus on the extremes of sexual violence and the exploitation of women in the sex industry—and arguably, her failure to make crystal clear at every possible opportunity the distinction between the social construction or metaphysical definition of male power and actual men—had earned her a reputation as a man hater and a gender essentialist. Her sweeping descriptions of patriarchy’s toxic viscera were taken as evidence of a conviction that men are irredeemable; heterosexuality is hopeless, and, most famously, all sex is rape. But the bedrock of Dworkin’s feminism was, to the contrary, a repudiation of the essentialist, biological determinist logic that undergirds fascism and genocide. She believed that men, women, and sex could be different than they are now.

  That her lifelong, most fundamental position was consistently construed as its opposite was no doubt demoralizing. And yet Dworkin did not cater to the Sternhells of the world, trying to get them to understand. The formal daring and dirge-like excavations of Intercourse rendered it incomprehensible to those indifferent or hostile to her project—and though that bothered Dworkin, it wasn’t enough to change the way she wrote.

  Fucking is subject to radical skepticism in her book. She explores its meaning as an act and an institution by inhabiting male writers’ perspectives and portrayals of it, in works by Leo Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Gustave Flaubert. (Ironically, critics, in egregious misunderstandings of the text and Dworkin’s strategy, frequently took Tolstoy’s pessimistic view of sex as hers.) Reading Intercourse now, I find it lucid and almost uncontroversial in its denaturalization of the act; Dworkin’s exposure of intercourse as the linchpin of heterosexuality, as its emblem and climax, rings true. Intercourse is socially and legally regulated to create and enforce sex difference and male supremacy—who can deny it? Many contemporary readers will have already wandered to this place, or somewhere nearby, through Foucault or Butler.

  As Dworkin points out in her introduction to the 1995 edition, which we have included, skepticism, with regard to something as precious as intercourse, is not allowed—not from a woman author and certainly not from a harridan like her. We’ve also included a particularly skeptical chapter, “Occupation/Collaboration,” that moves dangerously back and forth between the metaphysics of fucking and women’s physical experience of it, provoking readers with an intentional blurring of worlds. “How to separate the act of intercourse from the social reality of male power is not clear, especially because it is male power that constructs both the meaning and the current practice of intercourse as such,” she writes. “But it is clear that reforms do not change women’s status relative to men, or have not yet. It is clear that reforms do not change the intractability of women’s civil inferiority,” she adds grimly. “Is intercourse itself then a basis of or a key to women’s continuing social and sexual inequality?”

  That question, which throws the viability of intercourse into doubt should equality ever be realized (fat chance), and which demonstrates Dworkin’s unencouraging agnosticism on the issue, somehow raises the stakes unbearably high for many readers. She doesn’t threaten (emptily) to take fucking away, but she does issue a serious challenge: “If intercourse can be an expression of sexual equality, it will have to survive—on its own merits as it were, having a potential for human expression not yet recognized or realized—the destruction of male power over women…”

  Again, Dworkin’s notoriety foreclosed any possibility that her work would be recognized or contended with as art. Stoltenberg—an antipornography and antirape writer in his own right, focusing on the socialization of men—describes, in a 1994 article about their life together, finding safety under siege. “Over time, ‘home’ has been seven different places, including an apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, where we scraped by on food stamps; a mold-growing bunker on a buggy island in the Florida Keys; and a rat-ridden, fumy walk-up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side,” he recalls. “We are now fortunate to own our own house, a Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn, filled with warm colors and woodwork and walls full of books. We feel almost blissfully happy here—partly because this is our snug harbor against the storm…” Dworkin was an object of derision for writers like Sternhell, ostensibly a feminist, while also facing death threats and more dangerous ridicule, such as a series of antifeminist, anti-lesbian, anti-Semitic caricatures in Hustler. She sued for libel, and the court ruled against her in 1989. Speaking to the difficulties of those years, Stoltenberg writes, “Andrea’s and Larry Flynt’s lawyers deposed me, and I found I could not get through the interview without breaking down in sobs.”26

  Dworkin wrote novels because she wanted to; she wrote them for a tiny readership, for a future audience, or to cast them into the void. Certainly, their reception was disappointing for an author who still harbored an aching literary ambition. We have included a short section from Ice & Fire, an excerpt that could be read as a fictionalized snapshot of her life, post-jail, post-Crete and pre-Amsterdam. She takes drugs and turns tricks with her best friend, as they try to be artists together in New York. “We are going to make a movie, a tough, unsentimental avant-garde little number about women in a New York City prison,” Dworkin writes, laughing a little at her young self, “I have written it. It strangely resembles my own story: jailed over Vietnam the woman is endlessly strip-searched and then mangled inside by jail doctors.” The novel is tragic, but this part isn’t. At the Woolworth’s photo booth they “pose and look intense and avant-garde,” she writes, “We mess up our hair and sulk, or we try grinning, we stare into the hidden camera…”

  Mercy (1990) is more explicitly autofictional, a pointed mirroring of Dworkin’s own life events, though one that spins off into the kind of unhinged hallucination her nonfiction was often accused of. Never cited as a work on a par with Pornography or Intercourse, the unsung magnum opus is a revelatory foil to those works, just as formally complex, but uninhibited by the demands of traditional argumentation. “My narrator, who is a character in my book, knows less than I do,” Dworkin reflects, writing of her final novel. “She is inside the story. Deciding what she will see, what she can know, I am detached from her and cold in how I use her.”27 It’s a telling observation, as the opposite might be assumed—that Mercy’s unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness or diaristic style constitutes a loosening of her rhetorical grip.

  In the first-person novel, Dworkin chronicles—or grieves—the life of Andrea, who writes of her name, many times throughout the book, with anger or disbelief, that “it means manhood or courage.” Of her childhood home, she notes, also in a mournful refrain, that it was
just down the street from Walt Whitman’s house in Camden. The historic site’s proximity fuels dreams of Leaves-of-Grass greatness; and for the anti-imperialist teen poet she becomes, Whitman is a symbol of an alternate, mythic nation. “I’m from his country, the country he wrote about in his poems, the country of freedom, the country of ecstasy, the country of joy of the body,” she insists, “not the Amerika run by war criminals.”

  Mercy is indisputably a tale of horrific sexual violence, beginning with Andrea’s molestation at the movies, and never pausing for long in its depictions of abuse. But contrary to Dworkin’s reputation—to the image of her as a prudish, perennial victim—she also offers a passionate account of the adventures of a sexual rebel. In her fiction, depictions of sex, good and bad, with men and women, begin to answer the questions that she raised throughout her career about the possibilities of pleasure under patriarchy, to represent her vision of a liberated sexuality—not through the example of a superhuman revolutionary who practices a squeaky-clean reciprocity, but through the trial-and-error journey of an imperfect protagonist.

  At age twenty, living in New York, she sees a woman she desperately wants. “The room’s empty but she sits at the table next to me, black leather pants, black hair, painted black, like I always wanted.” They’re at a Kosher restaurant downtown. “I can’t go with her now because she has an underlying bad motive, she wants to eat,” she wryly observes, “and what I feel for her is complete sex.” Encounters with women provide fleeting reprieve from male violence; they’re trapdoors to Whitman’s ecstatic country. “Your life’s telling you that if you’re between her legs, you’re free—free’s not peaceful and not always kind, it’s fast,” she writes. “There’s not many women around who have any freedom in them let alone some to spare, extravagant, on you, and it’s when they’re on you you see it best and know it’s real.”

  Mercy also tells of a marriage in Amsterdam, much like Dworkin’s it would seem, offering a level of detail not present in her nonfiction. The relationship begins as a profound romance between radicals, the couple’s shared drive to sow antiauthoritarian chaos fueling a gender-transcending sexual bond. Dworkin describes it as “a carnal expression of brotherhood in the revolutionary sense, a long, fraternal embrace for hours or days, in hiding.” Sex affirms their freedom and sustains their underground life of righteous crime. “I liked fucking after a strike, a proper climax to the real act—I liked how everything got fast and urgent; fast, hard, life or death; I liked bed then, after, when we was drenched in perspiration from what came before; I liked revolution as foreplay; I liked how it made your supersensitive so the hairs on your skin were standing up and hurt before anything touched you.” Pleasure and pain are entangled, sensitively, in her accounts of their relationship before it turns. “I liked to be on top and I moved real slow,” she writes, “using every muscle in me, so I could feel him hurting—you know that melancholy ache inside that deepens into a frisson of pain?” But Andrea is not always on top, and doesn’t mind (“there wasn’t nothing he did to me that I didn’t do to him”), until, somehow, she finds herself always on the bottom—tied to the bed, and then, beaten almost to death.

  How do we reconcile this Andrea—desirous, self-critical, principled, the author’s obvious self-portrait—with the antisex villain invoked in third-wave defenses of sexual empowerment? And how can we understand this Andrea next to the ruined monster of Mercy’s end? Her blood runs green, she has nothing left to lose, and at last she summons the courage and manhood suggested by her name to visit arbitrary nighttime vigilante injustice on the city’s most unlucky men.

  This time, the Times review makes the stunning claim, regarding Mercy, that “Ms. Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men.”28 However outlandish its author Wendy Steiner’s interpretation may be, it’s perhaps an accurate measure of the public perception of Dworkin’s politics. And she insightfully credits her with a “new representational strategy,” “risking the prurience of the pornography she deplores,” written in a style combining “the repetition of the early Gertrude Stein and, ironically, the unfettered flights of Henry Miller.” But in a misreading that echoes so many reactions to Dworkin, she takes the novel’s shocking collapse of the metaphorical and the literal, of fantasy and confession, as a sign that its plot is actually a plan. In fact, Dworkin’s real plan—always—was simply, unironically, to be as unfettered as Miller was, to beat him at his own game:

  My only chance to be believed is to find a way of writing bolder and stronger than woman hating itself—smarter, deeper, colder. This might mean that I would have to write a prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography. How would the innocent bystander be able to distinguish it, tell it apart from the tales of rapists themselves if it were so nightmarish and impolite? There are no innocent bystanders.29

  More than murder, suicide figures in the final stretch of the novel. It is an escape and a protest, a desperate last measure to bestow meaning on a female life. Dworkin retells an ancient legend—the story of nearly a thousand Jews, living in exile in a fortress on the rock of Masada. Under Roman siege, with their extermination or enslavement inevitable, the men decide to kill themselves—everyone—rather than submit. Andrea recalls a past life as an old woman on that rock, who overhears the men and slits her own throat before the massacre begins. Dworkin also depicts Andrea’s self-immolation. Like Norman Morrison at the Pentagon decades ago, she burns outside a porn theater in Times Square. “I go to outside Deep Throat where my friend Linda is in the screen,” she writes, “and I put the gasoline on me. I soak myself in it in broad daylight and many go by and no one looks and I am calm, patient, gray on gray like the Buddhist monks, and I light the fire; free us.”

  “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite,” wrote Huey Newton, one of Dworkin’s militant heroes, speaking of the Black Panther movement in 1973. “We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.” Radical struggle shortens one’s life, he writes. “Other so-called revolutionaries cling to an illusion they might have their revolution and die of old age. That cannot be…”30

  Last Days at Hot Slit concludes with an excerpt from the previously unpublished work My Suicide (1999),31 found on Dworkin’s hard drive by Stoltenberg after her death in 2005, at age fifty-eight. After years of chronic illness and pain, she died in her sleep; the cause was inflammation of the heart. In its entirety, the piece is a 24,000-word autobiographical essay, dedicated to “J.S.” (Stoltenberg) and “E.M.” (Elaine Markson, her longtime literary agent and dear friend). Stoltenberg writes of discovering the text, “it was finished; as if for publication. And I understood why she did not show it to me or Elaine. She had to have known it would devastate us. Because she had written it in the form of a suicide note.”32

  It is an account of her drugging and rape in a Paris hotel, where she had gone alone to celebrate the completion of her epic work Scapegoat, a book on the Holocaust, which would be published the next year. She tells of reading in a garden, a second cocktail that doesn’t taste right, and blacking out in her room. She wakes to find herself bleeding, she finds a bruise, and feels a kind of internal pain that only rape can explain. My Suicide is an interrogation of memory and trauma, a searching recitation of the same events again and again, which takes the spiraling form we now recognize from the experimental structures of Mercy and Intercourse—as well as from her entire body of work, with its vivid, long-running leitmotifs. The drug rape is one more prism through which her life’s narrative is refracted, and it’s one more aspect of sexual violence she comes to know intimately. “I want to live but I don’t know how,” she writes, “I can’t bear knowing what I know.” Her hallmark refrain is delivered in a new register of defeat.

  A cruel footnote�
��which surely felt more like a headline then—is that she was disbelieved during this time of emotional crisis, a period that also marked a sharp decline in her physical health. When she wrote an article for the British magazine The New Statesman,33 chronicling the events and aftermath of her Paris trip, the strange, unverifiable story was met with the raised eyebrows of even sympathetic feminist friends. Stoltenberg, who appears in My Suicide as Paul, understandably wished for another explanation, which is the kindest breed of doubt. And then there were the true attacks—her story publicly picked apart to discredit her once and for all, as evidence of a false politics, an entire career rooted in histrionics and paranoid fantasy.

  _____

  Amy and I did not, of course, expect to finish this book under Trump; I didn’t expect to write this introduction while witnessing the ascendance of full-throated white supremacist populism, or the consolidation of power under an authoritarian regime in my country—but Dworkin has been my companion through this time. It’s hard to argue that she offers comfort, but I will say that just as it was her curse to see the seed of genocide in everything—the calamity waiting in every expression and symbol of inequality, however small or private—it was her gift to see in everything an opportunity to resist.