Andrea Dworkin: Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

the need to root out from all anger the spirit of

murder.

Barbara Deming, “On Anger”

We Cannot Live Without Our Lives

Now, women do not ask half of a kingdom but

their rights, and they don’t get them. When she

comes to demand them, don’t you hear how sons

hiss their mothers like snakes, because they ask

for their rights; and can they ask for anything

less?. . . But we’ll have our rights; see if we don’t;

and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can.

You can hiss as much as you like, but it is coming.

Sojourner Truth, 1853

I thank Kitty Benedict, A

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Phyllis Chesler, Barbara

Deming, Jane Gapen, Beatrice Johnson, Eleanor

Johnson, Liz Kanegson, Judah Kataloni, Jeanette

Koszuth, Elaine Markson, and Joslyn Pine for

their help and faith.

I thank John Stoltenberg, who has been my

closest intellectual and creative collaborator.

I thank my parents, Sylvia and Harry Dworkin,

for their continued trust and respect.

I thank all of the women who organized the

conferences, programs, and classes at which I

spoke.

I thank those feminist philosophers, writers,

organizers, and prophets whose work sustains and

strengthens me.

PREFA CE

Our Blood is a book that grew out of a situation. The

situation was that I could not get my work published. So I

took to public speaking—not the extemporaneous exposition of thoughts or the outpouring of feelings, but crafted prose that would inform, persuade, disturb, cause recognition, sanction rage. I told myself that if publishers would not publish my work, I would bypass them altogether. I

decided to write directly to people and for my own voice. I

started writing this way because I had no other choice: I saw

no other way to survive as a writer. 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. The publishing establishment was a formidable

blockade, and my plan was to swim around it.

In April 1974 my first book-length work of feminist

theory, Woman Hating, was published. Before its publication I had had trouble. I had been offered magazine assignments that were disgusting. I had been offered a great

deal of money to write articles that an editor had already

outlined to me in detail. They were to be about women or

sex or drugs. They were stupid and full of lies. For instance,

I was offered $1500 to write an article on the use of

barbiturates and amphetamines by suburban women. I was

to say that this use of drugs constituted a hedonistic

rebellion against the dull conventions of sterile housewifery,

that women used these drugs to turn on and swing and have

a wonderful new life-style. I told the editor that I suspected

women used amphetamines to get through miserable days

and barbiturates to get through miserable nights. I suggested, amiably I thought, that I ask the women who use the drugs why they use them. I was told flat-out that the article

would say what fun it was. I turned down the assignment.

This sounds like great rebellious fun—telling establishment

types to go fuck themselves with their fistful of dollars—but

when one is very poor, as I was, it is not fun. It is instead

profoundly distressing. Six years later I finally made half

that amount for a magazine piece, the highest I have ever

been paid for an article. I had had my chance to play ball

and I had refused. I was too naive to know that hack writing

is the only paying game in town. I believed in “literature, ”

“principles, ” “politics, ” and “the power of fine writing to

change lives. ” When I refused to do that article and others,

I did so with considerable indignation. The indignation

marked me as a wild woman, a bitch, a reputation reinforced during editorial fights over the content of WomanHating, a reputation that has haunted and hurt me: not hurt

my feelings, but hurt my ability to make a living. I am in

fact not a “lady, ” not a “lady writer, ” not a “sweet young

thing. ” What woman is? My ethics, my politics, and my

style merged to make me an untouchable. Girls are supposed to be invitingly touchable, on the surface or just under.

I thought that the publication of Woman Hating would

establish me as a writer of recognized talent and that then I

would be able to publish serious work in ostensibly serious

magazines. I was wrong. The publication of Woman Hating,

about which I was jubilant, was the beginning of a decline

that continued until 1981 when Pornography: Men Possessing Women was published. The publisher of Woman Hating did not like the book: I am considerably understating here.

I was not supposed to say, for example, “Women are

raped. ” I was supposed to say, “Green-eyed women with

one leg longer than the other, hair between the teeth,

French poodles, and a taste for sauteed vegetables are

raped occasionally on Fridays by persons. ” It was rough. I

believed I had a right to say what I wanted. My desires were

not particularly whimsical: my sources were history, facts,

experience. I had been brought up in an almost exclusively

male tradition of literature, and that tradition, whatever its

faults, did not teach coyness or fear: the writers I admired

were blunt and not particularly polite. I did not understand

that—even as a writer—I was supposed to be delicate,

fragile, intuitive, personal, introspective. I wanted to claim

the public world of action, not the private world of feelings.

My ambition was perceived as megalomaniacal—in the

wrong sphere, demented by prior definition. Yes, I was