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

naive. I had not learned my proper place. I knew what I was

rebelling against in life, but I did not know that literature

had the same sorry boundaries, the same absurd rules, the

same cruel proscriptions. * It was easy enough to deal with

me: I was a bitch. And my book was sabotaged. The

publisher simply refused to fill orders for it. Booksellers

wanted the book but could not get it. Reviewers ignored the

* I had been warned early on about what it meant to be a girl, but I hadn’t

listened. “You write like a man, ” an editor wrote me on reading a draft

of a few early chapters of Woman Hating. “When you learn to write like

a woman, we will consider publishing you. ” This admonition reminded

me of a guidance counselor in high school who asked me as graduation

approached what I planned to be when I grew up. A writer, I said. He

lowered his eyes, then looked at me soberly. He knew I wanted to go to a

superb college; he knew I was ambitious. “What you have to do, ” he

said, “is go to a state college—there is no reason for you to go

somewhere else—and become a teacher so that you’ll have something to

fall back on when your husband dies. ” This story is not apocryphal. It

happened to me and to countless others. I had thought both the guidance

counselor and the editor stupid, individually stupid. I was wrong. They

were not individually stupid.

book, consigning me to invisibility, poverty, and failure.

The first speech in Our Blood (“Feminism, Art, and My

Mother Sylvia”) was written before the publication of

Woman Hating and reflects the deep optimism I felt at that

time. By October, the time of the second speech in Our

Blood (“Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’”), I knew that I was

in for a hard time, but I still did not know how hard it was

going to be.

“Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’” was written for the

National Organization for Women Conference on Sexuality

that took place in New York City on October 12, 1974. I

spoke at the end of a three-hour speakout on sex: women

talking about their sexual experiences, feelings, values.

There were 1100 women in the audience; no men were

present. When I was done, the 1100 women rose to their

feet. Women were crying and shaking and shouting. The

applause lasted nearly ten minutes. It was one of the most

astonishing experiences of my life. Many of the talks I gave

received standing ovations, and this was not the first, but I

had never spoken to such a big audience, and what I said

contradicted rather strongly much of what had been said

before I spoke. So the response was amazing and it

overwhelmed me. The coverage of the speech also overwhelmed me. One New York weekly published two vilifications. One was by a woman who had at least been present.

She suggested that men might die from blue-balls if I were

ever taken seriously. The other was by a man who had not

been present; he had overheard women talking in the lobby.

He was “enraged. ” He could not bear the possibility that “ a

woman might consider masochistic her consent to the means

of my release. ” That was the “danger Dworkin’s ideology

represents. ” Well, yes; but both writers viciously distorted

what I had actually said. Many women, including some

quite famous writers, sent letters deploring the lack of

fairness and honesty in the two articles. None of those

letters were published. Instead, letters from men who had

not been present were published; one of them compared my

speech to H itler’s Final Solution. I had used the words

“limp” and “penis” one after the other: “limp penis. ” Such

usage outraged; it offended so deeply that it warranted a

comparison with an accomplished genocide. Nothing I had

said about women was mentioned, not even in passing. The

speech was about women. The weekly in question has since

never published an article of mine or reviewed a book of

mine or covered a speech of mine (even though some of my

speeches were big events in New York City). * The kind of

fury in those two articles simply saturated the publishing

establishment, and my work was stonewalled. Audiences

around the country, most of them women and men,

continued to rise to their feet; but the journals that one

might expect to take note of a political writer like myself, or

a phenomenon like those speeches, refused to acknowledge

my existence. There were two noteworthy if occasional

exceptions: Ms. and Mother Jones.

In the years following the publication of Woman Hating,

it began to be regarded as a feminist classic. The honor in

this will only be apparent to those who value Mary

Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication o f the Rights o f Women or

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. It was a great

honor. Feminists alone were responsible for the survival of

Woman Hating. Feminists occupied the offices of Woman

* After Our Blood was published, I went to this same weekly to beg—yes,

beg—for some attention to the book, which was dying. The male writer

whose “release” had been threatened by “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’ ” asked to meet me. He told me, over and over, how very beautiful Our Blood was. “You know—urn—um, ” I said, “that—urn, urn—That

Speech is in Our Blood —you know, the one you wrote about. ” “So

beautiful, ” he said, “so beautiful. ” The editor-in-chief of the weekly

wrote me that Our Blood was so fine, so moving. But Our Blood did not

get any help, not even a mention, in those pages.

Hating 's publisher to demand that the book be published in

paper. Phyllis Chesler contacted feminist writers of reputation all over the country to ask for written statements of support for the book. Those writers responded with astonishing generosity. Feminist newspapers reported the suppression of the book. Feminists who worked in bookstores scavenged distributors’ warehouses for copies of the book and wrote over and over to the publisher to demand

the book. Women’s studies programs began using it.

Women passed the book from hand to hand, bought second

and third and fourth copies to give friends whenever they

could find it. Even though the publisher of Woman Hating

had told me it was “mediocre, ” the pressure finally resulted

in a paperback edition in 1976: 2500 leftover unbound