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

copies were bound in paper and distributed, sort of.

Problems with distribution continued, and bookstores,

which reported selling the book steadily when it was in

stock, had to wait months for orders to be filled. Woman

Hating is now in its fifth tiny paperback printing. The book

is not another piece of lost women’s literature only because

feminists would not give it up. In a way this story is

heartening, because it shows what activism can accomplish,

even in the Yahoo land of Amerikan publishing.

But I had nowhere to go, no way to continue as a writer.

So I went on the road—to women’s groups who passed a hat

for me at the end of my talk, to schools where feminist

students fought to get me a hundred dollars or so, to

conferences where women sold T-shirts to pay me. I spent

weeks or months writing a talk. I took long, dreary bus rides

to do what appeared to be only an evening’s work and slept

wherever there was room. Being an insomniac, I did not

sleep much. Women shared their homes, their food, their

hearts with me, and I met women in every circumstance,

nice women and mean women, brave women and terrified

women. And the women I met had suffered every crime,

every indignity: and I listened. “The Rape Atrocity and the

Boy Next D oor” (in this volume) always elicited the same

responses: 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, tom , 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.

My life on the road was an exhausting mixture of good

and bad, the ridiculous and the sublime. One fairly typical

example: I gave the last lecture in Our Blood (“The Root

Cause, ” my favorite) on my twenty-ninth birthday. I had

written it as a birthday present to myself. The lecture was

sponsored by a Boston-based political collective. They were

supposed to provide transportation and housing for me and,

because it was my birthday and I wanted my family with me,

my friend and our dog. I had offered to come another time

but they wanted me then— en famille. One collective

member drove to New York in the most horrible thunderstorm I have ever seen to pick us up and drive us back to Boston. The other cars on the road were blurs of red light

here and there. The driver was exhausted, it was impossible

to see; and the driver did not like my political views. He

kept asking me about various psychoanalytic theories, none

of which I had the good sense to appreciate. I kept trying to

change the subject—he kept insisting that I tell him what I

thought of so-and-so—every time I got so cornered that I

had to answer, he slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.

I thought that we would probably die from the driver’s

fatigue and fury and God’s rain. We were an hour late, and

the jam-packed audience had waited. The acoustics in the

room were superb, which enhanced not only my own voice

but the endless howling of my dog, who finally bounded

through the audience to sit on stage during the question-

and-answer period. The audience was fabulous: involved,

serious, challenging. Many of the ideas in the lecture were

new and, because they directly confronted the political

nature of male sexuality, enraging. The woman with whom

we were supposed to stay and who was responsible for our

trip home was so enraged that she ran out, never to return.

We were stranded, without money, not knowing where to

turn. A person can be stranded and get by, even though she

will be imperiled; two people with a German shepherd and

no money are in a mess. Finally, a woman whom I knew

slightly took us all in and loaned us the money to get home.

Working (and it is demanding, intense, difficult work) and

traveling in such endlessly improvised circumstances require

that one develop an affection for low comedy and gross

melodrama. I never did. Instead I became tired and

demoralized. And I got even poorer, because no one could

ever afford to pay me for the time it took to do the writing.

I did not begin demanding realistic fees, secure accommodations, and safe travel in exchange for my work until after the publication of Our Blood. I had tried intermittently and mostly failed. But now I had to be paid and safe.

I felt I had really entered middle age. This presented new

problems for feminist organizers who had little access to the

material resources in their communities. It also presented

me with new problems. For a long time I got no work at all,

so I just got poorer and poorer. It made no sense to anyone

but me: if you have nothing, and someone offers you

something, how can you turn it down? But I did, because I

knew that I would never make a living unless I took a stand.

I had a fine and growing reputation as a speaker and writer;

but still, there was no money for me. When I first began to

ask for fees, I got angry responses from women: how could

the author of Woman Hating be such a scummy capitalist

pig, one woman asked in a nearly obscene letter. The letter

writer was going to live on a farm and have nothing to do

with rat-shit capitalists and bourgeois feminist creeps. Well,

I wrote back, I didn’t live on a farm and didn’t want to. I

bought food in a supermarket and paid rent to a landlord

and I wanted to write books. I answered all the angry

letters. I tried to explain the politics of getting the money,

especially from colleges and universities: the money was

there; it was hard to get; why should it go to Phyllis Schlafly

or William F. Buckley, Jr.? I had to live and I had to write.

Surely my writing m attered, it mattered to them or why did

they want me: and did they want me to stop writing? I

needed money to write. I had done the rotten jobs and I

was living in real, not romantic, poverty. I found that the

effort to explain really helped—not always, and resentments still surfaced, but enough to make me see that explaining even without finally convincing was worthwhile.