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

first time in history, a rather happier resolution than one might

expect.

Do you remember that in Hemingway’s For Whom the

Bell Tolls Maria is asked about her lovemaking with Robert,

did the earth move? For me, too, in my life, the earth has

sometimes moved. The first time it moved I was ten. I was

going to Hebrew school, but it was closed, a day of mourning

for the six million slaughtered by the Nazis. So I went to see my

cousin who lived nearby. She was shaking, crying, screaming,

vomiting. She told me that it was April, and in April her

youngest sister had been killed in front of her, another sister’s

infant had died a terrible death, their heads had been shaved

— let me just say that she told me what had happened to her in

a Nazi concentration camp. She said that every April she remembered in nightmare and terror what had happened to her that month so many years before, and that every April she

shook, cried, screamed, and vomited. The earth moved for me

then.

The second time the earth moved for me was when I was

eighteen and spent four days in the Women’s House of Detention in New York City. I had been arrested in a demonstration

against the Indochina genocide. I spent four days and four

nights in the filth and terror of that jail. While there two doctors gave me a brutal internal examination. I hemorrhaged for fifteen days after that. The earth moved for me then.

The third time the earth moved for me was when I became

a feminist. It wasn’t on a particular day, or through one experience. It had to do with that afternoon when I was ten and my cousin put the grief of her life into my hands; it had to do

with that women’s jail, and three years of marriage that began

in friendship and ended in despair. It happened sometime after

I left my husband, when I was living in poverty and great

emotional distress. It happened slowly, little by little. A week

after I left my ex-husband I started my book, the book which is

now called Woman Hating. I wanted to find out what had

happened to me in my marriage and in the thousand and one

instances of daily life where it seemed I was being treated like

a subhuman. I felt that I was deeply masochistic, but that my

masochism was not personal— each woman I knew lived out

deep masochism. I wanted to find out why. I knew that I

hadn’t been taught that masochism by my father, and that my

mother had not been my immediate teacher. So I began in

what seemed the only apparent place—with Story of O, a

book that had moved me profoundly. From that beginning I

looked at other pornography, fairy tales, one thousand years

of Chinese footbinding, and the slaughter of nine million

witches. I learned something about the nature of the world

which had been hidden from me before— I saw a systematic

despisal of women that permeated every institution of society,

every cultural organ, every expression of human being. And I

saw that I was a woman, a person who met that systematic

despisal on every street comer, in every living room, in every

human interchange. Because I became a woman who knew

that she was a woman, that is, because I became a feminist, I

began to speak with women for the first time in my life, and

one of the women I began to speak with was my mother. I

came to her life through the long dark tunnel of my own. I

began to see who she was as I began to see the world that had

formed her. I came to her no longer pitying the poverty of her

intellect, but astounded by the quality of her intelligence. I

came to her no longer convinced of her stupidity and triviality, but astonished by the quality of her strength. I came to her, no longer self-righteous and superior, but as a sister, another woman whose life, but for the grace of a feminist father and the new common struggle of my feminist sisters, would

have repeated hers— and when I say “repeated hers” I mean,

been predetermined as hers was predetermined. I came to her,

no longer ashamed of what she lacked, but deeply proud of

what she had achieved— indeed, I came to recognize that my

mother was proud, strong, and honest. By the time I was

twenty-six I had seen enough of the world and its troubles to

know that pride, strength, and integrity were virtues to honor.

And because I addressed her in a new way she came to meet

me, and now, whatever our difficulties, and they are not so

many, she is my mother, and I am her daughter, and we are

sisters.

You asked me to talk about feminism and art, is there a

feminist art, and if so, what is it. For however long writers

have written, until today, there has been masculinist art— art

that serves men in a world made by men. That art has degraded women. It has, almost without exception, characterized us as maimed beings, impoverished sensibilities, trivial people with trivial concerns. It has, almost without exception,

been saturated with a misogyny so profound, a misogyny that

was in fact its world view, that almost all of us, until today,

have thought, that is what the world is, that is how women

are.

I ask myself, what did I learn from all those books I read as

I was growing up? Did I learn anything real or true about

women? Did I learn anything real or true about centuries of

women and what they lived? Did those books illuminate my

life, or life itself, in any useful, or profound, or generous, or

rich, or textured, or real way? I do not think so. I think that

that art, those books, would have robbed me of my life as the

world they served robbed my mother of hers.

Theodore Roethke, a great poet we are told, a poet of the

male condition I would insist, wrote:

Two of the charges most frequently levelled against poetry by

women are lack of range—in subject matter, in emotional tone—

and lack of a sense of humor. And one could, in individual instances among writers of real talent, add other aesthetic and moral shortcomings: the spinning-out; the embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life—that special province of the feminine talent in prose—hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is;

lyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the

altar, stamping a tiny foot against God; or lapsing into a sententiousness that implies the author has re-invented integrity; carrying on excessively about Fate, about time; lamenting the lot of woman. . . and so on. 2

What characterizes masculinist art, and the men who make it,