Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Frost’s old house, owned by painter Kenneth Noland, rented

by the English sculptor Anthony Caro, who was teaching at

Bennington. We got into my friend’s truck and went. I felt

shielded by my painter friend. The visit was her brazen act,

not mine.

It was my first year at Bennington, and I did not know the

anthropology of the place. Anyone famous who came to

Bennington was provided with one or more Bennington girls;

my college was the archetypical brothel, which may have been

why, the semester before I matriculated, the English seniors

recreated the brothel in Joyce’s Ulys es as a senior project and

for the enjoyment of the professors.

So my friend and I got to the old Robert Frost house. It

was deep in the Vermont countryside, old, simple, painted

white, with hooks from the ceiling on which, I was told, animals

had been hung and salted. There were bookshelves, but they

were mostly empty, with only a few books about Kenneth

Noland, at least in the living room. Mr. Smith was deep in a

bot le of 100-proof Stolichnaya and scat ered like inanimate

dolls were some of my fellow students from Bennington,

each in a black sheath, each awaiting the pleasure of her host,

Anthony Caro, and his guest, David Smith. As happens with

habitually drunk fuckers of women, Smith could not have been

more indif erent to the women who were there for him, and

he wanted to talk to me. I was trying to leave, embarrassed for

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Heartbreak

my classmates and too shy to talk to Smith. But Smith did not

have to be nice to the women acquired for him, so he wasn’t.

He dismissed my fellow students with a gesture of the hand

and told me and my friend to sit down and drink with him.

He said that he had always wanted to provide Bennington

with a graduate school in art; that his name had been on a

pro-Cuba petition signed by artists and intellectuals; that John

Kennedy had cal ed him up and told him to get his name of

of that petition or he’d never get his graduate school; that

he had removed his name and in so doing he had whored.

“Never whore, ” he said; “it ruins your art. ” He told me never

to tell anyone and until now, with some private exceptions,

I haven’t. He’s been dead a long time, and that puts him

beyond the shame he felt that night. He said that taking his

signature off the pro-Cuba petition had made him a whore

and he couldn’t work anymore because of it. “Work” was

literal - it meant making sculptures; “whore” was a metaphor

- it meant not compromising one’s art. He warned me repeatedly; I only wish he had meant it literally as wel as metaphorical y because I might have listened. Since then - since I was eighteen - I’ve always measured my writing against his admonition: never whore. He also taught me how to drink 100-proof Stoli, my drink of choice until in the late 1970s I switched to

bottled water and the occasional glass of champagne. He was

talking to me, not to my painter friend; I’ve never known

why. I always hoped it was because he saw an artist in me. A

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David Smith

week and a half later he died, crashing his motorcycle into a

tree, the kind of death police regard as suicide.

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Contraception

At some point when I was in junior high or high school, my

father gave me the inevitable books on intercourse, more

commonly called “how babies are made. ” He was embarrassed; I rejected the books; he shoved them at me and left the room. I read the books about the sperm and the egg. There

were a few missing moments, including how the sperm got to

the egg before it was inside the vaginal tract, for example,

intercourse, and how not to become pregnant. By the time I

was sixteen, I understood the former but not the lat er. When

I asked my mother, she said that one must never let a man use

a rubber because it decreased his pleasure and the purpose was

to give him pleasure. Always ready to beat a dead horse into

the ground, I elicited from my unwilling mother the fact that

she had never let my father use a condom and that she had

used birth control. Beyond this she would not go, no hints as

to how or what.

One night I was summarily sent to the local Jewish

Community Center by my parents acting in tandem. There

was to be a lecture on sex education, and I was going to be

forced to listen to it. I cried and begged and screamed. I

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Contraception

couldn’t stand being treated as a child, and I couldn’t stand

the thought of being bored to death by adults tiptoeing

through the tulips. I had learned that adults never told one the

real stuff on any subject no mat er what it was. It stood to

reason that the sex education lecture was going to be stupid

and dull, and so it was. There was the sperm and the egg and

they met on a blackboard.

By that time I had learned always to listen to what was not

being said, to the empty space, as it were, to the verbal void.

The key to al adult pedagogy was not in what they did say but

in what they would not say. They would say the word “contraception, ” but they would not say what it was. This was a time in the United States when contraception and abortion

were both still illegal. I knew about abortion, or enough

about it to suit me then. I asked about contraception and got

an awkward runaround. I fucking wanted to know what it

was, and they fucking were not going to tell me. I couldn’t let

it go, as usual, and so got from them the statement that they

discussed contraception only with married people. The group

that sponsored the lecture, with its almost-famous woman

speaker, would not come clean; now that group, headed by

the same woman until she died in the last decade, is part of

the free speech lobby in the United States protecting the

rights of pornographers.

What I learned was simple and eventually evolved into my

own pedagogy: listen to what adults refuse to say; find the

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