Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Heartbreak

answers they won’t give; note the manipulative ways they

have of using authority to cut the child or student or teenager

of at the knees; notice their immoral, sneaky reliance on peer

pressure to shut up a questioner (because, of course, if one

persists, the others in the audience get mad or embarrassed).

The writing is in the configuration of white around print; the

verbal answer is buried in silence, a purposeful and wicked

silence, a lying, cheating silence. Every pregnant girl owes her

pregnancy not to the heroic lover who figured out how the

sperm gets inside her but to the adults who will not show her

a diaphragm, an IUD, a female condom, and - sor y, Ma - a

rubber. I left the lecture that night with the certain knowledge

that I did not know what contraception was even if I knew the

word and that adults were not going to tell me.

Miss Bel , my physical education teacher who also taught

health, had the only method that successful y resisted both my

Socratic urgency and emerging Kabalistic axioms: on one test

paper she mimeographed a huge drawing of the male genitals,

and the students had to write on the drawing the name of

each part - “scrotum, ” for instance. In an equivalent test on

female sexuality, she had this true-or-false statement for extra

credit of twenty points: if a girl is not a virgin when she gets

married, she wil go to hel . I was the only student in my class

not to get the extra twenty points.

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Young Americans for

Freedom

I wanted to know what a conservative was. I read William

Buckley’s right-wing magazine National Review, as I stil do. I

knew about the KKK, and I had an idea of what white

supremacy was. One girl in my class had neighbors who celebrated Hitler’s birthday, which she seemed to find reasonable.

I had an English teacher in honors English who was the

equivalent of Miss Bell, the gym-health teacher; but because

he was more literate there were many paths to hell, not just sex

outside of mar iage. Told to stay after school one day, I faced

Mr. Sullivan as he opposed my reading Voltaire’s Candide ,

which was proscribed for Catholics, which I wasn’t but he

was. He told me I would go to hell for reading it. I stood up

to him. I thought he was narrow-minded, but conservatism

seemed something different, Buckley’s magazine notwithstanding. What was it exactly, and why didn’t history teachers or political science types or civics teachers talk about it?

It was a mess just to try to think about it. Walking home

from high school one day, I passed a neighbor, Mr. Kane. No

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Heartbreak

one on the street talked to him or his wife, an auburn-haired

model. They painted their ranch house lavender, which was

downright unusual, though it framed Mrs. Kane’s auburn hair

beautiful y. Mr. Kane cal ed out to me and asked me to come

inside the side door to his house. I knew that I was never

supposed to talk with strange men or go anywhere with them,

and Mr. Kane was strange as hel . But I couldn’t resist, because

curiosity is such a strong force in a child, or in me. Inside Mr.

Kane had literature: he wasn’t the sexual child molester, no, he

was the political child molester, with endless pamphlets on

how JFK, a candidate for president, was the Catholic Church’s

running dog, so to speak; on how whites were bet er than

what he cal ed niggers; on how kikes were running the media

and the country. He gave me leaflets to take home: these went

easy on the kikes but hit the Catholics hard. At home I felt

ashamed to have even touched the things, and also I knew

that I had broken a big law, not a small one, by going with a

strange man. I tried to flush the leaflets down our toilet and

when they wouldn’t flush I tried to burn them. Wel , yes, I did

get that in the wrong order but I was guilty of fairly heinous

crimes and was desperate to get rid of the evidence. I was just

trying to find a shovel to dig a hole in the backyard where I

could bury them when my mother came home. She saw the

stuf , dripping wet al over, an additional sin I hadn’t thought

of, and sent me to my bedroom to wait for my father. I knew

the stuff was filthy and bad, my own behavior a mere footnote

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Young Americans for Freedom

to the sinister material I had brought into the house. It’s

amazing how seeing hate stuff and touching it can make one

viscerally sick.

I was called out into the living room. My mother and father

were sitting on the formal sofa that we had and I was expected

to stand. My father had the junk beside him on the sofa. He

had called the FBI. They were going to come and question

me. They came and they did. Mr. Kane disappeared from the

street and Mrs. Kane would stand out on the lawn, her auburn

hair crowning her beauty, alone; she was now alone. Their

house was eventually sold.

The crime, it turned out, was to threaten a candidate for

president of the United States. The dirty drawings and words

were taken to be direct threats against Kennedy, as were the vile

insults targeted to the Catholic Church and the pope. I, too,

was punished, but not by the government. I can’t remember

what the punishment was, but it was tempered with mercy

because I had helped shut down a hate enterprise. I knew that

Mr. Kane was not a conservative in the way that Mr. Buckley

was, even though Mr. Buckley supported segregation, to my

shock and dismay.

To find out what was and was not conservative as such, I

approached a group called Young Americans for Freedom.

Their leader was a somewhat aristocratic man named Fulton

Lewis III. This was far outside any prior experience of mine.

I wanted to debate him. I set up the debate for a school

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Heartbreak

assembly. I hurled liberal platitude after liberal platitude at