Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

executed whisper and I could listen to the shrill rant. I knew

never to shut down inside; I learned to defer my own reactions

and to consider listening an honor and a holy act. I learned

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patience, too, from my father and from that ocean that never

ends but goes round again circling the earth with no meaning,

nothing outside itself. One need not go to the moon to see the

cascading roundness of our globe because the ocean shows

it and says it; there are a million little sounds, tiny noises,

the same as in a human heart. Had I never been on the

freighter I think I would never have learned anything except

the tangled ways of humans fighting - ego or war. The words

on Kazantzakis’s grave say, “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free. ” On the freighter and from my father I learned the final lesson of Crete, and it would stand me in good stead

years later in fighting for the rights of women, especially

sexual y abused women: I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I

am free.

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After I lived on Crete, I went back to Bennington for two

long, highly psychedelic years. There I fought for on-campus

contraception - a no-no when colleges and universities functioned in loco parentis - and legal abortion. I fought against the Vietnam War. I tried to open up an antiwar counseling

center to keep the rural-poor men in the towns around the

college from signing up to be soldiers. Most of these were white

men, and Vietnam was the equivalent of welfare for them. But

the burning issue was boys in rooms. Bennington, an all-girls'

school with a few male students in dance and drama, had

parietal hours: from 2 a. m. to 6 a. m. the houses in which the

students lived were girls only. One could have sex with another

girl, and many of us did, myself certainly included. But the

male lovers had to disappear: be driven out like beasts into the

cold mountain night, hide behind trees during the hour of the

wolf, and reemerge after dawn. The elimination of parietal

hours was a huge issue, in some ways as big as the war. In

colleges across the country girls were required to be in their

gender-segregated dormitories by 10. Girls who went to Bennington in the main valued personal freedom; at least this girl

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did. As one watched male faculty sneak in and out of student

bedrooms, one could think about lies, lies, lies. As one saw the

pregnancies that led to il egal abortions from these liaisons,

one could think about the secret but not subtle cruelty of ful y

adult men to young women. Everyone knew the Bennington

guard who was deaf, and one prayed he would be on the 2-

to-6 shift so one could have sex with a man one’s own age

without facing suspension or expulsion. When a student would

go with a boy to a motel, she could expect a cal at the motel

from a particular administrator, a lesbian in hiding who tried

to defend law and order. It was law and order versus personal freedom, and I was on the side of personal freedom.

The college had a new president, Edward J. Bloustein, a

constitutional lawyer, or so he said. The U. S. Constitution is

amazingly malleable. Regardless, he was a law-and-order guy,

and he didn’t belong at Bennington. You might say it was him

or me. He wanted a more conventional Bennington with a more

conventional student body and a fully conventional liberal-

arts curriculum. He wanted to expand the student body, which

would make classes bigger. He wanted al the hippies gone

and al the druggies gone and al the lesbian lovers gone. He

was for abstinence at a time when virginity before marriage

was highly prized; he was against abortion and once told me

in a confrontation we had in his of ice that Jewish girls tried to

get pregnant - thus the problem with pregnancy on campus.

That was a new one. He considered the faculty blameless.

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Feeling under siege by this gray, gray man, students elected

me to the Judicial Commit ee of the college. It was clear that

he was looking for a scapegoat, someone to expel for defying

parietal hours especially but also for smoking dope and

having girl-girl sex. The students knew I could stand up to

him, and I could. The scapegoat he wanted to punish was my

best friend, and he just fucking was not going to get the

chance to do it.

She had been seen kissing another girl on the steps inside

the house in which she lived. I’ve rarely met a Bennington

woman from that time who does not think that she herself

was the girl being kissed. Someone reported my friend for

shooting up heroin in the living room. I recently asked her if

she had, and she said no. In the thirty-five years that I've known

her, I've never known her to lie - which was the problem back

then. The college president confronted her on marijuana use,

and she told him the truth - that she only had a joint or two

on her right then. Knowing her, I’d bet she offered to share.

The house where I lived, Franklin House, was a hotbed of

treason, so first we had her move there. She could not quite

grasp the notion of turning down music while people were

sleeping, and in our house that was a crime. One could shoot up

heroin or kiss girls, but one could not be a nuisance. Nevertheless, everyone knew a lot was at stake and so the music blared. To protect the personal freedom of each person living

in Franklin we seceded from the school. We declared ourselves

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entirely independent and we voted down parietal hours. So

stringy, hairy boys were in the bathrooms at 4 a. m., as one of

the few female professors noted in outrage at one of the many