Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

When she went to work at an agency that I didn’t particularly like, I decided to represent myself. By this time my nervousness about money had disappeared, a Darwinian adaptation, although my stage fright - which has run me ragged over the

years - never did.

I would cal whoever wanted me to speak on the phone. I'd

get an idea of how much money they could raise. I stil wanted

them to be comfortable, and it was a horror to me that anyone

would think I was ripping them off. By the time I took over

making al the ar angements myself, I had developed a fixed

set of necessities: a good hotel room in a good hotel, enough

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Heartbreak

money for meals and ground transportation (taxis, not buses

or subways). Eventually I graduated to the best hotel I could

find, and I'd also buy myself a first-class ticket.

Representing myself, I would fold an estimate of expenses

into a fee so that the sponsor had to pay me only one amount,

after I spoke on the night that I spoke. I had developed an

aversion to having organizers vet my expenses, even though I

was scrupulous. If I watched an in-room movie, I paid for it

myself.

In the first years, I was so poor that if I spoke at a conference I usually could not afford a ticket for the inevitable concert scheduled as part of the conference. I didn’t know that I could get one for free. If I wanted a T-shirt from the conference, I couldn’t buy it. My favorite women’s movement button - “Don’t Suck. Bite” - cost too much for me to have one.

I was scraping by, and the skin was pret y torn from my

fingers.

Even during the early years, I got letters from women

telling me that I was a capitalist pig; yeah, they did begrudge

me the $60. It wasn’t personal. It was just that any money I

earned came from someone else who also didn’t have enough

money for a T-shirt. Or did she? I guess I’l never know. I

couldn’t embrace being a capitalist pig; I couldn’t accept the

fact - and it was a fact - that the more money I was paid, the

nicer people were. I couldn’t even accept the good fallout -

that charging a fee for a lecture enabled me to do benefits as

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Capitalist Pig

wel . After a while I got the hang of it and when work fel of ,

when the speaking events dried up, when someone was nasty

to me, I just raised my price. It was bad for the karma but

good for this life.

I remember that saying I was poor got me contempt, not

empathy or a few more dol ars. I remember that begging

for money especially brought out the cruelty in people. I

remember that trying to talk about poverty - you show me

yours and I'l show you mine - never brought forth anything

other than insult. Competitive poverty was the lowest negotiation, a fight to the moral death.

In hindsight it is clear to me that I never would have been

able to put in more than a quarter of a century on the road

had I not figured out what I needed. Everyone doesn’t need

what I need, but I do need what I need. Money is a hard

discipline, not easy to learn, especially for the lumpen like me.

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One Woman

I was walking down the street on a bright, sunny day in New

York City sometime in 1975. A woman almost as bright and

sunny was walking toward me. I recognized her, an acquaintance in the world of books. She had been up at my Woodstock speech, which had been about rape. I had started writing out

my speeches because of my frustration at not being able to

find venues for publication. This was cal ed “The Rape Atrocity

and the Boy Next Door, ” subsequently published in 1976 in

a collection of speeches called Our Blood: Prophecies and

Discourses on Sexual Politics. We greeted each other, and then

she started talking: she had been raped on a particular night

in a particular city years before. She had left the window open

just a little for the breeze. The guy climbed in and when she

awoke he had already restrained her wrists and was inside her.

We stood in that one place for an hour or so because she told

me every detail of the rape. Most of them I still remember.

I gave the same speech at a smal community col ege. At the

reception after, the host pulled me aside. She had been gang-

raped some fifteen years before. The rapists were just about to

be released from prison. She was in ter or. One key element in

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One Woman

their convictions was that they had taken photographs of the

rape. The prosecutor was able to use the photographs to show

the jury the brutal fact of the rape.

Some eight years later a founder of one of the early rape

crisis centers told me that she and her colleagues were seeing

increasing numbers of rapes that were photographed; the

photography was part of the rape. The photographs themselves

no longer proved that a rape had taken place. For the rapists,

they intensified pleasure during the rape and after it they were

tokens, happy reminders; but the perception of what the photograph meant had changed. No mat er how violent the rape, the photograph of it seemed to be proof of the victim’s complicity to increasing numbers of jurors.

Everywhere that I traveled, starting from my poorest days

in New York and its environs to my more lucrative days flying

around the country to my sometimes-rich - sometimes-poor

days on the international level, I had women talking to me

about having been raped; then about having been raped and

photographed. One simply cannot imagine the pain. Each

woman told the story in the same way: no detail was left out;

the clock was running and the whole story had to be told to

me, then, there, wherever we were. Six months or a year or

several years could have passed since they had come to hear

me speak; six months or fifteen years could have passed since

the rape or the rape and the photographs.

Women did not stand up after the speech and speak about

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