Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

One weekend someone took me to a benefit for one of the

pacifist groups. I was so offended by the anti woman lyrics to

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True Grit

a song that I got up and walked out. Someone else did, too.

We reached the pavement at approximately the same time.

“I have a question I'd like to ask you, ” I said to the stranger.

I then presented the Trantino problem, which was really

gnawing at me. “It sounds like you already know what you

want to do, ” he said. Yes, I nodded. “You want him to stay in,

right? ” “Yes, ” I said out loud. The man was John Stoltenberg,

and I've lived with him for nearly twenty-seven years. I called

up the friend who had asked me to write the piece and said I

couldn’t do it. I told her the true reason: the women, not the

police.

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Anita

The same friend asked me to go talk with Anita Hoffman,

whose husband, Abbie, had just gone underground after being

busted for selling cocaine. I had donated some money to

Abbie’s defense fund and said he should just keep running.

I didn’t real y know why I was going to see Anita.

The apartment was small and crowded, distinguished only

by a television set the size of a smal country. Anita’s child with

Abbie, America, was playing. She and I sat on what was her

bed to talk.

She and Abbie had not been together for a while. It was

clear that she was poor. She said that she didn’t know what to

do, that a friend of Abbie’s had offered her work as a prostitute (“escort, ” high end of the line) and was put ing a lot of pressure on her. Abbie’s latest caper had left her destitute. This

guy was a friend of Abbie’s, so he had to be okay, right? She

had thought of doing organizing - poor, single mothers like

herself who had no political power in the system; but real y,

what was wrong with prostituting? She could earn a lot of

money and she was lonely. Honey, I thought, you don’t begin

to know what lonely is.

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Anita

I told her about my own experiences in the trade, especial y

about the dissociation that was essential to doing the deed.

You had to separate your mind from your body. Your consciousness had to be hovering somewhere near the ceiling behind you or on the far side of the room watching your body.

No one got through it without having that happen. I also told

her that she’d begin to hate men; at first manipulating them

would seem like power, but eventually and inevitably the day

would come when one perceived them as coarse and brutal,

smel y, dirty bullies. She had said that she liked sex and that

she had had sex with the guy who was now trying to pimp

her. I told her that the sex with Abbie’s friend was a setup to

make her more pliant and that in prostituting one lost the

ability to feel, so if one liked sex it was the last thing, not the

first thing, that one should do. I told her that most people

thought that women prostituted in order to get money

for drugs, but it was the other way around; the prostitution

became so vile, so ugly, so hard, that drugs provided the only

soft: landing, a kind of embrace - and on the literal level they

took away the pain, physical and mental.

I didn’t see or talk to Anita again after that night, but the

friend who had asked me to go said that Anita had moved to

California and had a job as an editor. I don’t know if Anita

ever tried the prostituting, but if so I helped her get out fast

and if not I helped with that, too. I was lucky to have the

chance to talk with her, and I began to understand that my

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Heartbreak

own experiences could have meaning for other women in

ways that mattered. I began to trust myself more.

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Prisons

Perhaps because I came from the pacifist left, I had an intense

and abiding hatred for prisons (even though the U. S. prison

system was developed by the Quakers). After the publication

of Our Blood, I wrote a proposal for a book on prisons. I was

struck by the way prisons stayed the same through time and

place: the confinement of an individual in bad circumstances

with a sadistic edge and including al the prison rites of passage.

I was struck by how prisons were the only places in which men

were threatened with rape in a way analogous to the female

experience. I was struck by the common sadomasochistic

structure of the prison experience no mat er what the crime

or country or historical era. That proposal was rejected by a

slew of publishers. I found myself at a dead end.

But an odd redemption was at hand. I had noticed that in

al pornography one also found the prison as leitmotif, the

sexualization of confining and beating women, the ubiquitous

rape, the dominance and submission of the social world in

which women were literally and metaphorically imprisoned.

I decided to write on pornography because I could make

the same points - show the same inequities - as with prisons.

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Heartbreak

Pornography and prisons were built on cruelty and brutalization; the demeaning of the human body as a form of punishment; the worthlessness of the individual human being; restraint, confinement, tying, whipping, branding, torture,

penetration, and kicking as commonplace ordeals. Each was a

social construction that could be different but was not; each