Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

honorable women who believed the pornographers' propaganda that the civil rights approach would hurt freedom of speech. Then there were the women, a small but determined

group, who thought that equality meant women using

pornography in the same ways that men did. We wanted a

resolution from NOW supporting the civil rights approach.

We got it, but, speaking for myself, at great emotional cost.

NOW runs its meetings using Robert’s rules of order,

which is democracy at its most degraded. One had to know

whether to hold up a red poster or a green poster or a yellow

poster to be recognized by the chair to speak. I can’t even now

articulate the points of order involved. When I got home, I

dreamt about those posters for months.

A vote was held on whether I could speak for Sonia Johnson.

The women voted no. So much for free speech. In place of

addressing the whole convention, we organized a meeting to

which anyone interested could come. I was speaking, and in

the middle NOW cut off the electricity for the mike. More

free speech. I was in tears, real y. The woman who cut off the

juice and then physically repossessed the mike - just following

orders, she said - claimed that we had not followed the rules

for holding our meeting. We had, but never mind.

Then the most miraculous thing happened. We had a suite

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Heartbreak

in the hotel, as did other subgroups of NOW, so that people

could come by, talk, pick up literature, find out for themselves

who we were and what we believed.

I was approached by a black woman who worked in the

hotel and asked if we would march down Bourbon Street

with the workers in the hotel and the local chapter of the

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now

(ACORN) to protest the pornography and prostitution so

densely located there. This woman might well have made my

bed that morning. It was an overwhelming mandate. Of

course we said yes and tried to get the NOW women to join,

which they pretty solidly refused to do.

New Orleans is like most other cities in the United States

in that the areas in which pornography and prostitution flourish are the areas in which poor people, largely people of color, live. We were being invited to stand up with them against the

parasitic exploitation of their lives, against the despoiling of

their living environment.

The group was poor. They took packages of paper plates,

wrote on the plates “No More Porn, ” and stuck the inscribed

plates up on storefronts and bars al along Bourbon Street.

Demonstrators also carried NOW logos. There were maybe a

hundred people marching (as opposed to the thousand or

so back in the hotel). I was privileged to speak out on the

street with my sisters, a bullhorn taking the place of a microphone.

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Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?

Meanwhile someone in the leadership of NOW had called

the police to alert them to an illegal march, a march without

a permit. As our rally came to an end and we were marching

out of the French Quarter the police approached. We ran. They

ar ested one of us at the back of the line. He, an organizer

from Minneapolis, went to jail for the night, a martyr for the

feminist cause. And it became a bad feminist habit for the rich

to rat out the poor, turn on the poor, keep themselves divided

from the poor - no mixing with the dispossessed. The ladies

with the cash to go to New Orleans from other parts of the

country did not want to be mistaken for the downtrodden.

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The Women

The first time a woman came up to me after a speech to say

that she had been in pornography was in Lincoln, Nebraska -

at a local NOW meeting in the heartland. I knew a lot about

pornography before I started writing Pornography: Men

Pos es ing Women because, as an intellectual, I had read a lot of

literary pornography and because, as a woman, I had prostituted. In pornography one found the map of male sexual dominance and one also found, as I said in a speech, “the

poor, the illiterate, mar ied women with no voice, women

forced into prostitution or kept from get ing out and women

raped, raped once, raped twice, raped more times than they

[could] count.”

Pornography brought me back to the world of my own

kind; I looked at a picture and I saw a live woman.

Some women were prostituted generation after generation

and, as one woman, a third-generation prostitute, said, “I’ve

done enough to raise a child and not make her a prostitute

and not make her a fourth generation. ”

I found pride - "I got a scar on my hand; you can’t real y

see it, but a guy tried to slice my throat, and I took the knife

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The Women

from him and I stabbed him back. To this day I don’t know if

he’s dead, but I don’t care because he was trying to take my

life. ”

I found women whose whole lives were consumed by

pornography: “I’ve been involved in pornography al my life

until 1987. I was gang-raped, that’s how I conceived my

daughter, and she was born in a brothel in Cleveland, Ohio”;

the child “was beaten to death by a trick - she used to get beat

up a lot by tricks. I’ve often wondered if some of the physical

damage that was done to her simply [was because] maybe a

child’s body wasn’t meant to be used that way, you know.

Maybe babies aren’t meant to be anally penetrated by things

or snakes or bot les or by men’s penises, but I don’t know for

sure. I’m not really sure about that because that’s what my life

was. ”

This same woman has “films of pornography that was taken

of me from the time I was a baby until just a few years ago. ”

I even found women wanting something from the system:

“I wish that this system, the courts and, you know, our judicial system that’s supposed to be there to help would have done something earlier in our life. I wish they would have

done something earlier in our daughter’s life and I wish that

they would do something now. ”