Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Women in pornography and prostitution talked to me, and

I became responsible for what I heard. I listened; I wrote; I

learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me

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Heartbreak

enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one

can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to

pick one kind of pedagogy over al others, I pick listening. It

breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed

limits; it takes one into another’s life, her hard times and, if

there is any, her joy, too. There are women whose whole lives

have been pornography and prostitution, and still they fight

to live.

The world gets meaner as prostitution and pornography are

legitimized. Now women are the slave population, an old

slavery with a new technology, cameras and camcorders. Smile;

say “bleed” instead of “cheese. ”

I’m tired, very weary, and I cry for my sisters. Tears get

them nothing, of course. One needs a generation of warriors

who can’t be tired out or bought of . Each woman needs to

take what she endures and turn it into action. With every tear,

accompanying it, one needs a knife to rip a predator apart;

with every wave of fatigue, one needs another platoon of

strong, tough women coming up over the horizon to take

more land, to make it safe for women. I’m willing to count the

inches. The pimps and rapists need to be dispossessed, forced

into a mangy exile; the women and children - the world’s true

orphans - need to be empowered, cosseted with respect and

dignity.

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Are there really women who have to worry about a fourth

generation’s becoming prostitutes? How many are there? Are

there five, or 2, 000, or 20 million? Are they in one place - for

instance, the Pacific Northwest, where the woman I quoted

lives - or are they in some sociological stratum that can be isolated and studied, or are they al in Thailand or the Philippines or Albania? Are there too many or too few, because in either

case one need not feel responsible? Too many means it’s too

hard to do anything about it; too few means why bother. Is it

possible that there is one adult woman in the United States

who does not know whether or not a baby’s body should be

penetrated with an object, or are there so many that they

cannot be counted - only their form of saying "I don’t know”

comes in the guise of labeling the penetration "speech” or

“free speech”?

A few nights ago I heard the husband of a close friend on

television discussing antirape policies that he opposes at a

university. He said that he was willing to concede that rapes

did take place. How white of you, I thought bitterly, and then

I realized that his statement was a definition of “white” in

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motion - not even “white male” but white in a country built

on white ownership of blacks and white genocide of reds and

white-indentured servitude of Asians and women, including

white women, and brown migrant labor. He thought that

maybe 3 percent of women in the United States had been raped,

whereas the best research shows a quarter to a third. The male

interviewer agreed with this percentage pulled out of thin air:

it sounded right to both of them, and neither of them felt

required to fund a study or read the already existing research

material. Their authority was behind their number, and in the

United States authority is white. Whatever trouble these

two particular men have had in their lives, neither has had

to try to stop a fourth generation, their own child, from prostituting.

“I had two daughters from [him], ” said a different woman,

“and he introduced me into heroin and prostitution. I went

further into drugs and prostitution, and al my life the only

protection I ever had was my grandmother, and she died

when I was five years old. ” This woman spoke about other

males by whom she had children and was abused. She spoke

about her mother, who beat her up and closed her in dark

closets. It’s good that her grandmother was kind because her

grandfather wasn’t: “I can’t remember how old I was when

my grandfather started molesting me, but he continued to

rape me until I became pregnant at the age of thirteen. ” Can

one count how many women there are on our fingers and

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toes, or does a bunch of us have to get together to have enough

fingers and toes, or would it take a small army of women to

get the right numbers?

There is another woman who was left in a garbage can

when she was six months old. She was born drunk and had to

be detoxified in her incubator. She was, in her own words,

“partially mentally retarded, ” “abandoned, ” and “raised in and

out of foster homes, ” some of which she says were good. She

had the chance to stay with a foster family but chose to be

with her father, since that was her idea of family. He was a

brute, good with his fists, and first raped her when, as a child,

she was taking a bath with her kid brother; and like many incest-

rapists, he’d rape her or make her perform sex acts and then

give her a child’s reward. “I just wanted him to be my father;

that’s al I wanted from him, ” she said. At twelve she was

stranger-raped. The stranger, a fairly talented pedophile, would

pick her up from school and talk with her. Eventual y he

slammed her against a garage and raped her: “Nobody had

ever talked to me about rape, so I figured he was just showing

me love like my father did. ” On having the rape discovered,

the girl was called no good, a whore, and shunned by her

family. “My father had taught me most of what I needed to

learn about pleasing men, ” she says. “There was a little bit more

that [the pimp] needed to teach me. So [the pimp] would

show me these videos, and I would copy on him what I saw

was going on in the videos, and that’s how I learned to be a

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