Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

also takes from you too much tenderness. One needs tenderness to love - not to be loved but to love.

I long to touch my sisters; I wish I could take away the

pain; I’ve heard so much heartbreak among us. I think I’ve

pretty much done what I can do; I’m empty; there’s not much

left, not inside me. I think that it’s bad to give up, but maybe

it’s not bad to rest, to sit in silence for a while. I’m told by my

friends that it’s not evil to rest. At the same time, as they

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know, there’s a child being pimped by her father with everyone around her either taking a piece of her or looking the other way. How can anyone rest, real y? What would make it

possible? I say to myself, Think about the fourth-generation

daughter who wasn’t a prostitute; think about her. I say,

Think about the woman who asked herself whether or not it

was bad to penetrate a baby with an object and figured out

that it might be; think about her. These are miracles, political

miracles, and there will be so many more. I think that there

will be many more.

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Politics doesn’t run on miracles modest or divine, and the few

miracles there are have the quality of invisibility about them

because they happen to invisible people, those who have been

hurt too much, too often, too deep. There’s a jagged wound

that is in fact someone’s life, and any miracle is hidden precisely

because the wound is so egregious. The victims of any systematized brutality are discounted because others cannot bear to see, identify, or articulate the pain. When a rapist stomps on

your life, you are victimized, and although it is a social law in

our society that “victim” is a dirty word, it is also a true word,

a word that points one toward what one does not want to

know.

Women used to be identified as a group by what was presumed to be a biological wound - the vaginal slit, the place for penile penetration. There is a 2, 000 year history of the slit’s

defining the person. If a stranger can go from the outside

to the inside, the instrumentality of that action is the whole

purpose of the creature to whom it is done. That area of

the female body has hundreds of dirty names that serve as

synonyms.

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The mystery is why the vagina is such a mystery. Any reference to one of the dirty names elicits sniggers and muted laughs. What are seen as the sexual parts of a woman’s body

are always jokes; anything nonsexual is trivial or trivialized.

For a prostitute, the whole body becomes the sexual part,

as if there were nothing human, only an anatomical use. She

gets to be dirty al over, and what is done to her gets to be

dirty al over. She is also a joke. None of the women I’ve met

in my life has been either dirty or a joke.

Feminists have good reasons for feeling tired. The backlash

against feminism has been deeply stupid. But first there is the

frontlash, the misogyny that saturates the gender system, so

that a woman is always less. The frontlash is the world the

way one knew it thirty-five years ago; there was no feminism

to stand against the enemies of women.

I often see the women’s movement referred to as one of the

most successful social change movements the world has yet

seen, and there is great truth in that. In some parts of the

Western world, fathers do not own their daughters under the

law; the fact that this has transmogrified into a commonplace

incest doesn’t change the accomplishment in rendering the

paterfamilias a nul ity in the old sense.

In most parts of the Western world, rape in marriage is now

il egal - it was not illegal thirty-five years ago.

In the United States, most women have paying jobs, even

though equal pay for equal work is a long way off; and

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although it is stil true that sexual harassment makes women

migrants in the labor market, the harassment itself is now

il egal and one can sue - one has a weapon.

Middle-class women keep battery a secret and in working-

and lower-class families battery is not suf iciently stigmatized;

nevertheless, there are new initiatives against both bat ery

and the batterer, and there wil be more, including the nearly

universal acceptance of a self-defense plea for killing a

bat erer.

The slime of woman hating comes now from the bot om,

oozing its way up the social scale. There is a class beneath

working and lower class that is entirely marginalized. It’s the

sex-for-money class, the whoring class, the pornography class,

the trafficked-woman class, the woman who is invisible almost

because one can see so much of her. Each inch of nakedness is

an inch of worthlessness and lack of social protection. The

world’s economies have taken to trafficking in women; the

woman with a few shekels is bet er off, they say, than the

woman with none. I know a few formerly prostituted women,

including myself, who disagree.

The women I’ve met are very often first raped, then pimped

inside their own families while they are still children. Their

bodies have no borders. Middle-class women, including middle-

class feminists, cannot imagine such marginality. It’s as if the

story is too weird, too ugly, too unsightly for an educated

woman to believe.

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What comes along with every ef ort to stop the sexual

abuse of women is the denial that the sexual abuse is happening at al , and U. S. women should understand that William Jefferson Clinton and his enabler, the senator, have set women

back more than thirty-five years in this regard. Some women

are pushed up and some women are pushed down. It’s the