Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

because they have no claim at al .

The worst immorality is in disinterest, indifference, so that

the lone person in pain has no importance; one need not feel

an urgency about rescuing the suffering person.

The worst immorality is in dressing up to go out in order

not to have to think about those who are hungry, without

shelter, without protection.

The worst immorality is in living a trivial life because one

is afraid to face any other kind of life - a despairing life or an

anguished life or a twisted and difficult life.

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Heartbreak

The worst immorality is in living a mediocre life, because

kindness rises above mediocrity always, and not to be kind

locks one into an ethos of boredom and stupidity.

The worst immorality is in imitating those who give nothing.

The worst immorality is in conforming so that one fits in,

smart or fashionable, mock-heroic or the very best of the very

same.

The worst immorality is accepting the status quo because

one is afraid of gossip against oneself.

The worst immorality is in selling out simply because one

is afraid.

The worst immorality is a studied ignorance, a purposeful

refusal to see or know.

The worst immorality is living without ambition or work

or pushing the rest of us along.

The worst immorality is being timid when there is no

threat.

The worst immorality is refusing to push oneself where one

is afraid to go.

The worst immorality is not to love actively.

The worst immorality is to close down because heartbreak

has worn one down.

The worst immorality is to live according to rituals, rites of

passage that are predetermined and impersonal.

The worst immorality is to deny someone else dignity.

The worst immorality is to give in, give up.

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Immoral

The worst immorality is to follow a road map of hate

drawn by white supremacists and male supremacists.

The worst immorality is to use another person’s body in the

passing of time.

The worst immorality is to inflict pain.

The worst immorality is to be careless with another

person’s heart and soul.

The worst immorality is to be stupid, because it’s easy

The worst immorality is to repudiate one’s own uniqueness

in order to fit in.

The worst immorality is to set one’s goals so low that one

must crawl to meet them.

The worst immorality is to hurt children.

The worst immorality is to use one’s strength to dominate

or control.

The worst immorality is to sur ender the essence of oneself

for love or money.

The worst immorality is to believe in nothing, do nothing,

achieve nothing.

The worst immoralities are but one, a single sin of human

nothingness and stupidity. “Do no harm” is the counterpoint

to apathy, indifference, and passive aggression; it is the fundamental moral imperative. “Do no harm” is the opposite of immoral. One must do something and at the same time do no

harm. “Do no harm” remains the hardest ethic.

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Memory

Memory became political on the global scale when Holocaust

survivors had to remember in order to testify against Nazi war

criminals. It had always been political to articulate a crime

that had happened to one and name the criminal, but that had

been on a small scale: the family, the village, the local legal

system. Sometimes one remembered but made no accusation.

This was true with pogroms as well as rapes.

There have been Holocaust survivors who refused to

remember, and there is at least one known Holocaust survivor

who is a Holocaust denier.

It has been hard to get crimes against women recognized as

such. Rape was a crime against the father or husband, not the

victim herself. Incest was a privately protected right hidden

under the imperial robe of the patriarch. Prostitution was a

crime in which the prostitute was the criminal no mat er who

forced her, who hurt her, or how young she was in those first

days of rape without complicity. A woman’s memory was so

inconsequential that her word under oath meant nothing.

Now we have a kind of half-memory; one can remember

being raped, but remembering the name and face of the

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Memory

rapist, saying the name aloud, pointing to the face, actually

compromises the victim’s claim. People are willing to cluck

empathetically over the horror of rape as long as they are not

made responsible for punishing the rapist.

Proust’s madeleine signifies the kind of memory one may

have. That memory may be baroque. A regular woman who

has been coerced had bet er have a very simple story to tell

and a rapist dripping with gold lame guilt instead of sweat.

A worker in a rape crisis center told me this story. It

happened down the street from where I live. A woman moved

into a new apartment on the parlor level, slightly elevated

from the street but not by much. She needed to have someone

come into her new apartment to install new windows. The

worker did most of the work but said that he needed a particular tool in order to finish. He said that he would be willing to come back that evening to finish the job. The woman was

grateful; after al , there is nothing quite as dangerously insecure

as an urban apartment near the ground floor with unlocked

windows. He came back; he beat and raped her. At the trial

his defense was that he had been her boyfriend, she had had

sex with him many times, she liked it rough, and as with the

other times this was not rape. She, of course, did not know

him at al .

The jury believed him, which is to say that they had reasonable doubt about her testimony. After al , she could not prove that he had not been her boyfriend, that she had never met

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