Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Heartbreak

him before that day. This scenario has to be the world’s worst

rape nightmare outside the context of torture and mass

murder. It was so simple for him.

The point is that once the victim can identify the predator,

once she says his name and goes to court, there is no empathy

for her, not on the part of al the good, civic-minded citizens

on the jury, not from the media reporting on the case (if they

do), not from men and women socializing in bars. She’s got

the mark of Cain on her; he does not. Al the sympathy tilts

toward him, and he has an unchangeable kind of credibility

with which he was born. To ruin his life with a charge of rape

is heinous - more heinous than the rape. No mat er how

many rapists go free, the society does not change the way the

scales of justice are weighted; he’s got a pound of gold by

virtue of being a male, and she’s got a pound of feathers. It

couldn’t be more equal.

People deal with hideous events in different ways, and one

way is to forget them. A forgotten event is not always sexual or

abusive. I worked very hard for years as a writer and feminist.

One night I had dinner with a distant cousin. “I remember when

you used to play the piano, ” she said. I didn’t remember that

fact of my life at al and had not for decades. My life had

changed so much, I had so little use for the memory, perhaps,

that I had forgot en the years of piano lessons and recitals.

I sat stunned. She was bewildered. She insisted: “Don’t you

remember? ” I was blank until she gave me some details. Then

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Memory

I began to remember. In fact, she had remembered my life

as a pianist over a period of decades during which I had

forgot en it.

With sexual abuse, people remember and people forget. The

process of remembering can be slow, tormenting, sometimes

impossible. Aharon Appelfeld thanks the Holocaust survivors

who insisted on remembering when al he wanted to do was

forget. There are at least two Holocaust memoirs about forgetting, and if one can forget a concentration camp one can forget a rape. If one can forget as an adult, a child can surely forget.

I read some years ago about a study in which a mother

chimpanzee was fit ed with a harness that had knives sticking

out; her babies were released into her presence; trying to

embrace her they were cut; the more cut they were the more

they tried to hold tight to her; the more they were hurt the

more they wanted their mother. The research itself is repugnant, but the terrifying story of what happened during it strikes me as an accurate parable of a child’s love, blind love, and

desperate need. Remembering and forget ing are aspects of

needing and loving, not rulers of what the heart does or does

not know. Those who say children are lying when they

remember as adults abuse they endured as children are foolish

- as are those who think children categorically do not know

when they’ve been hurt.

I remember a lot of things that happened in my life.

Sometimes I wish I remembered every little thing. Sometimes

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Heartbreak

I think that the best gift on dying would be if God gave one

that second between life and death in which to know everything al at once, al that one ever wanted to know. For myself, I’d include every fact of my own experience but especial y the

earliest years - and I'd like to know everything about my

parents, what they thought and what they dreamed. I'd like to

know our lineage al the way back, who my ancestors were

and what made them tick. I have a few questions about lovers

and friends, too. At the same time I want to know the truth

about the cel , the galaxy, the universe, where it began and

how it will end. I’d like to know what the sun is real y like -

it’s not just fire and cold spots - as much as I’d like to know

how there can be so much empty space inside a molecule.

I'd like to go back and redo my high school physics class and

real y master the language of mathematics. I’d like to know if

there is a God and what faith means. I’d like to know how

Shakespeare wrote from the inside out. I know that if there are

black holes in the universe, multiple personalities simply

cannot be impossible. In fact they have God’s mark al over

them as an elegant solution to a vile problem - children forced

to live in hel find ways to chop the hel up, a child becomes

plural, and each part of the plurality must handle some aspect

of the hel as if it’s got al of it. This is more complicated than

fragmenting a personality, but there is nothing difficult to

understand. The child becomes many children, and each has a

personality and work cut out for it; each personality helps the

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Memory

child endure. What is difficult is how children are hurt, and

sometimes the denial of multiple personalities, which is, of

course, a denial of memory, is also a denial of sexual abuse.

The story isn’t simple enough to be believed by outsiders, but

the victim has found a way to survive. It’s miraculous, real y.

One ritual-abuse survivor with double-digit personalities told

me to think of her as a small army fighting for the rights of

women. I do.

A memoir, which this is, says: this is what my memory

insists on; this is what my memory will not let go; these

points of memory make me who I am, and al that others find

incomprehensible about me is explained by what’s in here.

I need to say that I don’t care about being understood; I want

my work to exist on its merits and not on the power of personality or celebrity. I have done this book because a lot of people asked me to, and I hope this work can serve as a kind

of bridge over which some girls and women can pass into

their own feminist work, perhaps more ambitious than mine

but never less ambitious, because that is too easy. I want

women to stop crimes against women. There I stand or fal .

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Acknowledgments