Andrea Dworkin: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

narcoleptic students; you couldn’t play either of them for favors,

and they didn’t play you.

The third great teacher was dif erent in substance and in

kind. He liked little girls, especially little Jewish girls. I don’t

mean five-year-olds, although maybe he liked them too. But

he liked us, my two best friends and me. He had sexualized

relationships with the three of us. He played us against each

other: Who was going to get him at the end of the day or

13

Heartbreak

through his machinations get to skip a class to see him? Who

had spent the most time with him that day? Who had had the

sexiest conversation with him? I thought that he and I were

going to found a school of philosophy together; he would be

the leader and I would be his acolyte. The sexiest thing about

him was the range of his experience, not only concerning sex.

He knew jazz; he introduced me to Sartre and Camus, though

not de Beauvoir, certainly not; he had smoked marijuana and

talked about it; he encouraged identification with bad-boy,

alienated Holden Caulfield and through Holden the wretched

Franny and Zooey; he drew me pictures of al the sex acts,

including oral and anal sex; he printed by hand the names of

the acts and instructed me in how to pursue men, not boys;

he suggested to me that I become a prostitute - as he put it,

it was more interesting than becoming a hairdresser, which

was the one profession in his view open to women of my

social class; he encouraged disobedience in general and

af irmed that I was right to be so disenchanted with and contemptuous of the pukey adults who were my other teachers and to hate and defy al their stupid rules. At the same time,

he was very controlling: my friends and I danced his dance;

he partnered each of us and al of us; he created configurations

of sex and love that manipulated, sexualized, and intensified

our friendships with each other - it was a menage a quatre; he

knew what each of us wanted and there he was dangling it and

if you were part of his sexual delight he’d give you a taste.

14

The Pedophilic Teacher

We thought that he was the one honest one, the one hip one.

He knew who Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were; where

Tangiers was; the oeuvre of Henry Miller and of Lawrence

Durrell; what the politics of the Algerian War were, especially

as it related to Camus; in fact he had actually been to Paris; he

knew that sometimes, like Socrates, you needed to swallow

the poison and other times, like Che, you needed to use the

barrel of a gun. In other words, he was dazzling. He was the

world outside the prison walls, and escape was my sole desire.

His best trick was giving the three of us passes to get us out

of classes we didn’t like, and we’d get to spend that time with

him learning real stuff: sex stuff or sexy stuff. For instance,

instead of the traditional candy bar, he of ered me writ en

excuses from my mathematics classes, time bet er spent with

him: it’s a wonder I can count to one. He fucked one of us on

graduation night and kept up an emotional y abusive relationship with her for years. I almost commit ed suicide at sixteen because I didn’t think he loved me, though he later assured me

that he did in a hot and heavy phone cal : under his influence

and Salinger’s I had walked out into the ocean prepared to

drown. The waves got up to about chest level when I realized

that the water was fucking cold, and I turned myself around

and got right out of that big, old ocean, though the ocean

itself, not suicide, continues to entrance me. In my heart from

then to this day, I became antisuicide; it took me longer - far

too long - to become antipedophilic.

75

Heartbreak

I thought Paul Goodman was right when he wrote in

Growing Up Absurd that sex had always been passed on from

adults to children; college-aged, I met Goodman, watched and

experienced some of his cruelty to women, and was bewildered, though I knew I didn’t like the cruelty and I didn’t like him. How could someone write a rebel’s book and be so

mean? To me, that was a formidable mystery. In later years my

friend Judith Malina, who directed a play of Goodman’s

though he taunted her repeatedly by saying women could not

direct, told me about how he slapped her during a therapy

session - he was the therapist. Of course, Goodman was a

pedophile and a misogynist, as was Allen Ginsberg, whom I

met later. I say “of course” because there is a specific kind of

education the pedophilic teacher gives: the education itself is

a seduction, a long, exciting-but-drawn-out coupling, an intellectual y dishonest, soul-rending passion in which the curiosity and adventuresomeness of the younger person is used as the

hook, a cynical use because the younger person needs what

the older provides. It may be at ention or a sense of importance or knowledge denied her or him by other adults. In my case I was Little Eva, and a snake offered knowledge and the

promise of escape from the constriction of a dead world in

which there were no poets or geniuses or visionaries. Al the

girls, after al , were expected to teach, nurse, do hair, or clean

houses, or combinations as if from a Chinese menu. Because

most adults lie to children most of the time, the pedophilic

16

The Pedophilic Teacher

adult seems to be a truth-tel er, the one adult ready and willing to know the world and not to lie about it. Lordy, lordy, I do still love that piece of shit.

17

“Silent Night”

It was the sixth grade, I was ten, we had just moved from

Camden to the suburbs, and I wouldn’t sing it: that simple.

They put me alone in a big, empty classroom and let me sweat