Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

Andrea Dworkin

The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

BOOKS BY ANDREA DWORKIN

Woman Hating

Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

the new woman’s broken heart: short stories

Pornography: Men Pos es ing Women

Right-wing Women

Ice and Fire

Intercourse

Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality

(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)

Let ers from a War Zone

Mercy

Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings

On the Continuing War Against Women

In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings

(with Catharine A. MacKinnon)

Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel , and Wrmen’s Liberation

To Ricki Abrams and

Catharine A. MacKinnon

To Ruth and Jackie

Continuum

The Tower Building

11 York Road

London SE1 7NX

www. continuumbooks. com

Copyright © 2002 by Andrea Dworkin

This edition first published 2006 in the UK by Continuum

Al rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmit ed

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission

from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0-8264-9147-2

Typeset by Continuum

Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwal

Je est un autre

Rimbaud

Contents

Preface

xi

Music 1

1

Music 2

5

Music 3

7

The Pedophilic Teacher

12

“Silent Night”

18

Plato

22

The High School Library

27

The Bookstore

32

The Fight

36

The Bomb

40

Cuba 1

45

David Smith

48

Contraception

52

Young Americans for Freedom

55

Cuba 2

60

The Grand Jury

62

The Orient Express

66

Easter

69

Knossos

72

Heartbreak

Kazantzakis

74

Discipline

77

The Freighter

80

Strategy

83

Suf er the Little Children

89

Theory

93

The Vow

96

My Last Leftist Meeting

100

Petra Kel y

104

Capitalist Pig

108

One Woman

112

It Takes a Vil age

117

True Grit

121

Anita

124

Prisons

127

Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?

130

The Women

136

Counting

139

Heartbreak

145

Basics

148

Immoral

155

Memory

158

Acknowledgments

164

X

Preface

I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am

myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to

give if she asserts her will. In the home the question will be

couched in a million cruelties, some subtle, some so egregious

they rival the injuries of organized war.

A woman writer makes herself conspicuous by publishing,

not by writing. Although one could argue - and I would -

that publishing is essential to the development of the writing

itself, there will be exceptions. After al , suppose Max Brod had

burned Kafka’s work as Kafka had wanted? The private writer,

which Kafka was, must be more common among women than

men: few men have Kafka’s stunning self-loathing, but many

women do; then again, there is the obvious - that the public

domain in which the published work lives has been considered

the male domain. In our day, more women publish but many

more do not, and despite the glut of mediocre and worthless

books published each year just in the United States, there

must be a she-Kafka, or more than one, in hiding somewhere,

just as there must be a she-Proust, whose vanity turned robust

when it came to working over so many years on essentially

xi

Heartbreak

one great book. If the she-Proust were lucky enough to live

long enough and could afford the rewards of a purely aesthetic life, aggressive self-publication and promotion would not necessarily fol ow: her secret masterpiece would be just that -