Andrea Dworkin: The New Womans Broken Heart

bertha had changed much in her one short life, as a woman she

had often been whipped and had lusted for that agonizing, exquisite

humiliation, those who had whipped her were not yr vulgar wife

beaters but velvet coated actors and curly haired painters as well as

revolutionaries and workers, the whips had been real leather and

when her back and ass were shredded and blood began to form puddles on the floor, the whip handle had often as not been stuffed up her cunt or ass. now as an androgyne she had renounced all that, she

was proud of the fact that in her soul whips did not speak to her. oh

yes, there were occasional fleeting seconds—moments even—of

desire that verged on need, yes, sometimes the muscles in the pit of

her stomach did tighten and she did lust for the lash of the whip, not

to mention the whip handle, but she was secure in her conviction

that she who was now an androgyne would not regress to being a

mere woman, it would take, she knew, more than one man could

offer to make her into a woman again, it would take, she knew, a

concert hall filled with thousands of people, her bare-assed naked on

stage shackled in wicked chains, being whipped by, dare she say it,

Jean-Louis Trintignant, before she would even be tempted in a

serious way.

bertha had changed physically as well, as a woman she seemed to

be all breasts and ass. indeed, if other parts of her body existed, they

went unremarked by the world at large, now as an androgyne her

breasts had diminished while her belly had grown, her belly was now

a giant luminous mound, glowing, exquisitely sensitive to every

touch, even to every thought of touch, a finger on her belly was the

instrument of ecstasy and a tongue brought on multiple orgasms

that were as vast and as deep as the universe, stars quaked and comets exploded when her belly came into contact with an electric vibrator.

her nose, of course, had grown, it had grown and grown and

grown, sometimes it hung, weak, limp, sweet, beautiful, sometimes

upon the passing of a gentle wind, a grazing cow, or a wood nymph,

her nose would stiffen and enlarge and become engorged with blood,

it was not very pleasant when this happened in the company of ordinary men and women with their hidden private parts and endless sources of shame, but when it happened in the presence of other androgynes, she herself would touch and fondle it. limp or stiff, her nose would roll over arms and into armpits, explore ears that opened

up like flowers, juicy and moist and yielding, find its way between

toes and rub itself against calloused heels, seek out with gentle insistence the backs of knees, immerse itself in puddles of saliva under the tongue and the rich resonances of slick assholes, vibrate and

heave, and finally come to rest on a nipple, touching it just barely,

then, as bertha lay exhausted, her lover would touch her belly and so

they would begin again and continue and replenish and deplete and

invent, and then begin again.

berthas hair of course had changed too. as a woman she had violated it without conscience—cut it, lacquered it, straightened it, curled it, even shaved it from her legs and armpits and pulled it out

from between her eyes, now as an androgyne her hair rose and fell

with the light, the wind, it danced between her legs, it reached

toward the sun in rich profusion from every part of her. each hair

was an antenna, sensitive, alert, one hair, like a new filling, could

send an icy thrilling chill through her whole body or warm her like

whiskey and Ben-Gay. her pubic hair flowed, billowing, curling,

lustrous, slightly rough and coarse so that when touched by her fingertips elecric impulses would tickle her knuckles and cause her palms to swell and sweat, her hair grew on her legs and reached out

and touched the wind and met the water and when touched by other

flesh sent thrills into the marrow of her bones and turned her almost

inside-out with pleasure.

her hands too had changed, her fingers looked now much like her

nose, and her fingertips resembled vulvas, her Mount of Venus had

thickened and the lines in her hand were deep, almost cavernous,

and her ass, which as a woman had been mostly for shitting and occasional rape, had become an interior tunnel into which flesh sometimes flowed, or honey it seemed, or ice cream, in fact, the whole space between her ass and mouth had become a winding energy

passage so that any touch or breath in either place caused sweet

chills and exquisite tremors.

bertha schneider, once a woman, then a celibate, had become an

androgyne—and when I tell you that she lived happily ever after, I

hope you will know what I mean.

bertha schneiders unrelenting sadness

as she kissed his neck, bertha schneider remembered her unrelenting sadness, this was her hidden part, all covered in the luxuriant twine of personality, learned facts, sardonic humor.

“oh, what a life our bertha has led, ” said the ignorant, as she held

forth on her research into remote jungle tribes where hymens were

impaled on wooden spikes and urethras were split wide open to

resemble precious cuntlike flowers, it was almost as if she had been

there, heard the tribal drums, drunk the sweet or nauseating brews

of livers and brains of deceased enemy warriors, danced the raucous

gyrating dances of birth, death, and rebirth, but bertha, truth to tell,

had in fact been to the New York City Public Library at 42nd and

5th, especially on snowy storming days, there she had sat under that

pale and dreadful light (which, she believed, was part of the very

design of that building, calculated by those who wanted no one

civilian to know too much), books opened up like leaves fallen on the

earth in late October, her giantesque thighs pulsating on the stiff

wooden chairs to the beat of the cold hum around her.

bertha schneider had unrelenting sadness flowing through her very

veins, and this had been a fact all of her long lived life, it was her

heritage, in fact—a sadness so large, so soft, so sweet, so resonant,

that it interjected itself right into other peoples sentences and punctuated her own. the dead of bertha schneiders russian past churned in her, whole dead bodies of sadness never buried deep enough, this

sadness had passed, first in mother russia itself, from mother to

daughter and from mother to daughter and from mother to

daughter, in those dark grim russian urban alleys where her

forefathers had lived and studied Torah and died, the unrelenting

sadness had been bom, on those narrow dirt and stone streets, amid