Andrea Dworkin - Mercy

them. I will never have easy words; at my fingertips as they

say; but I will stake m y life on these words: Stop them. They

don’t stop themselves, do they? I’m Andrea, which means

manhood, but I do not rape; it is possible to be manly in your

heart, which I have always been, and not rape, I’ve always

liked girls, I’ve made love with many, I’ve never forced

anyone, don’t tell me you can’t, save it for them that don’t

know what it’s like, being with a girl. I was born in 1946, after

Auschwitz, after the bomb, I never wanted to kill, I had an

abhorrence for killing but it was raped from me, raped from

m y brain; obliterated, like freedom. I’m a veteran o f Birkenau

and Massada and deep throat, uncounted rapes, thousands o f

men, I’m twenty-seven, I don’t sleep. They leave the shell for

reasons o f their own. I have no fear o f any kind, they fucked it

out o f me some time ago, it’s neither here nor there, not good

or bad, except girls without fear scare them. I was born in

Camden, on M ickle Street, down from where Walt Whitman

lived, the great gray poet, a visionary, a prophet o f love; and I

loved, according to his poems. I was poor, I never shied away

from life, and I loved. I had a vision too, like his, but I will

never write a poem like his, a song o f myself, I count the

multitudes and so on, the multitudes passed on top o f me,

sticking it in, I lost count. For the record, Walt was wrong;

only a girl had a chance in hell o f being right. A lot o f men on

the B o w ery resemble Walt; huge, hairy types; I visit him

often. It was the end o f April, still cold, a brilliant, lucid cold.

Y ou could feel summer edging its w ay north. Y ou could smell

spring coming. Y ou would sing; if your throat wasn’t ripped.

Y ou r heart would rise, happy; if you wasn’t raped; in

perpetuity. I went out; at night; to smash a man’s face in; I

declared war. M y nom de guerre is Andrea One; I am reliably

told there are many more; girls named courage who are ready

to kill.

Not Andrea: Epilogue

It is, o f course, tiresome to dwell on sexual abuse. It is also

simple-minded. The keys to a woman’s life are buried in a

context that does not yield its meanings easily to an observer not

sensitive to the hidden shadings, the subtle dynamics, o f a self

that is partly obscured, partly lost, yet still self-determining, still

agentic— willful, responsible, indeed, even wanton. We are

seeking for the analytical tools— rules o f discourse that are

enhanced rather than diminished by ambiguity. We value

nuance. Dogma is anathema to the spirit o f inquiry that animates

women’s biography. The notion that bad things happen is both

propagandistic and inadequate. We want to affirm the spiritual

dignity and the sexual bonding we seek to find in women’s lives.

We want a discourse o f triumph, if you will pardon me for being

rhetorically elegant. I have heard the Grand Inquisitor Dworkin

say that, as we are women, such discourse will have to be

ambiguous. She is a prime example, o f course, o f the simple-

minded demogogue who promotes the proposition that bad

things are bad. This axiom is too reductive to be seriously

entertained, except, o f course, by the poor, the uneducated, the

lunatic fringe that she both exploits and appeals to. It is, for

instance, anti-mythological to perceive rape in moralistic terms

as a bad experience without transformative dimensions to it. We

would then have to ignore or impugn the myth o f Persephone,

in which her abduction and rape led, in the view o f the wise

ancient Greeks, to the establishment o f the seasons, a mythologi-

cal tribute, in fact, to the seasonal character o f the menarche. It

is disparaging and profoundly anti-intellectual to concentrate

on the virtual slave status o f women per se in ancient Greece as

if that in and o f itself rendered their mythological insights into

rape suspect. In fact, intercourse, forced or not, is the

precondition for a fertile, fruitful, multiplied as it were,

abundance o f living things, symbolized by the planting and

harvesting seasons. I am, o f course, not allying m yself either

with the right-wing endorsement o f motherhood or fam ily in

making these essentially keen, neutral, and inescapable observations. We cannot say the Greek philosophers and artists, the

storytellers and poets, were wrong, or dismiss them, simply

because some among us want to say that rape is bad or feels

bad or has some destructive effects. In fact, it has not been

scientifically proven that the effects o f rape are worse than the

effects o f gender-neutral assault and we are not willing to stew

in our stigma. As one distinguished feminist o f our own

school wrote some years ago in a left-wing journal o f

socialism, and I am paraphrasing: we should not dwell on rape

at all because to do so negatively valorizes sex; instead we

should actively concentrate on enjoying sex so that, in a sense,

the good can push out the bad; it is sex-negative to continue to

stigmatize an act, a process, an experience, that sometimes has

negative consequences; if we expand sexual pleasure we will,

in fact, be repudiating rape— in consciousness and in practice.

Further, in w om en’s academic circles we reify this perspective

by refusing, for instance, to have cross-cultural or cross-disci-

plinary discussions with those who continue to see themselves

as victims. While we deplore racism and endorse the goals o f

wom en o f color, we do not enter into discussions on the

Holocaust with Je w s or on slavery with Afro-Am ericans

because our theory, applied to their experience, might well be

misunderstood and cause offense. In fact, they will not affirm

the agentic dimensions o f their ow n historical experience,

which, we agree, is essentially an oppressive one. They

denounce and declaim, and we support them in those efforts.

But, as we find transcending affirmative values in wom en’s

experience under patriarchy, so too we can find concrete

examples o f the same dynamic in both Afro-American and

Jew ish experience. Ghetto Jew s from Eastern Europe did,