Andrea Dworkin - Mercy

helped to organize demonstrations by calling people on the

phones and I helped to write leaflets. They didn’t really believe

in rape, I think. I couldn’t ask anyone or tell anyone because

they would just say how I was bourgeois, which was this

word they used all the time. Women were it more than

anybody. They were hip or cool or hipsters or bohemians or

all those words you could see in newspapers on the Low er East

Side but anytime a woman said something she was bourgeois.

I knew what it meant but I didn’t know how to say it w asn’t

right. They believed in nonviolence and so did I, one hundred

percent. I w ouldn’t hurt anybody even if he did rape me but he

probably didn’t. Men were supposed to go crazy and kill

someone if he was a rapist but they wouldn’t hurt him for raping

me because they didn’t believe in hurting anyone and because I

was bourgeois and anything that brought me down lower to the

people was okay and if it hurt me I deserved it because if you

were bourgeois female you were spoiled and had everything and

needed to be fucked more or to begin with. At the Student Peace

Union there were boys m y age but they were treated like grown

men by everyone around there and they bossed me around and

didn’t listen to anything I said except to make fun o f it and no one

treated me as if I knew anything, which maybe I didn’t, but the

boys were pretty ignorant pieces o f shit, I can tell you that. I was

confused by it but I kept working for peace. These boys all called

momma at home; I heard them. I didn’t. There were adults,

some really old, at the War Resisters League but to me they

weren’t anything like the adults from school. They were heroes

to me. They had gone to jail for things they believed in. They

weren’t afraid and they didn’t follow laws and they didn’t act

dead and they had sex and they didn’t lie about it and they didn’t

act like there was all the time in the world because they knew

there wasn’t. They stood up to the government. They weren’t

afraid. One had been a freedom rider in the South and he got

beaten up so many times he was like a punched-out prizefighter.

He could barely talk he had been beaten up so much. I didn’t try

to talk to him or around him because I held him in awe. I thought

I would be awfully proud if I was him but he wasn’t proud at all,

just quiet and shy. Sometimes I wondered if he could remember

anything; but maybe he knew everything and was just humble

and brave. I have chosen to think so. He did things like I did,

typed and put out mailings and put postage on envelopes and ran

errands and got coffee; he didn’t order anyone around. They

were all brave and smart. One wrote poems and lots o f them

wrote articles and edited newsletters and magazines. One wrote

a book I had read in high school, not in class o f course, about

freedom and utopia, but when I asked him to read a poem I

wrote— I asked a secretary who knew him to ask him because I

was too shy— he wouldn’t and the secretary said he hated

women. He had a wife and there was a birthday party for him

one day and his wife brought a birthday cake and he wouldn’t

speak to her. Everyone said he had boys. His wife was

embarrassed and just kept talking, just on and on, and everyone

was embarrassed but no one made him talk to her or thank her

and I stayed on the outside o f the circle that was around him to

think if it was possible that he hated women, even his wife, and

w hy he would be mean to her as if she didn’t exist. Y o u ’d thank

anyone for a birthday cake. From his book I thought he was

wise. I thought he loved everyone. And if he hated women and

everyone knew it how come they were so nice to him because

hate wasn’t nonviolence. When he died a few years later I felt

relieved. I wondered if his wife was sad or if she felt relieved. I

suppose she was sad but why? I thought he was this one hateful

man but the others were the great I-Thous, the real I-Thous;

fighting militarism; wanting peace; writing; I wanted to be the

same. The I-Its were the regular people on the streets dressed in

suits all the same like robots busy going to business and women

with lacquered hair in outfits. But when the boys who wanted to

be conscientious objectors came in for help there were always

a lot o f jokes about rape. I didn’t see how you could make

jokes about rape i f you were against violence; maybe rape

barely existed at all but it was pretty awful. The pacifists and

w ar resisters would counsel the conscientious objectors about

what to say to the draft boards. Vietnam was pulling all these

boys to be killers. The draft board always asked what the c. o. ’s

would do i f their mother was raped or their girlfriend or their

sister and it was a big joke. The pacifists and the c. o . ’s would

say things like they would let her have a good time. I don’t

remember all the things they said but they would laugh and

jo k e about it; it always made me sort o f sick but if I tried to say

something they w ouldn’t listen and I didn’t know what to say

anyway. Eventually the pacifists would tell the c. o. ’s the right

w ay to answer the question. It was a lofty answer about never

using violence under any circumstance however tragic or

painful but it was a lie because none o f them ever thought it

was anything to have their girlfriend raped or their mother.

They always thought it was funny and they always laughed; so

it wasn’t violence because they never laughed at violence. So

I’m not sure i f rape even really existed because these pacifists

really cared about violence and they never would turn their

backs on violence. They cared about social justice. They cared

about peace. They cared about racism. They cared about

poverty. They cared about everything bad that happened to

people. It was confusing that they didn’t care about rape, or

thought it was a joke, but then I wasn’t so sure what rape was

exactly. I knew it was horrible. I always had a picture in my

mind o f a woman with her clothes torn, near dead, on the floor,

unable to move because she was beaten up so bad and hurt so

much, especially between her legs. I always thought the Nazis

had done it. The draft board always asked about the Nazis:

would you have fought against the Nazis, suppose the Nazis

tried to rape your sister. They would rehearse how to answer the