The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Andrea Dworkin (ч. 2)

It Takes a Vil age

It happens so often that I, at least, cannot keep track of it.

A woman is only believed if and when other women come

forward to say the man or men raped them, too. The oddness

of this should be transparent: if I'm robbed and my neighbor

isn’t, I’m still robbed - there is no legal or social agreement

that in order for me, the victim of a robbery, to be believed,

the burglar has to have robbed my neighbors. As writer Chris

Matthews said, “There are banks that Willy Sut on didn’t rob. ”

I remember an early, ter ible case in which a woman with a

history of mental upheaval due to her father’s incestuous rape

of her was raped by her psychiatrist. She had no credibility,

as they say, and the jury was doing a full-tilt boogie toward

vindicating the accused.

No one noticed a famous character actor who came to the

trial every day. The actor sat quietly and used her formidable

skil to help herself disappear. As the case was heading to the

jury, which was going to acquit, the actor came forward:

exactly the same thing had happened to her - father-daughter

incest and rape by this same psychiatrist. The actor testified

and the media printed pictures of her. Because of the actor’s

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familiarity to a large audience and the obvious ter or she felt

in exposing herself, the jury did not find for the rapist. How

do I know that the ter or was real? I talked with her.

In that case what no one seemed to understand was why the

victim, raped twice now by persons who were supposed to

protect and care for her, raped twice now by figures of power

and authority, was unstable - of course she was. Since she had

no credibility precisely because of the ef ects of the two rapes

on her, she needed rescue by the actor. Once the actor testified,

there were other women prepared to testify, and it was because

of the other women waiting in the wings that the defense

collapsed. In fact, the psychiatrist knew by virtue of his learning and expertise that incested women were staggeringly vulnerable and easy to shame; he bet his reputation and

professional life that shame would shut them up no mat er

how egregious his sexual abuse of them.

It takes a vil age of women to nail a rapist. Some rapists of

children have molested or assaulted hundreds of children before

they are caught for their first offense. Rapists of adult women

are high-brow and low-brow, white trash and black trash,

cunning and brutal, smart and stupid; some are high achievers;

some are rich; some are famous. Since the woman is always

on trial - this time to be evaluated on her credibility - there

almost always needs to be more than one of her to attest to

the abuser’s predatory patterns.

This was one of the great roles that rape crisis centers played:

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It Takes a Vil age

pat erns would emerge; women who could not bring themselves to go to the law could provide a lot of data on active rapists; even without appearing in court, the knowledge that

there were other victims might give a prosecutor some bal s

in bringing a case and trying to get a conviction for the one

woman, by definition not credible enough. In the early days,

it was still thought that women could not argue court cases,

so there were virtually no female prosecutors.

Each time the women’s movement achieves success in providing a way for a woman to speak out, in court or in the media, the prorape constituency lobbies against her: against her

credibility. It’s as if we’re going to have a vote on it, the new

reality TV: are we for her or against her? Is she a liar or - let’s

be kind - merely disturbed? In the United States it is increasingly common to have the lawyers defending the accused rapist on television talk shows. The victim is slimed; the jury pool is

contaminated; what happens to the woman after the trial is

lost; she’s gone, disappeared, as if her larynx had been ripped

out of her throat and even her shadow had been rent.

The credibility issue is gender specific: it’s amazing how

with al the rapes there are so few rapists. If one follows the

misogynistic reporting on rape, one has to conclude that maybe

there are five guys. The worst thing about a legal system that

puts the worth of the accused above the worth of the victim

is that the creep almost always looks clean: somebody’s father,

somebody’s brother, somebody’s son. Don’t you care? we used

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to ask; she’s somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister. The

answer was unequivocal: no, we don’t give a fuck. Worse was

the saccharine sweetness of those who pretended to care about

somebody’s mother, somebody’s sister. I’ve heard at least a

dozen criminal defense lawyers say, “I have a sister; I have a

daughter; I have a wife.” The rapists they defend use the same

locution. They want us to believe that the problem is that this

one woman wasn’t raped and the accused didn’t do it. Even

though criminal defense lawyers will admit that they rarely

have innocent clients, each time the public takes the sucker

punch: I have a sister; he has a sister; see his pretty suit; look

at how wel groomed he is. Her, she’s a mess. Wel , yes, she’s

been raped; it kind of messes you up. Oh, now we’re playing

victim, are we? Advice to young women: try not to be his first,

because then there aren’t others to confirm your story. You

can’t earn credibility; you can’t buy it; you can’t fake it; and

you’re a fucking fool if you think you have any.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s husband is so good at sliming

the women he’s abused - and he has had so much help - that

it might take two vil ages.

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True Grit

Becoming a feminist - seeing women through the prism of

feminism - meant changing and developing a new stance. For

instance, I hate prisons, but the process of becoming a feminist made me face the fact that I thought some people should be in jail. Years later, after watching rapists and batterers go free

almost al the time, my pacifism would collapse like a glass

tower, leaving me with jagged cuts everywhere inside and out

and half-buried as well. I began to believe that the bad guys

should be executed - not by the state but by the victim, if she

desired, one shot to the head.

When I was still a baby feminist (this being the lingo of the

movement), I was asked to go and interview a felon named

Tommy Trantino, who had published a book of drawings and

stories called Unlock the Lock. The person who had asked me

to go thought that I could write something about Trantino

that might help to get him out.

I went to Rahway State Prison, a maximum-security prison

in New Jersey. I talked to Trantino in a small, transparent

room, almost al glass. I was surrounded by the prison population, not in lockdown. Trantino had been convicted of killing

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two cops. I read a lot about him before I went. The same

day on which he had kil ed the cops he had also beaten up a

couple of women.

I asked Trantino al the obvious questions, including “Did

you do it?” His response was that he didn’t remember. Then

I departed from the script. I said that I knew he had been in

jail a long time, but had he heard of the women’s movement

and what did he think of it? Hands in his pants pockets, he

spread his legs wide open and said, “Wel , I'm good with women

and I'm bad with women.” That was enough for me, but ever

the intrepid reporter I said that I had noted that he had beat

up two women on the day of the killings; did he think he

would stil beat up on women if he was out? His answer was

an equivocating no, but I heard yes as clear as church bel s on

a Sunday, and as far as I was concerned he could stay in jail

forever. I didn’t think that this was the right way to think, but

I couldn’t stop thinking it.

I began the Socratic course of discussing the problem with

my friends, stil mostly on the pacifist left. Everyone told me,

in different ways, that I had an obligation to help Trantino get

out: prison was the larger evil. Here I was, virtually overlooking the murders of the two policemen; but he hit those women, and I didn’t think there was anything to suggest that if or

when he was out he wouldn’t hit more women.

One weekend someone took me to a benefit for one of the

pacifist groups. I was so offended by the anti woman lyrics to

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True Grit

a song that I got up and walked out. Someone else did, too.

We reached the pavement at approximately the same time.

“I have a question I'd like to ask you, ” I said to the stranger.

I then presented the Trantino problem, which was really

gnawing at me. “It sounds like you already know what you

want to do, ” he said. Yes, I nodded. “You want him to stay in,

right? ” “Yes, ” I said out loud. The man was John Stoltenberg,

and I've lived with him for nearly twenty-seven years. I called

up the friend who had asked me to write the piece and said I

couldn’t do it. I told her the true reason: the women, not the

police.

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Anita

The same friend asked me to go talk with Anita Hoffman,

whose husband, Abbie, had just gone underground after being

busted for selling cocaine. I had donated some money to

Abbie’s defense fund and said he should just keep running.

I didn’t real y know why I was going to see Anita.

The apartment was small and crowded, distinguished only

by a television set the size of a smal country. Anita’s child with

Abbie, America, was playing. She and I sat on what was her

bed to talk.

She and Abbie had not been together for a while. It was

clear that she was poor. She said that she didn’t know what to

do, that a friend of Abbie’s had offered her work as a prostitute (“escort, ” high end of the line) and was put ing a lot of pressure on her. Abbie’s latest caper had left her destitute. This

guy was a friend of Abbie’s, so he had to be okay, right? She

had thought of doing organizing - poor, single mothers like

herself who had no political power in the system; but real y,

what was wrong with prostituting? She could earn a lot of

money and she was lonely. Honey, I thought, you don’t begin

to know what lonely is.

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Anita

I told her about my own experiences in the trade, especial y

about the dissociation that was essential to doing the deed.

You had to separate your mind from your body. Your consciousness had to be hovering somewhere near the ceiling behind you or on the far side of the room watching your body.

No one got through it without having that happen. I also told

her that she’d begin to hate men; at first manipulating them

would seem like power, but eventually and inevitably the day

would come when one perceived them as coarse and brutal,

smel y, dirty bullies. She had said that she liked sex and that

she had had sex with the guy who was now trying to pimp

her. I told her that the sex with Abbie’s friend was a setup to

make her more pliant and that in prostituting one lost the

ability to feel, so if one liked sex it was the last thing, not the

first thing, that one should do. I told her that most people

thought that women prostituted in order to get money

for drugs, but it was the other way around; the prostitution

became so vile, so ugly, so hard, that drugs provided the only

soft: landing, a kind of embrace - and on the literal level they

took away the pain, physical and mental.

I didn’t see or talk to Anita again after that night, but the

friend who had asked me to go said that Anita had moved to

California and had a job as an editor. I don’t know if Anita

ever tried the prostituting, but if so I helped her get out fast

and if not I helped with that, too. I was lucky to have the

chance to talk with her, and I began to understand that my

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own experiences could have meaning for other women in

ways that mattered. I began to trust myself more.

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Prisons

Perhaps because I came from the pacifist left, I had an intense

and abiding hatred for prisons (even though the U. S. prison

system was developed by the Quakers). After the publication

of Our Blood, I wrote a proposal for a book on prisons. I was

struck by the way prisons stayed the same through time and

place: the confinement of an individual in bad circumstances

with a sadistic edge and including al the prison rites of passage.

I was struck by how prisons were the only places in which men

were threatened with rape in a way analogous to the female

experience. I was struck by the common sadomasochistic

structure of the prison experience no mat er what the crime

or country or historical era. That proposal was rejected by a

slew of publishers. I found myself at a dead end.

But an odd redemption was at hand. I had noticed that in

al pornography one also found the prison as leitmotif, the

sexualization of confining and beating women, the ubiquitous

rape, the dominance and submission of the social world in

which women were literally and metaphorically imprisoned.

I decided to write on pornography because I could make

the same points - show the same inequities - as with prisons.

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Pornography and prisons were built on cruelty and brutalization; the demeaning of the human body as a form of punishment; the worthlessness of the individual human being; restraint, confinement, tying, whipping, branding, torture,

penetration, and kicking as commonplace ordeals. Each was a

social construction that could be different but was not; each

incorporated and exploited isolation, dominance and submission, humiliation, and dehumanization. In each the effort was to control a human being by attacking human dignity. In each

the guilt of the imprisoned provided a license to animalize

persons, which in turn led to a recognition of the ways in

which animals were misused outside the prison, outside the

pornography. Arguably (but not always), those in prison had

commit ed an offense; the offense of women in pornography was in being women. In both prisons and pornography, sadomasochism was a universal dynamic; there was no chance for reciprocity or mutuality or an equality of communication.

In prison populations and in pornography, the most

aggressive rapist was at the top of the social structure. In

prison populations gender was created by who got fucked; so,

too, in pornography. It amazed me that in pornography the

prison was recreated repeatedly as the sexual environment

most conducive to the rape of women.

The one dif erence, unbridgeable, intractable, between prisons

and pornography was that prisoners were not expected to like

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Prisons

being in prison, whereas women were supposed to like each

and every abuse suffered in pornography.

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Sister, Can You

Spare a Dime?

In 1983 Catharine A. MacKinnon and I drafted, and the City

of Minneapolis passed, a civil law that held pornographers

responsible for the sexual abuse associated with the making

and consuming of pornography If a woman or girl was forced

into making pornography or if a woman or girl was raped or

assaulted because of pornography, the pornographer or retailer

could be held responsible for civil damages. If a woman

was forced to view pornography (commonplace in situations

of domestic abuse), the person or institution (a school, for

instance) that forced her could be held responsible. The burden

of proof was on the victim. In addition, the law defined

pornography as sex discrimination; this meant that pornography helped to create and maintain the second-class status of women in society - that turning a woman into an object or

using her body in violent, sexual y explicit ways contributed

to the devaluing of women in every part of life. The pornography itself was defined in the statute as a series of concrete scenarios in which women were sexual y subordinated to men.

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Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?

In 1984 I went with a group of activists and organizers to

the convention of the National Organization for Women in

order to get NOW’s support for this new approach to fighting

pornography.

The convention was held in New Orleans in a posh hotel.

Sonia Johnson, an activist especially associated with a radical

crusade to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, was running

for president of NOW, and she sur endered her time and space

so that I could address the convention on her behalf; our

understanding was that I would talk about pornography and

the new approach MacKinnon and I had developed.

It was a hot, hot city in every sense. Leaving the hotel one

saw the trafficking in women in virtually every venue along

Bourbon Street. The whole French Quarter, and Bourbon

Street in particular, was crowded with middle-aged men in

suits roving as if in gangs, dripping sweat, going from one sex

show to the next, searching for prostitutes and strippers.

In the hotel, NOW women were herded into caucuses and

divided into cliques. I'm a member of NOW, even though its

milksop politics deeply offend me. Now I was going to try to

persuade the members that they should pursue the difficult

and dangerous task of addressing pornography as a civil rights

issue for women.

It is hard to describe how insular NOW is. It is run on the

national level by women who want to play politics with the

big boys in Washington, D. C., where NOW’s national of ice

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Heartbreak

is located. I had, over the years, spoken at ral ies and events

organized by many local NOW chapters al over the country.

On the local level, my experience with NOW was entirely

wonderful. The members were valiant women, often the sole

staf for battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers,

often the only organized progressive group in a smal town or

city. I’ve never met better women or bet er feminists. Those

who run the nationally visible NOW are different in kind:

they stick to safe issues and mimic the politics and strategies

of professional political lobbyists.

Soon after I came back from Amsterdam, I spoke at a ral y

organized by the local NOW chapter in Washington, D. C. At

the time the burning issue was the Equal Rights Amendment,

a proposed amendment to the U. S. Constitution that would

have given women a basic right to equality. There was a lot

of of icial (national) NOW literature on the Equal Rights

Amendment that I saw for the first time in D. C. I couldn’t

understand why reading it made me question the ERA - a

question I had only on contact with national NOW, its literature and its spokespeople. But of course, I did understand - I just wasn’t schooled yet in the ways of this duplicitous feminist organization. The literature was al about how the ERA would benefit men. Guts were sorely lacking even back then.

A decade later, the organization was torn over pornography.

The big girls in the big of ice didn’t want to get their hands

dirty - the issue demanded at least an imagined descent down

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Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?

the social ladder. Lots of local NOW activists were fully

engaged in the fight against pornography and brought those

politics to the convention. Then there were what I take to be

honorable women who believed the pornographers' propaganda that the civil rights approach would hurt freedom of speech. Then there were the women, a small but determined

group, who thought that equality meant women using

pornography in the same ways that men did. We wanted a

resolution from NOW supporting the civil rights approach.

We got it, but, speaking for myself, at great emotional cost.

NOW runs its meetings using Robert’s rules of order,

which is democracy at its most degraded. One had to know

whether to hold up a red poster or a green poster or a yellow

poster to be recognized by the chair to speak. I can’t even now

articulate the points of order involved. When I got home, I

dreamt about those posters for months.

A vote was held on whether I could speak for Sonia Johnson.

The women voted no. So much for free speech. In place of

addressing the whole convention, we organized a meeting to

which anyone interested could come. I was speaking, and in

the middle NOW cut off the electricity for the mike. More

free speech. I was in tears, real y. The woman who cut off the

juice and then physically repossessed the mike - just following

orders, she said - claimed that we had not followed the rules

for holding our meeting. We had, but never mind.

Then the most miraculous thing happened. We had a suite

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Heartbreak

in the hotel, as did other subgroups of NOW, so that people

could come by, talk, pick up literature, find out for themselves

who we were and what we believed.

I was approached by a black woman who worked in the

hotel and asked if we would march down Bourbon Street

with the workers in the hotel and the local chapter of the

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now

(ACORN) to protest the pornography and prostitution so

densely located there. This woman might well have made my

bed that morning. It was an overwhelming mandate. Of

course we said yes and tried to get the NOW women to join,

which they pretty solidly refused to do.

New Orleans is like most other cities in the United States

in that the areas in which pornography and prostitution flourish are the areas in which poor people, largely people of color, live. We were being invited to stand up with them against the

parasitic exploitation of their lives, against the despoiling of

their living environment.

The group was poor. They took packages of paper plates,

wrote on the plates “No More Porn, ” and stuck the inscribed

plates up on storefronts and bars al along Bourbon Street.

Demonstrators also carried NOW logos. There were maybe a

hundred people marching (as opposed to the thousand or

so back in the hotel). I was privileged to speak out on the

street with my sisters, a bullhorn taking the place of a microphone.

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Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?

Meanwhile someone in the leadership of NOW had called

the police to alert them to an illegal march, a march without

a permit. As our rally came to an end and we were marching

out of the French Quarter the police approached. We ran. They

ar ested one of us at the back of the line. He, an organizer

from Minneapolis, went to jail for the night, a martyr for the

feminist cause. And it became a bad feminist habit for the rich

to rat out the poor, turn on the poor, keep themselves divided

from the poor - no mixing with the dispossessed. The ladies

with the cash to go to New Orleans from other parts of the

country did not want to be mistaken for the downtrodden.

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The Women

The first time a woman came up to me after a speech to say

that she had been in pornography was in Lincoln, Nebraska -

at a local NOW meeting in the heartland. I knew a lot about

pornography before I started writing Pornography: Men

Pos es ing Women because, as an intellectual, I had read a lot of

literary pornography and because, as a woman, I had prostituted. In pornography one found the map of male sexual dominance and one also found, as I said in a speech, “the

poor, the illiterate, mar ied women with no voice, women

forced into prostitution or kept from get ing out and women

raped, raped once, raped twice, raped more times than they

[could] count.”

Pornography brought me back to the world of my own

kind; I looked at a picture and I saw a live woman.

Some women were prostituted generation after generation

and, as one woman, a third-generation prostitute, said, “I’ve

done enough to raise a child and not make her a prostitute

and not make her a fourth generation. ”

I found pride - "I got a scar on my hand; you can’t real y

see it, but a guy tried to slice my throat, and I took the knife

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The Women

from him and I stabbed him back. To this day I don’t know if

he’s dead, but I don’t care because he was trying to take my

life. ”

I found women whose whole lives were consumed by

pornography: “I’ve been involved in pornography al my life

until 1987. I was gang-raped, that’s how I conceived my

daughter, and she was born in a brothel in Cleveland, Ohio”;

the child “was beaten to death by a trick - she used to get beat

up a lot by tricks. I’ve often wondered if some of the physical

damage that was done to her simply [was because] maybe a

child’s body wasn’t meant to be used that way, you know.

Maybe babies aren’t meant to be anally penetrated by things

or snakes or bot les or by men’s penises, but I don’t know for

sure. I’m not really sure about that because that’s what my life

was. ”

This same woman has “films of pornography that was taken

of me from the time I was a baby until just a few years ago. ”

I even found women wanting something from the system:

“I wish that this system, the courts and, you know, our judicial system that’s supposed to be there to help would have done something earlier in our life. I wish they would have

done something earlier in our daughter’s life and I wish that

they would do something now. ”

Women in pornography and prostitution talked to me, and

I became responsible for what I heard. I listened; I wrote; I

learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me

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enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one

can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to

pick one kind of pedagogy over al others, I pick listening. It

breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed

limits; it takes one into another’s life, her hard times and, if

there is any, her joy, too. There are women whose whole lives

have been pornography and prostitution, and still they fight

to live.

The world gets meaner as prostitution and pornography are

legitimized. Now women are the slave population, an old

slavery with a new technology, cameras and camcorders. Smile;

say “bleed” instead of “cheese. ”

I’m tired, very weary, and I cry for my sisters. Tears get

them nothing, of course. One needs a generation of warriors

who can’t be tired out or bought of . Each woman needs to

take what she endures and turn it into action. With every tear,

accompanying it, one needs a knife to rip a predator apart;

with every wave of fatigue, one needs another platoon of

strong, tough women coming up over the horizon to take

more land, to make it safe for women. I’m willing to count the

inches. The pimps and rapists need to be dispossessed, forced

into a mangy exile; the women and children - the world’s true

orphans - need to be empowered, cosseted with respect and

dignity.

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Counting

Are there really women who have to worry about a fourth

generation’s becoming prostitutes? How many are there? Are

there five, or 2, 000, or 20 million? Are they in one place - for

instance, the Pacific Northwest, where the woman I quoted

lives - or are they in some sociological stratum that can be isolated and studied, or are they al in Thailand or the Philippines or Albania? Are there too many or too few, because in either

case one need not feel responsible? Too many means it’s too

hard to do anything about it; too few means why bother. Is it

possible that there is one adult woman in the United States

who does not know whether or not a baby’s body should be

penetrated with an object, or are there so many that they

cannot be counted - only their form of saying "I don’t know”

comes in the guise of labeling the penetration "speech” or

“free speech”?

A few nights ago I heard the husband of a close friend on

television discussing antirape policies that he opposes at a

university. He said that he was willing to concede that rapes

did take place. How white of you, I thought bitterly, and then

I realized that his statement was a definition of “white” in

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motion - not even “white male” but white in a country built

on white ownership of blacks and white genocide of reds and

white-indentured servitude of Asians and women, including

white women, and brown migrant labor. He thought that

maybe 3 percent of women in the United States had been raped,

whereas the best research shows a quarter to a third. The male

interviewer agreed with this percentage pulled out of thin air:

it sounded right to both of them, and neither of them felt

required to fund a study or read the already existing research

material. Their authority was behind their number, and in the

United States authority is white. Whatever trouble these

two particular men have had in their lives, neither has had

to try to stop a fourth generation, their own child, from prostituting.

“I had two daughters from [him], ” said a different woman,

“and he introduced me into heroin and prostitution. I went

further into drugs and prostitution, and al my life the only

protection I ever had was my grandmother, and she died

when I was five years old. ” This woman spoke about other

males by whom she had children and was abused. She spoke

about her mother, who beat her up and closed her in dark

closets. It’s good that her grandmother was kind because her

grandfather wasn’t: “I can’t remember how old I was when

my grandfather started molesting me, but he continued to

rape me until I became pregnant at the age of thirteen. ” Can

one count how many women there are on our fingers and

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Counting

toes, or does a bunch of us have to get together to have enough

fingers and toes, or would it take a small army of women to

get the right numbers?

There is another woman who was left in a garbage can

when she was six months old. She was born drunk and had to

be detoxified in her incubator. She was, in her own words,

“partially mentally retarded, ” “abandoned, ” and “raised in and

out of foster homes, ” some of which she says were good. She

had the chance to stay with a foster family but chose to be

with her father, since that was her idea of family. He was a

brute, good with his fists, and first raped her when, as a child,

she was taking a bath with her kid brother; and like many incest-

rapists, he’d rape her or make her perform sex acts and then

give her a child’s reward. “I just wanted him to be my father;

that’s al I wanted from him, ” she said. At twelve she was

stranger-raped. The stranger, a fairly talented pedophile, would

pick her up from school and talk with her. Eventual y he

slammed her against a garage and raped her: “Nobody had

ever talked to me about rape, so I figured he was just showing

me love like my father did. ” On having the rape discovered,

the girl was called no good, a whore, and shunned by her

family. “My father had taught me most of what I needed to

learn about pleasing men, ” she says. “There was a little bit more

that [the pimp] needed to teach me. So [the pimp] would

show me these videos, and I would copy on him what I saw

was going on in the videos, and that’s how I learned to be a

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prostitute. ” Her tricks were professional men. She worked in

good hotels until she found herself streetwalking. “I ended up

back in prostitution. I worked out on Fourth Street, which is

the strip, and St. Carlos in San Jose. There were [many] times

that I would get raped or beat up. ” Daddy pimped.

One night she was trying to bring home her quota of

money when a drug-friend of her father’s came by. “He raped

me, he beat me up, he held a gun [in] his hand [to my head].

And I swear to this day I can stil hear that gun clicking. ”

She then worries that she is taking up too much of my time.

I’m important; she’s not. My time matters; hers doesn’t. My

life matters; hers does not. From her point of view, from the

reality of her experience, I embody wealth. I speak and some

people listen. I write and one way or another the books get

published from the United States and Great Britain to Japan

and Korea. There is a splendidness to my seeming importance,

especial y because once parts of my life were a lot like parts of

hers. How many of her are there? On my own I’ve counted

quite a few.

These women are proud of me, and I don’t want to let them

down. I feel as if I’ve done nothing because I know that I

haven’t done enough. I haven’t changed or destabilized the

meaning of “white, ” nor could anyone alone. But writers

write alone even in the context of a political movement. I’ve

always seen my work as a purposeful series of provocations,

especially Pornography: Mlen Pos es ing Women, Ice and Fire,

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Counting

Intercourse, and Mercy. In other books I’ve devoted myself to

the testimony of women who had no other voice. These

books include Let ers from a War Zone, currently being published in Croatia in its lonely trip around the world; the introduction to the second edition of Pornography: Men Pos es ing Women, which can also be found in Life and Death: Writings

on the Continuing War Against Women, a collection of essays;

and In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings,

edited with Catharine A. MacKinnon and published by Harvard

University Press. I still don’t get to be white, because the

people who care about what I say have no social importance.

I’m saying that white gets to say, “Yes, it happened” or "No,

it didn’t. ” I’m saying that there are always either too many or

too few. I’m saying that I don’t count sheep at night; I see in

my mind instead the women I’ve met, I see their faces and I

can recollect their voices, and I wish I knew what to do, and

when people ask me why I'm such a hard-ass on pornography

it’s because pornography is the bible of sexual abuse; it is

chapter and verse; pornography is the law on what you do to

a woman when you want to have mean fun on her body and

she’s no one at al . No one does actually count her. She’s at the

bot om of the barrel. We’re al stil trying to tel the white guys

that too many - not too few - women get raped. Rape is the

screaming, burning, hideous top level of the rot en barrel,

acid-burned damage, what you see if you look at the surface

of violence against women. Rape plays a role in every form of

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Heartbreak

sexual exploitation and abuse. Rape happens everywhere and

it happens al the time and to females of al ages. Rape is

inescapable for women. The act, the attempt, the threat - the

three dynamics of a rape culture - touch 100 percent of us.

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Heartbreak

How did I become who I am? I have a heart easily hurt. I

believed that cruelty was most often caused by ignorance.

I thought that if everybody knew, everything would be different. I was a silly child who believed in the revolution. I was torn to pieces by segregation and Vietnam. Apartheid broke

my heart. Apartheid in Saudi Arabia still breaks my heart.

I don’t understand why every story about rising oil prices does

not come with an addendum about the domestic imprisonment of women in the Gulf states. I can’t be bought or intimidated because I’m already cut down the middle. I walk

with women whispering in my ears. Every time I cry there’s a

name at ached to each tear.

My ideology is simple and left: I believe in redistributing

the wealth; everyone should have food and health care, shelter

and safety; it’s not right to hurt and deprive people so that

they become prostitutes and thieves.

What I’ve learned is that women suffer from terrible shame

and the shame comes from having been complicit in abuse

because one wants to live. Middle-class women rarely understand how complicit they are unless they’ve experienced torture,

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Heartbreak

usually in the home; prostituting women know that every

breath is bought by turning oneself inside out so that the

blood covers the skin; the skin is ripped; one watches the

world like a hunted animal on al fours in the darkest part of

every night.

There is nothing redemptive about pain.

Love requires an inner fragility that few women can afford.

Women want to be loved, not to love, because to be loved

requires nothing. Suppose that her love brought him into

existence and without it he is nothing.

Men are shits and take pride in it.

Only the toughest among women wil make the necessary

next moves, the revolutionary moves, and among prostituted

women one finds the toughest if not always the best. If prostituted women worked together to end male supremacy, it would end.

Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you

rights, honor, and knowledge because you earn them; but it

also takes from you too much tenderness. One needs tenderness to love - not to be loved but to love.

I long to touch my sisters; I wish I could take away the

pain; I’ve heard so much heartbreak among us. I think I’ve

pretty much done what I can do; I’m empty; there’s not much

left, not inside me. I think that it’s bad to give up, but maybe

it’s not bad to rest, to sit in silence for a while. I’m told by my

friends that it’s not evil to rest. At the same time, as they

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Heartbreak

know, there’s a child being pimped by her father with everyone around her either taking a piece of her or looking the other way. How can anyone rest, real y? What would make it

possible? I say to myself, Think about the fourth-generation

daughter who wasn’t a prostitute; think about her. I say,

Think about the woman who asked herself whether or not it

was bad to penetrate a baby with an object and figured out

that it might be; think about her. These are miracles, political

miracles, and there will be so many more. I think that there

will be many more.

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Basics

Politics doesn’t run on miracles modest or divine, and the few

miracles there are have the quality of invisibility about them

because they happen to invisible people, those who have been

hurt too much, too often, too deep. There’s a jagged wound

that is in fact someone’s life, and any miracle is hidden precisely

because the wound is so egregious. The victims of any systematized brutality are discounted because others cannot bear to see, identify, or articulate the pain. When a rapist stomps on

your life, you are victimized, and although it is a social law in

our society that “victim” is a dirty word, it is also a true word,

a word that points one toward what one does not want to

know.

Women used to be identified as a group by what was presumed to be a biological wound - the vaginal slit, the place for penile penetration. There is a 2, 000 year history of the slit’s

defining the person. If a stranger can go from the outside

to the inside, the instrumentality of that action is the whole

purpose of the creature to whom it is done. That area of

the female body has hundreds of dirty names that serve as

synonyms.

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Basics

The mystery is why the vagina is such a mystery. Any reference to one of the dirty names elicits sniggers and muted laughs. What are seen as the sexual parts of a woman’s body

are always jokes; anything nonsexual is trivial or trivialized.

For a prostitute, the whole body becomes the sexual part,

as if there were nothing human, only an anatomical use. She

gets to be dirty al over, and what is done to her gets to be

dirty al over. She is also a joke. None of the women I’ve met

in my life has been either dirty or a joke.

Feminists have good reasons for feeling tired. The backlash

against feminism has been deeply stupid. But first there is the

frontlash, the misogyny that saturates the gender system, so

that a woman is always less. The frontlash is the world the

way one knew it thirty-five years ago; there was no feminism

to stand against the enemies of women.

I often see the women’s movement referred to as one of the

most successful social change movements the world has yet

seen, and there is great truth in that. In some parts of the

Western world, fathers do not own their daughters under the

law; the fact that this has transmogrified into a commonplace

incest doesn’t change the accomplishment in rendering the

paterfamilias a nul ity in the old sense.

In most parts of the Western world, rape in marriage is now

il egal - it was not illegal thirty-five years ago.

In the United States, most women have paying jobs, even

though equal pay for equal work is a long way off; and

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Heartbreak

although it is stil true that sexual harassment makes women

migrants in the labor market, the harassment itself is now

il egal and one can sue - one has a weapon.

Middle-class women keep battery a secret and in working-

and lower-class families battery is not suf iciently stigmatized;

nevertheless, there are new initiatives against both bat ery

and the batterer, and there wil be more, including the nearly

universal acceptance of a self-defense plea for killing a

bat erer.

The slime of woman hating comes now from the bot om,

oozing its way up the social scale. There is a class beneath

working and lower class that is entirely marginalized. It’s the

sex-for-money class, the whoring class, the pornography class,

the trafficked-woman class, the woman who is invisible almost

because one can see so much of her. Each inch of nakedness is

an inch of worthlessness and lack of social protection. The

world’s economies have taken to trafficking in women; the

woman with a few shekels is bet er off, they say, than the

woman with none. I know a few formerly prostituted women,

including myself, who disagree.

The women I’ve met are very often first raped, then pimped

inside their own families while they are still children. Their

bodies have no borders. Middle-class women, including middle-

class feminists, cannot imagine such marginality. It’s as if the

story is too weird, too ugly, too unsightly for an educated

woman to believe.

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Basics

What comes along with every ef ort to stop the sexual

abuse of women is the denial that the sexual abuse is happening at al , and U. S. women should understand that William Jefferson Clinton and his enabler, the senator, have set women

back more than thirty-five years in this regard. Some women

are pushed up and some women are pushed down. It’s the

women who are down who are paying the freight for al the

rest; the women who have been pushed up even a smidge

have taken to acting as if everything is al right or wil be soon.

Their arguments are not with men or even with subgroups of

men, for instance, pimps. They smile and make nice with the

men. Their arguments are with me or other militants. Being a

militant simply requires fighting sexual abuse - the right of a

rapist, the right of a pimp, the right of a john, the right of an

incest-daddy to use or intimidate or coerce girls or women.

A young woman just out of college says that date rape does

not happen, and the media conspire to make her rich and

famous.

A woman of no intellectual distinction writes a 3, 000-page

book, or so it seems, and she is celebrated - she becomes rich

and famous.

The wealthy wife of a multimil ionaire writes longingly

about being a stay-at-home mother. Feminists, she says, have

made that too hard - as she pursues a golden career writing

(without talent) about how she wants to be home mopping

up infant vomit.

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Heartbreak

A middle-class English feminist of ferocious mediocrity

spends her time charting the eating disorders of her betters.

They are not so evident on the landscape now, but there

were so-called feminists who published in Playboy, Hustler,

and Penthouse and penned direct attacks on feminists fighting

pornography and prostitution. There were women labeled

feminist who wrote pornographic scenarios in which the

so-called fantasies were the rape of other feminists, usually

named and sometimes drawn but always recognizable; one at

least has become a male through surgery - her head and heart

were always right there.

Making fun of the victims was even more commonplace

than making fun of the feminists fighting in behalf of those

who had been raped or prostituted.

It became an insult to be cal ed or considered a victim, even

when one had been victimized. The women in pornography

and prostitution had not been victimized just once or by a

stranger; more often the family tree was a poison tree - sexual

abuse grew on every branch. Only in the United States could

second-class citizens (women) be proud to disown the experiences of sisters (prostitutes), stand up for the predator, and minimize sexual abuse - this after thirty-five years spent

fighting for the victim’s right to live outside the dynamic of

exploitation. “If you’re ignorant to what’s going on around

you, ” said one former prostitute, "or haven’t got the education

to bring yourself out of that, you stay there. And so it

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Basics

becomes from the little go-go dancer to the strip-tease dancer

to the glamorous effect to pornography, [and] coaxing other

women into doing the same thing because I was a strong

woman. Coming from a woman it sounds better, it comes

across better, and I didn’t realize I was doing it until I got the

chance to do some healing. In the long run I was being tricked

into it just like every other woman out there. ”

What does it mean if you cal yourself a feminist, have the

education, and act like a designer-special armed guard to keep

women prostituting?

It is true, I think, that at the beginning, in the early years,

feminists did not and could not imagine women hurting other

women on purpose - being so morally or politically cor upt.

The naivete was stunning; betrayal is always an easier choice.

One follows the patriarchal nar ative by blaming the incest-

mothers, the Chinese mothers who bound their daughters’

feet, the bad mothers in the fairy tales. One did not want to

fol ow the patriarchal nar ative. But is it not the political

responsibility of feminists to figure out the role of female-to-

female betrayal in upholding male supremacy? Isn’t that

necessary? And how can one do what is necessary if one is too

cowardly to face the truth?

The truth of a bad or incapacitated mother is a hard truth

to face. As one woman said, “I was forced to be the head of

the family because my mother couldn’t do it. She was in a

mental institution. ” Another woman said, “My mother was

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Heartbreak

scared for men to be around [because] al my sisters were al

molested by this man, and so she protected us from him, but

a lady came in my life who seduced me and molested me also.

I was twelve, and I thought I was safe. ” So there she was, the

bad mother or the betraying mother or the incapacitated

mother or the unknowing mother; and each had her own sadness or ter or.

Not too many prostituting women got past twelve without

being sexual y abused, and not too many were childless, and

not too many lived lives as teenagers and adults without men

abusing them: “I was into drugs, in the limelights and the

glamorous life, and thought I was bet er than the whores on

the streets ’cause what I did was drove fancy cars and travel

around in airplanes, al this shit, but I was stil in the same pain

as everybody else, [and] instead of using men I started using

women for whatever my needs was. ” The media antifeminists

are not unlike the woman-using prostitutes and the strung-out

mothers - their venom goes in the direction of other women

because it is easier than taking on men. Is this ever going to

stop?

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Immoral

People play life as if it’s a game, whereas each step is a real

step. The shock of being unable to control what happens,

especially the tragedies, overwhelms one. Someone dies;

someone leaves; someone lies. There is sickness, misery, loneliness, betrayal. One is alone not just at the end but al the time. One tries to camouflage pain and failure. One wants

to believe that poverty can be cured by wealth, cruelty by

kindness; but neither is true. The orphan is always an orphan.

The worst immorality is in apathy, a deadening of caring

about others, not because they have some special claim but

because they have no claim at al .

The worst immorality is in disinterest, indifference, so that

the lone person in pain has no importance; one need not feel

an urgency about rescuing the suffering person.

The worst immorality is in dressing up to go out in order

not to have to think about those who are hungry, without

shelter, without protection.

The worst immorality is in living a trivial life because one

is afraid to face any other kind of life - a despairing life or an

anguished life or a twisted and difficult life.

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Heartbreak

The worst immorality is in living a mediocre life, because

kindness rises above mediocrity always, and not to be kind

locks one into an ethos of boredom and stupidity.

The worst immorality is in imitating those who give nothing.

The worst immorality is in conforming so that one fits in,

smart or fashionable, mock-heroic or the very best of the very

same.

The worst immorality is accepting the status quo because

one is afraid of gossip against oneself.

The worst immorality is in selling out simply because one

is afraid.

The worst immorality is a studied ignorance, a purposeful

refusal to see or know.

The worst immorality is living without ambition or work

or pushing the rest of us along.

The worst immorality is being timid when there is no

threat.

The worst immorality is refusing to push oneself where one

is afraid to go.

The worst immorality is not to love actively.

The worst immorality is to close down because heartbreak

has worn one down.

The worst immorality is to live according to rituals, rites of

passage that are predetermined and impersonal.

The worst immorality is to deny someone else dignity.

The worst immorality is to give in, give up.

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Immoral

The worst immorality is to follow a road map of hate

drawn by white supremacists and male supremacists.

The worst immorality is to use another person’s body in the

passing of time.

The worst immorality is to inflict pain.

The worst immorality is to be careless with another

person’s heart and soul.

The worst immorality is to be stupid, because it’s easy

The worst immorality is to repudiate one’s own uniqueness

in order to fit in.

The worst immorality is to set one’s goals so low that one

must crawl to meet them.

The worst immorality is to hurt children.

The worst immorality is to use one’s strength to dominate

or control.

The worst immorality is to sur ender the essence of oneself

for love or money.

The worst immorality is to believe in nothing, do nothing,

achieve nothing.

The worst immoralities are but one, a single sin of human

nothingness and stupidity. “Do no harm” is the counterpoint

to apathy, indifference, and passive aggression; it is the fundamental moral imperative. “Do no harm” is the opposite of immoral. One must do something and at the same time do no

harm. “Do no harm” remains the hardest ethic.

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Memory

Memory became political on the global scale when Holocaust

survivors had to remember in order to testify against Nazi war

criminals. It had always been political to articulate a crime

that had happened to one and name the criminal, but that had

been on a small scale: the family, the village, the local legal

system. Sometimes one remembered but made no accusation.

This was true with pogroms as well as rapes.

There have been Holocaust survivors who refused to

remember, and there is at least one known Holocaust survivor

who is a Holocaust denier.

It has been hard to get crimes against women recognized as

such. Rape was a crime against the father or husband, not the

victim herself. Incest was a privately protected right hidden

under the imperial robe of the patriarch. Prostitution was a

crime in which the prostitute was the criminal no mat er who

forced her, who hurt her, or how young she was in those first

days of rape without complicity. A woman’s memory was so

inconsequential that her word under oath meant nothing.

Now we have a kind of half-memory; one can remember

being raped, but remembering the name and face of the

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Memory

rapist, saying the name aloud, pointing to the face, actually

compromises the victim’s claim. People are willing to cluck

empathetically over the horror of rape as long as they are not

made responsible for punishing the rapist.

Proust’s madeleine signifies the kind of memory one may

have. That memory may be baroque. A regular woman who

has been coerced had bet er have a very simple story to tell

and a rapist dripping with gold lame guilt instead of sweat.

A worker in a rape crisis center told me this story. It

happened down the street from where I live. A woman moved

into a new apartment on the parlor level, slightly elevated

from the street but not by much. She needed to have someone

come into her new apartment to install new windows. The

worker did most of the work but said that he needed a particular tool in order to finish. He said that he would be willing to come back that evening to finish the job. The woman was

grateful; after al , there is nothing quite as dangerously insecure

as an urban apartment near the ground floor with unlocked

windows. He came back; he beat and raped her. At the trial

his defense was that he had been her boyfriend, she had had

sex with him many times, she liked it rough, and as with the

other times this was not rape. She, of course, did not know

him at al .

The jury believed him, which is to say that they had reasonable doubt about her testimony. After al , she could not prove that he had not been her boyfriend, that she had never met

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him before that day. This scenario has to be the world’s worst

rape nightmare outside the context of torture and mass

murder. It was so simple for him.

The point is that once the victim can identify the predator,

once she says his name and goes to court, there is no empathy

for her, not on the part of al the good, civic-minded citizens

on the jury, not from the media reporting on the case (if they

do), not from men and women socializing in bars. She’s got

the mark of Cain on her; he does not. Al the sympathy tilts

toward him, and he has an unchangeable kind of credibility

with which he was born. To ruin his life with a charge of rape

is heinous - more heinous than the rape. No mat er how

many rapists go free, the society does not change the way the

scales of justice are weighted; he’s got a pound of gold by

virtue of being a male, and she’s got a pound of feathers. It

couldn’t be more equal.

People deal with hideous events in different ways, and one

way is to forget them. A forgotten event is not always sexual or

abusive. I worked very hard for years as a writer and feminist.

One night I had dinner with a distant cousin. “I remember when

you used to play the piano, ” she said. I didn’t remember that

fact of my life at al and had not for decades. My life had

changed so much, I had so little use for the memory, perhaps,

that I had forgot en the years of piano lessons and recitals.

I sat stunned. She was bewildered. She insisted: “Don’t you

remember? ” I was blank until she gave me some details. Then

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Memory

I began to remember. In fact, she had remembered my life

as a pianist over a period of decades during which I had

forgot en it.

With sexual abuse, people remember and people forget. The

process of remembering can be slow, tormenting, sometimes

impossible. Aharon Appelfeld thanks the Holocaust survivors

who insisted on remembering when al he wanted to do was

forget. There are at least two Holocaust memoirs about forgetting, and if one can forget a concentration camp one can forget a rape. If one can forget as an adult, a child can surely forget.

I read some years ago about a study in which a mother

chimpanzee was fit ed with a harness that had knives sticking

out; her babies were released into her presence; trying to

embrace her they were cut; the more cut they were the more

they tried to hold tight to her; the more they were hurt the

more they wanted their mother. The research itself is repugnant, but the terrifying story of what happened during it strikes me as an accurate parable of a child’s love, blind love, and

desperate need. Remembering and forget ing are aspects of

needing and loving, not rulers of what the heart does or does

not know. Those who say children are lying when they

remember as adults abuse they endured as children are foolish

- as are those who think children categorically do not know

when they’ve been hurt.

I remember a lot of things that happened in my life.

Sometimes I wish I remembered every little thing. Sometimes

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Heartbreak

I think that the best gift on dying would be if God gave one

that second between life and death in which to know everything al at once, al that one ever wanted to know. For myself, I’d include every fact of my own experience but especial y the

earliest years - and I'd like to know everything about my

parents, what they thought and what they dreamed. I'd like to

know our lineage al the way back, who my ancestors were

and what made them tick. I have a few questions about lovers

and friends, too. At the same time I want to know the truth

about the cel , the galaxy, the universe, where it began and

how it will end. I’d like to know what the sun is real y like -

it’s not just fire and cold spots - as much as I’d like to know

how there can be so much empty space inside a molecule.

I'd like to go back and redo my high school physics class and

real y master the language of mathematics. I’d like to know if

there is a God and what faith means. I’d like to know how

Shakespeare wrote from the inside out. I know that if there are

black holes in the universe, multiple personalities simply

cannot be impossible. In fact they have God’s mark al over

them as an elegant solution to a vile problem - children forced

to live in hel find ways to chop the hel up, a child becomes

plural, and each part of the plurality must handle some aspect

of the hel as if it’s got al of it. This is more complicated than

fragmenting a personality, but there is nothing difficult to

understand. The child becomes many children, and each has a

personality and work cut out for it; each personality helps the

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Memory

child endure. What is difficult is how children are hurt, and

sometimes the denial of multiple personalities, which is, of

course, a denial of memory, is also a denial of sexual abuse.

The story isn’t simple enough to be believed by outsiders, but

the victim has found a way to survive. It’s miraculous, real y.

One ritual-abuse survivor with double-digit personalities told

me to think of her as a small army fighting for the rights of

women. I do.

A memoir, which this is, says: this is what my memory

insists on; this is what my memory will not let go; these

points of memory make me who I am, and al that others find

incomprehensible about me is explained by what’s in here.

I need to say that I don’t care about being understood; I want

my work to exist on its merits and not on the power of personality or celebrity. I have done this book because a lot of people asked me to, and I hope this work can serve as a kind

of bridge over which some girls and women can pass into

their own feminist work, perhaps more ambitious than mine

but never less ambitious, because that is too easy. I want

women to stop crimes against women. There I stand or fal .

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