have just been reading these.
FIGHTING TALK
From New Statesman & Society
(London, England)
21 April 1995
Copyright © 1995 by Michael Moorcock and Andrea Dworkin.
Reprinted by permission of Michael Moorcock and Andrea Dworkin.
All rights reserved.
[British novelist] Michael Moorcock talks to feminist activist, theorist and author Andrea Dworkin, and finds her keen to sort out a few false rumours
Michael Moorcock: You were born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1946, had an admired father, went to a progressive school, led the familiar bohemian life of the 1960's, were active in protest politics, were arrested and received unexpectedly brutal treatment--but not as brutal as being a battered wife, stranded in Amsterdam with your monstrous husband, a political radical. Pretty traumatic stuff, Yet you remain, I think, fundamentally an optimist.
Andrea Dworkin: Optimism is what you do, how you live. I write, which is a quintessential act of optimism. It sometimes means the triumph of faith over experience, a belief in communication, in community, in change, and, for me, in beauty. The power and beauty of language. I act with other women to create social change: activism is optimism. I've always believed in art and politics as keys to transformation. Emotional authenticity and, if you will, social progress towards fairness and equality.
I was happy as a kid, although my mother was sick with heart disease, and my younger brother and I were often parcelled out to various family members, separated from each other and my parents. I grew up very fast and very early in all ways. That means I was independent, I did what I wanted. I learned to have a private life when I was very young, and also at different times I had to take care of my brother and mother. I lived a lot on the streets with my friends. It was a big part of my life. My family was poor and all these circumstances meant that I didn't have a stable or middle-class upbringing.
My father was--and is--very special, even back then noticeably different from other fathers: extremely gentle and caring, respecting women and children, listening to us, responding intellectually and emotionally. He worked in what was considered here a woman's job, as a teacher, and he worked at the post office; so I didn't get to see him much. But he was the great heart in our family. It would be hard to overstate how much he had to do with teaching me about human rights and human dignity, also how to talk and how to think.
The progressive school was Bennington, which I went to on a scholarship. I went to neighbourhood schools until college. I didn't think much of them because they were intellectually constricting, demanded conformity, especially for girls. My political life began long before I was arrested for protesting against the Vietnam war. I refused to sing Christmas carols in elementary school and was isolated and punished for it--as well as having "kike" written on my drawings on the bulletin board. In sixth grade, I couldn't decide whether to be a lawyer or a writer. I wanted to change the abortion laws . . .
Michael Moorcock: Your first book was "Woman Hating" in 1974. To make some sort of living from your work, you took to public speaking. This led to "Our Blood", a collection of eloquent and finely written speeches, published in 1976. Where do you come from politically?
Andrea Dworkin: Both my parents were horrified by US racism, certainly by de jure segregation, but also by all aspects of discrimination--black poverty, urban ghettos, menial labour, bad education, the lack of respect whites had for blacks. My father was pro-labour; he wanted teachers to be unionised. He refused a management job at the post office. My mother was committed to planned parenthood, to legal birth control (it was criminal then) and to legal abortion. We had immigrant family members who were survivors of the Holocaust, though most of my mother's and father's families had been killed. So I grew up taking hate and extermination seriously. I read all the time, as much as I could. My mother often had to write me notes so that I could have certain books from the library. After the high school board purged the library of all "socialist" and "indecent" books, I found this cute little book they'd missed called Guerilla Warfare by Che Guevara. I read it a million times. I'd plan attacks on the local shopping mall. I got a lot of practice in strategising real rebellion. It may be why I refuse to think that rebellion against the oppressors of women should be less real, less material, less serious.
Michael Moorcock: You've been described as a radical visionary rather than a practical politician. Do you enjoy politics?
Andrea Dworkin: I find compromise not impossible but incomprehensible. When Catharine MacKinnon and I were trying to pass the civil-rights law recognising pornography as sex discrimination in Minneapolis in 1983, politicians kept talking to me about incinerators. I was bewildered. They'd vote for the civil-rights bill if legislator X would vote to put some incinerator somewhere--not in their district, I think. My eyes would glaze over. Then I'd become enraged. The trade-offs, the pay-offs, sometimes actual blackmail and bribery. I was good at holding the politician's feet to the fire, in private and in public; to excoriate them, to move their constituents, but from a basis of principle. That I can do. I have good practical instincts on where dominant structures are vulnerable. This requires a high tolerance for risk and conflict.
I've always considered writing sacred. I've come to consider the rights of women, including a right to dignity, sacred. This is what I care about. I don't want to give up what I care about.
Michael Moorcock: There's enormous substance and original insight in your work. Yet a book like "Right-Wing Women", a superb analysis of the kind of women presently very prominent in politics, is out of print in the US. Why?
Andrea Dworkin: My novel Ice and Fire has never appeared in paperback here. For years, most of my work was officially out of print or simply unfindable. From when the civil-rights law was passed in Minneapolis until 1990, after I found a new publisher, Pornography could only be bought in northern California, via exceptionally resourceful distributors. There was a long period in the mid-1980's when it was easier to get virtually any book by me in English in Nigeria than in the US. Without belabouring any of this, I think these are the reasons: 1) In the US the pornography industry and the publishing industry see themselves as twin entities engaged in exercising and protecting the same rights in the same way. I stand against the pornography industry; the publishing industry sees me as an enemy. 2) My work is radical. A lot of people, especially the already comfortable, don't like it. Men especially object. Women don't want to be associated with work that brings out unambiguous hostility in men. 3) The left refuses to change, and in order to organise for the equality of women, the left must change. Even to consider, for example, the analysis in Right-Wing Women means reconceptualising what it would take to organise women politically.
Michael Moorcock: Having worked for porn publishers and knowing the trade pretty well, I felt your 1981 "Pornography: men possessing women" offered clear insights into what made me uneasy about porn. Like you, I am an anti-censorship activist, but I didn't like what porn "said". Did you begin with the view that porn is effective propaganda against women?
Andrea Dworkin: Like many women, I think, my life was different from my understanding. I didn't come to feminism until I was in my mid-20's. It's hard for younger women now to understand that women my age didn't have feminism as a movement or an analytical tool. I understood Vietnam right away. I understood apartheid. I knew prisons were bad and cruel, but I didn't understand why the male doctors in the Women's House of Detention essentially sexually assaulted me, or even that they did. I knew they ripped up my vagina with a steel instrument and told dirty jokes about women while they did it. I knew they enjoyed causing me purposeful pain. But there was no public, political conception of rape or sexual assault. Rape rose to being a political issue only when it involved false accusations made by white women against black men.
I prostituted on the streets for several years. I had no political understanding of that, nor even of my own homelessness or poverty. I was battered--genuinely tortured--when I was married, but I thought I was the only woman in the world this ever happened to. I had no political understanding that I was being beaten because I was a woman, or that this man thought I belonged to him, inside out. I came to pornography, which I had both read and used, just as I came to fairy-tales: to try to understand what each said about being a woman. There was the princess, the wicked queen or witch; there was O, there was the Dominatrix. I had somehow learned all that, become all of them; and figured I'd better unlearn some of this shit fast or I was going to be dead soon but not soon enough.
I once heard a pimp say he could turn any woman out but no one could make her stay on the streets. But what happens when you find the inside worse than the outside? What happens when the marital bed with your revolutionary lover/husband is worse than any two-second fuck in any alley? I was a believer in sexual liberation, but more important I had believed in the unqualified goodness of sex, its sensuousness, its intensity, its generosity. I've always loved being alive. I've no interest in suicide, never have had. The battering destroyed me. I had to decide whether I wanted to live or die. I was broken and ashamed and empty. I looked at pornography to try to understand what had happened to me. And I found a lot of information, about power and the mechanisms by which the subordination of women is sexualised. I want you to understand that I didn't learn an ideology. For me, it's been a living journey. I began to examine the use of force in sex, as well as the kind of sadism I'd experienced in prison. I had so many questions, why do men think they own women? Oh, well, they do; here are the laws that say so; here's how the pornography says so. Why do men think women are dirty? Why is overt violence against women simply ignored, or disbelieved, or blamed on the woman?
I read all I could and still found the richest source of information on women's lives was women, like me, who wanted freedom and were willing to fight for it. But a big part of the fight was facing facts; and facts had a lot to do with what men had done to us, how men used us with or without our own complicity. In pornography I found a map, a geography of male dominance in the sexual realm, with sex clearly defined as dominance and submission, not as equality or reciprocity.
"Pornographers have repeatedly published the 'all sex is rape' slander, and it's now been taken up by others like Time"
Michael Moorcock: After "Right-Wing Women" and "Ice and Fire" you wrote "Intercourse". Another book which helped me clarify confusions about my own sexual relationships. You argue that attitudes to conventional sexual intercourse enshrine and perpetuate sexual inequality. Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven't found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?
Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse--it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.
The whole issue of intercourse as this culture's penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the "all sex is rape" slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don't think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.
It's important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the "all sex is rape" slander repeatedly over the years, and it's been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.
Michael Moorcock: What do you say to committed feminists who disagree with your approach to pornography and say porn is merely one manifestation among many of a problem with deeper roots?
Andrea Dworkin: I say solve the problem you think is more urgent or goes deeper. Pornography is so important, I think, because of how it touches on every aspect of women's lower status: economic degradation, dehumanisation, woman hating, sexual domination, systematic sexual abuse. If someone thinks she can get women economic equality, for instance, without dealing in some way with the sexual devaluation of women as such, I say she's wrong; but I also say work on it, try, organise; I will be there for her, as a resource, carrying picket signs, making speeches, signing petitions, supporting lawsuits for economic equality. But if she thinks the way to advance women is to organise against those of us who are organising against sexual exploitation and abuse, then I say I don't respect that; it's horizontal hostility, not feminism. Women willing to let other women do the so-called sex work, be the prostitutes, while they lead respectable professional lives in law or in the academy, frankly, make me sick. I concentrate my energy, however, on uniting with women who want to fight sexual exploitation, not on arguing with women who defend it.
Michael Moorcock: You have been wildly and destructively misquoted. I've been told that you hate all men, believe in biological determinism, write pornography while condemning it, have been censored under the very "laws" you introduced in Canada and so on. I know these allegations have no foundation, but they're commonly repeated. Do you know their source?
Andrea Dworkin: Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and lobbying groups for pornographers. Some of the lobbying groups call themselves anti-censorship, but they spend so much time maligning MacKinnon and myself that it is hard to take them seriously. And it seems to be only defending pornography that brings them out. I would define illiteracy as the basic speech problem in the US, but I don't see any effort to deal with it as a political emergency with constitutionally based remedies, such as lawsuits against cities and states on behalf of illiterate populations characterised by race and class, purposefully excluded by public policy from learning how to read and write. Fighting MacKinnon and me is equivalent to going to Club Med rather than doing real work.
Michael Moorcock: What's your position on free speech?
Andrea Dworkin: I don't think the British understand US law. Here, burning a cross on a black person's lawn was recently protected as free speech by the Supreme Court. It's obviously a big subject, but the First Amendment, which keeps Congress from making laws that punish speech, doesn't say, for instance, that I have a right to say what I want, let alone that I have a right to say it on NBC or CBS. After I have expressed myself, the government isn't supposed to punish me. But women and people of colour, especially African-Americans, have been excluded from any rights of speech for most of our history. In the US it costs money to have access to the means of speech. If you're a woman, sexual assault can stop you from speaking; so can almost constant intimidation and threat. The First Amendment was designed to protect white, land-owning men from the power of the state. This was followed by the Second Amendment, which says, ". . . and we have guns". Women and most blacks were chattels, without any speech rights of any kind. So the First Amendment protects the speech of Thomas Jefferson, but has Sally Hemmings ever said a word anyone knows about? My own experience is that speech is not free; it costs a lot.
Michael Moorcock: What do you think about the current shift to the right in US politics?
Andrea Dworkin: Here, in blaming and shaming the oppressed, the powerless, the left colludes with the right. There's no reason to look to the left for justice, so people look to the right for order. It's pretty simple. The victory of the right also expresses the rage of white men against women and people of colour who are seen to be eroding the white man's authority. The pain of destroying male rule won't be worse than the pain of living with it.
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin ... rview.html
PORNOGRAPHY: MEN POSSESSING WOMEN
by Andrea Dworkin
Copyright © 1989 by Andrea Dworkin.
All rights reserved.
Introduction
1
I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.
--Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave Written by Himself
In 1838, at the age of 21, Frederick Douglass became a runaway slave, a hunted fugitive. Though later renowned as a powerful political orator, he spoke his first public words with trepidation at an abolitionist meeting--a meeting of white people--in Massachusetts in 1841. Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison recalled the event:
He came forward to the platform with a hesitancy and embarrassment, necessarily the attendants of a sensitive mind in such a novel position. After apologizing for his ignorance, and reminding the audience that slavery was a poor school for the human intellect and heart, he proceeded to narrate some of the facts in his own history as a slave. . . . As soon as he had taken his seat, filled with hope and admiration, I rose. . . [and] . . . reminded the audience of the peril which surrounded this self-emancipated young man at the North,--even in Massachusetts, on the soil of the Pilgrim Fathers, among the descendants of revolutionary sires; and I appealed to them, whether they would ever allow him to be carried back into slavery--law or no law, constitution or no constitution. 1
Always in danger as a fugitive, Douglass became an organizer for the abolitionists; the editor of his own newspaper, which advocated both abolition and women's rights; a station chief for the underground railroad; a close comrade of John Brown's; and the only person willing, at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, to second Elizabeth Cady Stanton's resolution demanding the vote for women. To me, he has been a political hero: someone whose passion for human rights was both visionary and rooted in action; whose risk was real, not rhetorical; whose endurance in pursuing equality set a standard for political honor. In his writings, which were as eloquent as his orations, his repudiation of subjugation was uncompromising. His political intelligence, which was both analytical and strategic, was suffused with emotion: indignation at human pain, grief at degradation, anguish over suffering, fury at apathy and collusion. He hated oppression. He had an empathy for those hurt by inequality that crossed lines of race, gender, and class because it was an empathy animated by his own experience--his own experience of humiliation and his own experience of dignity.
To put it simply, Frederick Douglass was a serious man-- a man serious in the pursuit of freedom. Well, you see the problem. Surely it is self-evident. What can any such thing have to do with us--with women in our time? Imagine-- in present time--a woman saying, and meaning, that a man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing her. Suppose there were a politics of liberation premised on that assertion--an assertion not of ideology but of deep and stubborn outrage at being misused, a resolute assertion, a serious assertion by serious women. What are serious women; are there any; isn't seriousness about freedom by women for women grotesquely comic; we don't want to be laughed at, do we? What would this politics of liberation be like? Where would we find it? What would we have to do? Would we have to do something other than dress for success? Would we have to stop the people who are hurting us from hurting us? Not debate them; stop them. Would we have to stop slavery? Not discuss it; stop it. Would we have to stop pretending that our rights are protected in this society? Would we have to be so grandiose, so arrogant, so unfeminine, as to believe that the streets we walk on, the homes we live in, the beds we sleep in, are ours--belong to us--really belong to us: we decide what is right and what is wrong and if something hurts us, it stops. It is, of course, gauche to be too sincere about these things, and it is downright ridiculous to be serious. Intelligent people are well mannered and moderate, even in pursuing freedom. Smart women whisper and say please.
Now imagine Cherry Tart or Bunny or Pet or Beaver saying, and meaning, that a man who expected to succeed in whipping must also succeed in killing her. She says it; she means it. It is not a pornographic scenario in which she is the dummy forced by the pimp-ventriloquist to say the ubiquitous No-That-Means-Yes. It is not the usual sexual provocation created by pornographers using a woman's body, the subtext of which is: I refuse to be whipped so whip me harder, whip me more; I refuse to be whipped, what I really want is for you to kill me; whip me, then kill me; kill me, then whip me; whatever you want, however you want it--was it good for you? Instead, the piece on the page or in the film steps down and steps out: I'm real, she says. Like Frederick Douglass, she will be hesitant and embarrassed. She will feel ignorant. She will tell a first-person story about her own experience in prostitution, in pornography, as a victim of incest, as a victim of rape, as someone who has been beaten or tortured, as someone who has been bought and sold. She may not remind her audience that sexual servitude is a poor school for the human intellect and heart--sexually violated, often since childhood, she may not know the value of her human intellect or her human heart--and the audience cannot be counted on to know that she deserved better than she got. Will there be someone there to implore the audience to help her escape the pornography--law or no law, constitution or no constitution; will the audience understand that as long as the pornography of her exists she is a captive of it, a fugitive from it? Will the audience be willing to fight for her freedom by fighting against the pornography of her, because, as Linda Marchiano said of Deep Throat, "every time someone watches that film, they are watching me being raped" 2 ? Will the audience understand that she is standing in for those who didn't get away; will the audience understand that those who didn't get away were someone--each one was someone? Will the audience understand what stepping down from the page or out of the film cost her--what it took for her to survive, for her to escape, for her to dare to speak now about what happened to her then?
"I'm an incest survivor, ex-pornography model, and ex-prostitute," the woman says. "My incest story begins before preschool and ends many years later--this was with my father. I was also molested by an uncle and a minister . . . my father forced me to perform sexual acts with men at a stag party when I was a teenager. . . . My father was my pimp in pornography. There were three occasions from ages nine to sixteen when he forced me to be a pornography model . . . in Nebraska, so, yes, it does happen here." 3
I was thirteen when I was forced into prostitution and pornography, the woman says. I was drugged, raped, gang-raped, imprisoned, beaten, sold from one pimp to another, photographed by pimps, photographed by tricks; I was used in pornography and they used pornography on me; "[t]hey knew a child's face when they looked into it. It was clear that I was not acting of my own free will. I was always covered with welts and bruises. . . . It was even clearer that I was sexually inexperienced. I literally didn't know what to do. So they showed me pornography to teach me about sex and then they would ignore my tears as they positioned my body like the women in the pictures and used me." 4
"As I speak about pornography, here, today," the woman says, "I am talking about my life." I was raped by my uncle when I was ten, by my stepbrother and stepfather by the time I was twelve. My stepbrother was making pornography of me by the time I was fourteen. "I was not even sixteen years old and my life reality consisted of sucking cocks, posing nude, performing sexual acts and actively being repeatedly raped." 5
These are the women in the pictures; they have stepped out, though the pictures may still exist. They have become very serious women; serious in the pursuit of freedom. There are many thousands of them in the United States, not all first put in pornography as children though most were sexually molested as children, raped or otherwise abused again later, eventually becoming homeless and poor. They are feminists in the antipornography movement, and they don't want to debate "free speech." Like Frederick Douglass, they are fugitives from the men who made a profit off of them. They live in jeopardy, always more or less in hiding. They organize to help others escape. They write--in blood, their own. They publish sometimes, including their own newsletters. The demonstrate; they resist; they disappear when the danger gets too close. The Constitution has nothing for them--no help, no protection, no dignity, no solace, no justice. The law has nothing for them--no recognition of the injuries done them by pornography, no reparations for what has been taken from them. They are real, and even though this society will do nothing for them, they are women who have resolved that the man who expects to succeed in whipping must also succeed in killing them. This changes the nature of the women's movement. It must stop slavery. The runaway slave is now part of it.
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/PornIntro1.html
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