Porn Free: Talking To Andrea Dworkin

When Andrea Dworkin speaks, her voice quivers with the fervor of reckoning. “Women,” she says, a hand clutched to her chest, “want to have an interior life. Women want to be able to know what introspection is. Women want to have a self that’s real, not one that’s torn into little pieces and thrown out with the garbage. Women refuse self-annihilation.”

At an address sponsored in part by the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, Dworkin, easily the most vociferous and controversial feminist author and thinker in America today, outlined why the work of the women’s movement is still unfinished.

Of the abuses leveled against women, Dworkin says she has endured nearly all of them: rape, prostitution, battery. Now 55, she has recently published her thirteenth book, a memoir that describes how she went from being jailed for protesting the Vietnam War to launching a crusade against pornography. It is the latter that earned Dworkin and her collaborator, legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, the most infamy: The civil ordinances in which they defined pornography as an actionable violation of women’s civil rights passed in some cities but were subsequently shot down on First Amendment grounds.

The Schlesinger Library’s recent acquisition of Dworkin’s papers was unusual since that library, which customarily receives donations of manuscripts, paid an undisclosed fee for the artifacts. “Radcliffe wanted my papers before they merged with Harvard,” Dworkin told the Boston Globe. “It was like their last bad act...to show Harvard what they thought of Harvard.”

On campus for the speech and book signing, she was less pointed, though no less fiery. “The library may be the quietest place that women ever go, but it’s also probably the most important,” Dworkin told the audience. “When I come to a library like the Schlesinger, I think about intellectual independence for women and girls.”

Dworkin’s prose, like her oratory, is ruthless and uncompromising, driven by an incantatory rhythm. Her anger is untempered, measureless and directed equally at every target. But in a culture where feminists are frequently apologetic in their haste not to offend or be branded man-haters, Dworkin’s defiant stance, however divisive, is nothing if not courageous.

THC: I know you often only get asked about politics. But in this memoir, you talk a little bit about the art of writing as you practice it. What writers have inspired you?

AD: I mentioned a lot of writers in the book, that I read when I was younger, from James Baldwin to Jean Genet. They all had an influence on me; I think Lorca had the biggest influence. Dostoyevsky had a tremendous influence on me. When I was growing up, we didn’t read female writers, they weren’t in print, including Virginia Woolf, including anyone that you might take for granted and read today. We didn’t have them to read. I think the only woman writer that I read in high school was George Eliot, and it was her worst book, Silas Marner. So I didn’t really get to read George Eliot until I was much older and the women’s movement had started.

THC: What about process? What do you do when you sit down to write?

AD: I write regularly. I write at night, I write every night. I consider reading part of my work. I think that what’s most important is not to be afraid of writing, not to be afraid of the text, but to be willing to get involved with language. And in that way, you don’t have writer’s block, you don’t become frightened of writing, you just move forward in a kind of slow, purposeful way. And that’s the way I like to write.

THC: You wrote in your book that you’ve always measured your writing against the admonition: Never Whore. Can you describe whoring when it comes to writing?

AD: When it comes to writing? Writing for money. Writing for the admiration of other people. Writing because you want something other than to write. Writing especially because you want a book that tells a lot. Or you want a make a lot of money. I think I mentioned money. I think that covers it for me.

THC: You’ve said on several occasions, including in your book, that you think rape victims should be allowed to execute their rapists. Is this rhetorical hyperbole or policy proposal?

AD: It’s not rhetorical hyperbole, it’s something I believe. I’ve been a pacifist most of my life, and I’ve been very sad and miserable about any kind of violence. I’ve really rejected violence. But now I’ve reached a point where I don’t see how women can possibly survive if we don’t learn to defend ourselves, and if we don’t learn to retaliate against men who hurt us, I just don’t know what we will do if we don’t do that.

THC: But you see how this is obviously a comment that people will take out of context. How has the way you’ve been vilified in the media affected you?

AD: Well, it’s affected me, but not as much as people would think. You don’t have the kind of experience I’ve had in my life and get easily insulted or easily dismayed because people have something nasty to say about you. I think that you have force yourself to say what you think is true, even when that truth is something that hurts you and you don’t like it.

THC: What do you think people get wrong about you most often?

AD: [laughs]. That I’m violent. People get wrong about me that I’m authoritarian. That’s what they get wrong.

THC: I wanted to ask you about Scapegoat, which was published a year and a half ago. What’s your take on the worsening situation in the Middle East?

AD: It just breaks my heart. Nobody’s going to stop what’s happening in the Middle East until they can deal with the situation of women in both countries. What I said in Scapegoat was that in every country, women are the scapegoats of that country. I think that that’s true in Israel, and I think that that’s true in the area that the Palestinian Authority has control over. I think when we’re talking about the kind of violence that we’ve seen in the Middle East in the last six months, we’re talking about violence in male identity, and what it means. And I think that Arab men have presented us with an extraordinary question, which is, how is it that masculinity sees itself through suicide? I mean, most of the time masculinity sees itself through killing other people, not killing oneself.

THC: On the topic of current events, what do you think should be the top items on the feminist agenda in 2002?

AD: I think rape, battery, pornography and prostitution. And in other countries, female genital mutilation and acid burning of women. In Pakistan, for example, when men want revenge on other men, they will rape the women who are seen to belong to other men. And they will cut off the noses of those women. So all of those kinds of disfigurement and humiliation and sadism, all of those things are the issues that we have to deal with in the coming decade. We just have to. Because if we don’t, women have nothing.

THC: There’s been a lot of discussion on why many young women aren’t identifying as feminists. What do you think the problem is? What do you think feminists should do to mobilize young women?

AD: Well, I don’t really think it’s our responsibility to mobilize young women. I think young women should learn to take care of themselves, and I think that they will. And some of them already do. I know lots of young feminists who are very strong and very militant. I admire them greatly. But I think at some point young women will possibly face losing what we gained. And once you face losing it, you have to make a decision about whether you’re ready to lose it or not. And I don’t think young women are going to want to lose it.

THC: How do you save people who don’t think very much is wrong? What hope is there for sisterhood in that scenario?

AD: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what you do when people don’t think that very much is wrong. I think you try to tell them that very much is wrong. And that’s where first person testimony of women has been so important, because the mainstream will say, oh, that doesn’t happen, and then a group of women will say, well, it happened to me. So it does happen. And I just think that that’s the main issue. The main issue is facing the acts of violence that keep women from having full and generous lives.