Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

282 Pages·2019·1.41 MB·English

by  Andrea Dworkin

Selection and compilation copyright © 2019 by Johanna Fateman and Amy
Scholder. Introduction copyright © 2019 by Johanna Fateman.
Texts by Andrea Dworkin copyright © 2005, 2007, 2014 by The Estate of
Andrea Dworkin. All rights reserved.
This edition © Semiotext(e) 2019
See Permissions on page 405
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.
Published by Semiotext(e)
PO BOX 629, South Pasadena, CA 91031
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Special thanks to Robert Dewhurst and John Ebert.
Cover Design: Lauren Mackler
Back Cover Photograph: Robert Giard, “Andrea Dworkin,” 1992
Layout: Hedi El Kholti
ISBN: 978-1-63590-080-4
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England
Printed in the United States of America
The Radical Feminism of ANDREA DWORKIN
Edited by
JOHANNA FATEMAN AND
AMY SCHOLDER
semiotext(e)
Contents

Copyright
Introduction by Johanna Fateman
Postcard to Mom and Dad, 1973
WOMAN HATING, 1974
Introduction
The Herstory
Androgyny
Woman as Victim: Story of O
Afterword: The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle
OUR BLOOD, 1976
Renouncing Sexual “Equality,” 1974
The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door, 1975
Letter to Mom and Dad, 1978
LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE, 1988
A Battered Wife Survives, 1978
PORNOGRAPHY: MEN POSSESSING WOMEN, 1979–1989
Introduction
Power
Men and Boys
Pornography
Whores
RIGHT-WING WOMEN, 1983
The Promise of the Ultra-Right
LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE, 1988
I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape, 1983
RUINS, 1978–1983
Goodbye to All This, 1983
ICE AND FIRE, 1986
INTERCOURSE, 1987–1995
Preface to Second Edition
Occupation/Collaboration 117
MERCY, 1990
Chapter 6: In June 1967 (Age 20)
LIFE AND DEATH, 1997
My Life as a Writer, 1995
In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson, 1994–1995
Israel: Whose Country Is It Anyway?, 1990
MY SUICIDE, 1999
Notes
Permissions
Acknowledgments
introduction by Johanna Fateman
LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT:
The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin
Black-and-white photos show a hippie couple in a city-hall ceremony in
Amsterdam. The bride is not the Andrea Dworkin we know, who wore a uniform
of denim overalls and sneakers, militant and unmitigated by a single capitulation
to feminine beauty standards. This one is very young, just twenty-two, with
black-rimmed eyes and a chin-length hair cut with bangs. In a letter from April
1969, she writes to her parents in New Jersey about her wedding, “no one gave
me away. in the ceremony we promised to respect each other.”1 In a group shot,
the newlyweds, dressed in embroidered robes (hers Turkish, his Tibetan), stand
seriously at the center of their long-haired friends. Oddly, the groom’s hand isn’t
around Dworkin’s shoulder or waist, but gripping her neck. It’s also on her neck
in the photo of them standing before a canal kissing.2
In New York, the women’s movement was charging forward, still in its first
exhilarating years. Just two months before Dworkin said “I do,” Ellen Willis and
Shulamith Firestone founded the action-oriented radical-feminist group
Redstockings. And soon after, Willis reports, from a fly-on-the-wall perspective
for the New Yorker,3 a group of some thirty women wreaked havoc on an
abortion-law hearing of the all-male New York State Joint Legislative
Committee on Public Health, demanding to testify as the “real experts” on illegal
abortion. Though one day Willis would become Dworkin’s enemy, Firestone
would first become her hero for writing The Dialetic of Sex (1970). And the
Redstockings’ winning tactic—of which their disruption that day was just one
early example—would become Dworkin’s guiding principle, her religion: The
advance guard of the second wave showed that by casting off stigma and shame,
by forcing their stories into the public record, they could open the floodgates of
women’s rage to change the culture and the law.
In September 1971 Dworkin writes home in tall, fast cursive.4 It’s her
handwriting, but not the writer we know. Composed in the aftermath of a
cataclysmic visit from her parents—during which they witnessed her husband’s
rage and saw him hit her; during which she begged them to take her away and
they refused—the long letter is an excruciating document of concealments,
excuses, and apologies—all things she would eradicate from her prose shortly.
By November, she’s living as a fugitive. At her husband’s hands she’s been
disabused—almost fatally—of her faith in the male-led Left. Now she hides
from him on a farm, on a freezing houseboat, or in the basement of a nightclub,
with the help of a new lover. Ricki Abrams brings her books—Firestone’s,
which introduces the concept of the sex-class system, Robin Morgan’s anthology
Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, from the same
year—and together the two women begin to work on one of their own.
In between her letters home, in which she puts on a brave face and asks for
money until she can get back on her feet, Dworkin writes with Abrams about
fairy tales, foot binding, witch burning, and porn. Until finally, in 1972,
desperate and destitute, she agrees to carry a briefcase of heroin through customs
in exchange for a thousand dollars and a ticket to New York. The dope-
smuggling plan falls through, but Dworkin keeps the money and gets away,
carrying with her a ticket to a writer’s life—an unfinished manuscript she’s
thinking of calling Last Days at Hot Slit.
The draft she arrived in New York with would ultimately become Woman
Hating, published in 1974 (Abrams would decide not to be part of the final
version), and this collection is titled for her abandoned idea—chosen to
memorialize her escape, the high stakes of her literary debut, and the
apocalyptic, middle-finger appeal of her prose. It opens with a postcard written
four years after her wedding.5 In New York with Gringo, the beloved German
shepherd she somehow rescued from Amsterdam, she’s divorced and ecstatic,
working as an assistant to the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Dworkin thanks her parents
for their money and solicits their pride, brazenly demanding to be loved for who
she really is—now, the author of a truly incendiary feminist text.
_____
Through chronological selections from Dworkin’s lifetime of restless output—
excerpts from her most infamous nonfiction works and examples of her
overlooked fiction, as well as two previously unpublished works—Last Days at
Hot Slit aims to put the contentious positions she’s best known for in dialogue
with her literary oeuvre.6 An iconic figure of so-called antisex feminism,
Dworkin still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom. In her
singular scorched-earth theory of representation, pornography is fascist
propaganda, a weapon as crucial to the ever-escalating war on women as
Goebbels’s caricatures were to Hitler’s rise. In her analysis of the sex-class
system, prostitution is a founding institution, the bottom rung of hell. And in her
vision of sexual liberation, there’s no honor in squeezing pleasure from the
status quo—s/m is nihilistic playacting founded on farcical consent or craven
collaboration, “Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated.”7
And so, in the feminist insistence that women have the right to make and use
pornography, to choose sex work, to engage in every kind of consensual act
without shame, and to do so as revolutionaries, Dworkin is the censorial
demagogue to shoot down. But nearly four decades after the historic Barnard
Conference on Sexuality, which drew the battle lines of the feminist sex wars—
pro-sex feminists staking out territory for the investigation of pleasure, while
Women Against Pornography protested outside—and nearly three decades since
the ascendance of the third wave signaled her definitive defeat, we hope it’s
possible to consider what was lost in the fray.
This collection is the product of years of conversation. When Amy Scholder,
my co-editor, invited me to contribute to Icon (2014)8—a collection of nine
personal essays, for which each author chose a public figure who influenced,
intrigued, or haunted her—she reignited a teenage obsession of mine, which
proved to be contagious. By choosing Dworkin as my subject, I returned to a
moment in the 1990s, when my discovery of her militant voice fueled my
nascent feminist rage, and when I quickly disavowed her politics with the kind
of clean, capricious break that youth affords. But for Amy and me both, in
reading Dworkin’s books with fresh eyes—measuring them against her lingering
presence in feminist discourse as a symbol, frozen in time at the helm of a failed
crusade—we found much more than the antiporn intransigence she’s reviled or
revered for.
Dworkin was a philosopher outside of and against the academy, one of the
first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary
analysis of male supremacy. With astonishing vulnerability and searching rigor,
she wrote of fucking, whoring, and the atrocity of rape; she wrote without
apology, wielding the blunt, ugly language most appropriate to the bitter subject
matter of her life. And while her work is by no means all autobiographical, her
lifelong, unflinching inquiry into women’s subjugation was founded on a simple
desire: “I wanted to find out what happened to me and why.”9
_____
Born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Camden, New Jersey, in 1946,
Dworkin was raised under the specter of the Holocaust, in the hushed home of a
frequently bedridden mother. Sylvia Dworkin’s heart condition is prominent in
Andrea’s portrayal of her childhood. She and her brother Mark are separated and
sent to live with relatives during Sylvia’s hospital stays; Harry, their father, is
often absent, working two or more jobs so his wife can see the best doctors.
Andrea keeps Sylvia alive through psychic vigilance and peaceful conformity,
she thinks. Conversely, she makes her sicker with the disruptive force of her true
personality.
Childhood is a long, drawn-out loss of girlish illusions, as it becomes clear,
through a series of painful lessons, that her ambitions—to be a poet, to obey only
her instinct for adventure—are categorically male. There’s a mythic dimension
to this narrative: The female hero’s journey is a search for greatness and
meaning, in which rebellion and naiveté alike are punished by stunning sexual
cruelty. And there is no home to return to, transformed or not.
Her life comes into focus through the overlapping accounts of her essays and
fiction. At age nine, left alone for the first time to see a movie, a paperback of
Baudelaire in her pocket, she is sexually assaulted in the dark of the theater.
“The commitment of the child molester is absolute,” she writes, regarding the
incident in My Life as a Writer (1995), “and both his insistence and his victory
communicate to the child his experience of her—a breachable, breakable thing
any stranger can wipe his dick on.”10 Her novel Mercy (1990) complements that
cold indictment with the flustered anguish of a child. Narrated by her first-
person protagonist, also named Andrea, it opens with a long scene in which the
trauma of that day is defined by the twin horrors of the molester’s violation and
her mother’s shame-tinged panic to confirm that “nothing happened,” i.e., that
he only wiped his dick on her daughter, didn’t force it inside.
Dworkin has a book with her when she’s jailed in 1965, too—a volume of
Charles Olson’s poetry. While a freshman at Bennington, participating in the
college’s work program as a volunteer for the Student Peace Union in New
York, she’s arrested protesting the Vietnam war outside the U.N. and held at the
Women’s House of Detention for four days, where she is subjected to a sadistic
pelvic exam, a gynecological rape. Upon her release, bleeding, she writes