OTI: How did Andrea Dworkin become
Andrea Dworkin?
AD: I come from a family with strong
political principles and deep human rights
convictions, so I was brought up thinking
about human rights. My parents were the
first generation born in this country, with
father's parents from Russia and my
mother's from Hungary. My parents were
very concerned about racism, and the Holocaust was a central family experience as all
of our European family was decimated by it.
Our family talked all the time about the
relationship between what happened to the
Jews in Europe and what happened to Black
people in this country.
My father was a school teacher at a time
when only women taught school. It was a
very poorly paid and very feminized profession. He also worked in the post office for
supplemental income. We were poor and
lived in one of those neighborhoods where
the Jews are on one block, the Blacks on
another, and the Irish Catholics are on
another, but we all went to the same school.
It was a very heterogeneous way to grow
while at the same time very strongly rooted
in American Jewish culture. I had a very
hard life as a child, though I must say I was
happy most of the time. Because my mother
had heart disease, my brother and I were
farmed out to different relatives and were
separated a great deal. When you're a kid
and your mother is very sick you grow up
very fast. I had an unusual childhood, but i
was helpful because it did a lot to prepare
me for being a writer.
OTI: What about your role models? Were
there any?
AD: My first role model was my father who
is a very unusual man, being intellectual,
honest and brave. One thing that amazes
me is that people think that I think men are
irredeemable. On the contrary, I think its
incomprehensible that men behave the way
they do, because my father was a very
gentle, loving and nuturing parent. He
served as both parents for my brother and
myself and was also a person of extraordinary loyalty and kindness to my mother. So
it was quite a shock to me when I went out
into the world and found that other people
didn't treat women the same way.
OTI: And your mother?
AD: When she was young, my mother was
one of the earliest members of Planned Parenthood. It was one of her first and greatest passions, a real crusade. By the time I was in the sixth grade I knew women
died from illegal abortions and that it was wrong, even though I didn't have the faintest idea what an abortion was.
I knew that I wanted to stop these deaths,
only I didn't know how, but I thought that there were probably two ways. You could
become a lawyer and brilliantly make the arguments that would change the laws; or you could become a novelist who wrote a
book so incredible that people cried and
couldn't stand it any more. Those are still the two things that interest me most, change
through law and change through books.
My mother is also a model of extraordinary physical courage. Unfortunately, I've
learned nothing from her. I have no physical
courage at all.
OTI: What about literary influences?
AD: I started reading when I was very
young. Most of my original influences are
male writers, male political figures. An early
"literary influence" was Allen Ginsberg. I
read the poets that he liked, and then from those poets I got to Shelley, Byron and
Keats, and when I found Rimbaud I was
hooked for life. I liked the wild writers who
broke all the rules, and even though I
learned more from others, when I was
younger I wouldn't read anyone who didn't
have an apocalyptic message.
OTI: So would you say your politics came out
of the literary tradition of dissidents saying "no"
to societal rules or was it a singular theme
coming from its own place?
AD: It came out of a variety of things. First, it
really did come out of my family, so I was
very surprised when they later viewed my
politics as rebellious. I thought I was just
doing what they had taught me to do. And
also, by the time I was in the 6th grade, I
knew I wanted to be a lawyer. That all
changed when I got arrested and realized I
didn't want to be in that courtroom as part
of that system.
OTI: That was during the protests against the
Vietnam War?
AD: It was one of the earliest at the
beginning of 1965.1 was arrested at the U.S.
Mission to the U.N. in a sit-in. Adlai Stevenson was the United States Ambassador to
the U.N. Stevenson was a great liberal, but
here he was, defending the war and being
the front for American war policy around the
world. I was so outraged that we blocked his
entrance to the Mission. We were arrested,
and I was sent to the Women's House of
Detention. I can remember standing in
court. They wouldn't let us sit down and,
because we had been on a hunger strike in
jail, we were very weak and very tired. They
kept us standing there from nine in the
morning until two in the afternoon.
OTI: That takes a great deal of physical
courage . . .
AD: It was hard, it was awful. It was so
horrible seeing what happened in the court
that I didn't want to be a lawyer anymore. I
wanted to become a citizen who knows how
to challenge the law and I think that is really
what I have become.
OTI: Was it this prison experience that
radicalized you?
AD: When I went into the House of Detention I was 18 years old. It was a notorious
and very brutal prison. Twelve floors of
women who mostly had done nothing.
Before I went into jail, a male protester
who had been arrested and convicted for
everything including theft and rape (he was
a real piece of work) somewhere along the
line had become a pacifist and a nonviolent
activist. He was being very Gandhi-like when
he said to me, "This is a really rotten place
you're going to, so be quiet and remember
everything. When you come out you can do
something about it if you remember." So I
went in there with that assignment in my
head. I can remember sitting there with a
group of women who had been arrested,
and one policewoman pointed at me and
said "Watch her. The quiet ones, they're the
dangerous ones." She could see I was
watching, remembering. All the women
were given internal examinations. You were
body searched constantly and they claimed that they were looking for heroin. They
looked for heroin in every orifice of your
body. Also, they said they had to give you a
medical examination for syphilis. They
never gave anybody a Wasserman but two
doctors gave me an internal examination
that totally brutalized me. It was a rape.
They were male doctors, very sadistic,
having a good time laughing and joking. It's
been 20 years and I haven't forgotten one
detail of it. I started hemorrhaging shortly
after. I was only there for four days. When I
got out of jail I was still bleeding and, being
a woman of my generation, there was a lot I
didn't know, so I kept trying to convince
myself it was my period. After about the
15th day I knew this wasn't my period so I
went home to my parents. They were
furious with me for being arrested. My
mother's reactions were terrible and my
father was more concerned for her health
than mine. I was very badly hurt. That was
the last time I was home. I never again was
a child in my parents' house.
At some point, years later, the prison was
closed, and I've been told that I had something to do with it. I was forced to testify
before the grand jury. The D.A., the famous
Frank Hogan, came to see me the night
before I testified. Mr. Integrity himself said,
"Cooperate with us, do what you're supposed to do and we won't hurt you." So
there I was with this grand jury of 30 people
looking down at me and this district attorney asking me questions like who do you
live with? have you had sex? do you smoke
dope? He'd say, "Have you ever slept with a
man?" and I'd talk about the rats in my cell
at the prison.
The person I remember most was this
funny little guy who was the personal
assistant to Nelson Rockefeller. He was sent
down to tell me that it was all going to be all
right, they were going to deal with it.
He had drawings of a new prison that was
like a camp site for girls. He said to me, "I
swear to you Andrea, I'm going to show you
that the system works." One day he was just
voted out of existence. Gone, along with all
his little drawings of camp. But I did learn
how the system works—it was an
education.
OTI: It seems that you also learned how to
challenge power.
AD: I found that it is always better to fight
than not to fight, always no matter what.
OTI: How did the pornography issue come
into your life?
AD: It came from the prison experience.
Originally, the book that I started on por-
nography was about prisons. One of the
consistent things in literary pornography is
that the woman is always kept in something
that is in fact a prison. Certainly my experience in the Women's House of Detention
was a direct experience of sexual sadism. I
saw those doctors enjoy what they did to
me. I know they got sexual pleasure from it.
When I came out of jail I had a lot of
questions and no way of answering them.
One of the questions was, why does it
matter if a woman's a virgin or not, because
everyone kept asking if I was a virgin. It was
as though, if you are a virgin, then something had been done to you; but if you're not, then nothing's been done to you. The
prison's view was that anybody who wasn't
a virgin didn't have anything to complain
about.
OTI: Do you see any relationship between
pornography and Nazism? Did modern sexual
sadism begin with the Holocaust?
AD: It certainly didn't begin there, but there
is a contemporary celebration of sexual
sadism that's very much related to the
Holocaust. There's an entire European generation of people our age who were raised
by the Nazis. A massive amount of pornography was produced by those people,
who grew up under the Nazi system of
thought, which had a widespread influence
on how people comprehend cruelty and
pain.
At some point between Hitler's speech
and the Jews on the trains to Auschwitz
somebody would have had to intervene.
Hitler came to power legally, he was voted
into power. Goebbels spent a decade using
the courts in the Weimar Republic the way
the pornographers use the courts here to
insist on their rights of free speech. The
Weimer Republic was the closest thing to
the kind of society we have here. Free
speech protections were very strong. Goebbels was taken into court time and time
again for libel, for whatever people could
think of to stop him from doing what the
hell he was doing and the courts usually
came out on his side. The democratic court
in a democratic society said his right to free
speech had to be protected. Now at what
point did speech cause genocide? Because
with the Nazis there is a relationship between speech and genocide.
OTI: There is a relationship between speech
and action but there is also the responsibility of
the people who are listening to the speech to
decide whether or not to act. How much can
you control?
AD: I'm just saying people who talk about
freedom of speech refuse to understand the
power of speech to get people to act. But
pornography in our society isn't something
that can be characterized as just speech.
Pornography is the photographic documentation of a crime against someone. Most
pornography is deeply violative of a
woman's integrity. Some is just objectifying,
most of it has elements of sadism or
violence in it and some shows outright
torture. There is nothing in this society that
enables us to do anything about any part of
that continuum. Pornography also generates
crimes of violence against women. It creates
bigotry, hostility, and aggression against
women. It causes attitudes and behaviors o
sex discrimination, which is, goddam it,
illegal. In addition, in this country if a
woman is raped and the rape is filmed
(which is happening more and more) the
films are protected speech and can't be
taken off the market. You couldn't find a
better example of the courts saying speech
matters and a woman's life doesn't.
OTI: But who makes the distinctions, Andrea?
I'm sure that that's the question that's always
thrown up to you, because there is a fine line
between what is considered erotic and what is
considered pornographic.
AD: I think the Ordinance will become the
solution in the future because women are
either going to solve this problem or women
are going to be destroyed by the pornography industry. We developed a bill that is a
civil bill. It's not a criminal bill, so the police
have no power at all to make any decisions
of any kind. Under the bill there is a very
specific definition of pornography. It's very
concrete and risks missing some pornography in order not to be misunderstood or
misinterpreted. So first there's the definition
of pornography which the material has to
actually meet; then there are four circumstances under which a woman or someone
else who has been hurt (primarily women)
could bring civil suits against pornographers, exhibitors, distributors and sellers.
The burden of proof is on her. If she's been
coerced into pornography, she should be
able to hold the people who coerced her
civilly responsible. She should be able to get
the pornography off the market. The civil
liberties people say she can't touch the
pornography. We say the pornography is
part of what violates her. It's a part of
her rape.
OTI: In a recent interview in ON THE
ISSUES, attorney Harriet Pilpel was quoted as
saying: "You cannot possibly, in my opinion,
prohibit something because it is repulsive to
you or puts in a degrading light one group or
another. That's the same argument that was
made in favor of suppressing 'The Merchant of
Venice' because Shyiock as depicted would aid
the cause of anti-Semitism. It's the same
argument that's been made about suppressing
material which shows the Italians or French or
anyone else in a hostile light. Of particular
interest, with reference to the Indianapolis
case, is that it was tried in the lowest Federal
Court before a young woman judge. It was her
first case. She was appointed by President
Reagan, yet she wrote a most impressive
opinion dealing with freedom of the press and
she decided that the Indianapolis Ordinance
was unconstitutional under our federal free
press guarantees. The case was appealed by
the appropriate Federal Court of Appeals,
which also wrote a superb opinion agreeing
with the District Court. The Supreme Court
upheld the lower court's decision.
So, we have two wonderful lower court
decisions approved by the United States
Supreme Court in essence."
AD: Let's look at these "wonderful decisions". Sarah Evans Barker, a Reagan judge,
said in her decision that sex discrimination
is never more important than free speech.
There have been other decisions that said
you can't have advertisements that say
"men only". That's a First Amendment Right,
that's words. You're not allowed to put up a
sign that says "whites only". That's words,
that's the First Amendment. There are certain kinds of discrimination that have been
found to be more important than the First
Amendment right or free speech. So the
judge was wrong. That was that wonderful
decision. It was then appealed and the judge
who wrote the next wonderful decision is
Frank Easterbrook, who is a right wing
libertarian, appointed by Ronald Reagan.
What he said was that he accepted the premises of the Indianapolis Legislation. He
said that pornography promoted injury and
insult, promoted rape and assault, caused
women to have lower pay in the marketplace and that that proved its power as
speech and, therefore, it was protected. He
then made analogies to the Holocaust and
said that when you live in a free world you
take your chances, sometimes very bad
things happen. That was his wonderful
decision. When pornography is attacked as
male dominance, the right-wing jurists protect the pornography and say to hell with
women's rights. This is what Pilpel's saying
is wonderful.
There are two things here you have to
understand. The first is that the Indianapolis
Ordinance had a different definition of pornography than the Minneapolis Ordinance, a
much narrower definition targeting only
violent and sadistic pornography. These
courts said that the pornography was more
important than women's lives while acknowledging that pornography did all the
harm to women that we said it did. Now, the
only other people who have been treated
this way in the U.S. legal system are Blacks
back when slavery was upheld.
The other thing that these decisions did
was to find a new legal way to make women
chattel. What these decisions did was to say
women belong to men as speech. Real
women being sexually violated or hurt in
pornography legally belong to men as
"speech". If women are speech, men can do
whatever they want to them. Women don't
have rights that are independently theirs as
long as we can characterize the abuses of
them as speech. It's a staggering setback for
women's rights.
OTI: Then this is the thinking behind your
attacks on free speech and the pornographers,
and the basis for the attacks on you for being
a censor?
AD: The argument isn't just that I or other
feminists are for censorship, it's that we're
trying to take these people's sexuality away
from them. When they're talking about
censorship of speech it's almost a euphemism. What they mean is censorship of
their sexuality and their sexuality is based
on dominance and submission.
OTI: But are you trying to censor that?
AD: Well, they're saying we're trying to
censor that.
OTI: Are you?
AD: Other people call it revolution.
OTI: What do you call it?
AD: Nobody can tell me that when a woman
is gagged and hung from something that
this is an expression of free speech. Nobody
can tell me that the use of her body in those
ways can be a protected right of speech for
anyone. Pornography is a significant practice that helps to silence women in society.
It's a practice of terrorism, it's a practice of
intimidation, it's a form of making you know
your place in society. It has incredible effects
on the people who have power over
women; the people who hire us, fire us, give
us grades in school and, in general, also rape us, batter us, commit incest against us
and force us into prostitution. Pornography
says that all those activities of sexual abuse
are legitimate and that we like them, enjoy
them, and have a good time when they do
those things to us.
OTI: Perhaps pornography represents the
Madonna/whore construct. In prostitution and
incest, women are either whores or victims.
Sexual pleasure is not the issue.
AD: No, I think that here we find one of the
few remaining distinctions between Right
and Left in this country (since I think there is
no real political Left anymore in America).
The Right despises the prostitute, but wants
to save her through Christ. There is a
recognition of her suffering in one way or
another. The Left wants prostitution to be a
legitimate way of life for women.
OTI: Because it's their choice of what to do
with their bodies?
AD: That's the rap, but I think what's really
underneath it is a deep hatred of women
that says that's all women are worth. The
rap says when a woman spends her life
being a prostitute, her life is not wasted
because she's a working woman. Like Blacks
picking cotton is working, because they're
doing something appropriate. Remember
that senator from California, George Murphy, who said that Mexicans are the best
people to pick things in the fields because
their backs are closer to the ground? In this
sense, it's natural for women to be
prostitutes.
OTI: So the Left has nature and appropriateness and the Right has God.
AD: Yes. And they're not distinct. These
people can fight each other forever but the
fact of the matter is that God and nature say
the same things about women. That doesn't
leave us with much, which is why we need
feminism, which is neither Right or Left, but,
theoretically at least, about us from our
point of view.
OTI: Many people (liberals in particular) see you
as going to bed with the right wing on the
pornography issue. How do you respond?
AD: I'm not a liberal but I know the problem
with liberals and liberal feminists is that they
will not deal with the realities of power, or
the realities of woman hating in the world.
Aside from the fact that we have no actual
alliance with anyone on the right, have
never taken any money, have not gotten any
help, that the bill was developed in Minneapolis which is an exceptionally progressive city by any standard, aside from all of
that, a rapist doesn't say to a woman
"Excuse me, what are your politics?" The 16-
year-old could be a Reagan fan, but when a
pimp picks her up off the street and puts her
in pornography, she's a woman. It's one of
the great challenges of feminism to deal
with the fact that women of all political
persuasions are treated as women whether
they understand it or not.
OTI: But it goes beyond that. Aside from the
sexual degradation and minimization of
women, there's the money involved. You're
talking about a 10-billion-dollar-per-year industry
that sells sex and sells it big.
Do you feel that you failed in your struggle
against pornography because the Ordinance
was declared unconstitutional?
AD: I feel frustrated and I feel angry but we
certainly didn't expect anything else. We're
not Alice in Wonderland. We didn't think the
courts who uphold the power disparity
between men and women were going to say
"Oh thank you, you've shown us the way."
OTI: But you raised an extraordinary challenge
that continues to be addressed and that's a
wonderful thing.
AD: Absolutely. You have to go into the
courts. When Blacks were fighting for civil
rights and equality, they went into segregationist courts for 50 years before there was a
major success in 1954 with Brown vs. Board
of Education.
You have to go to where the power is. You
have no other way of dealing with the
power that is being used against you except
to confront it where it is and to try to find a
way to explode its contradictions. That's one
of the things that the Ordinance does. It
doesn't just challenge the pornographers, it
challenges this legal system that says it's
against pornography but in effect has been
protecting it. I mean, the obscenity law is the
formula for legal pornography.
OTI: Let's talk about sexuality. Don't you think
that sexuality as it is constructed in this society
is mechanistic and adolescent? One could say
the sexuality of a Penthouse or Hustler is
not so much sadistic as it is simplistic and
mechanistic.
AD: What you're saying is certainly true, but
the turning of a person into an object is an
integral part of creating a system of
violence.
The issue of objectifying women is exceptionally important. We can't look at any form
of systematic violence against people based
on race, sex, or any hierarchical value,
where people are not first turned into objects. The fact that with women this is done
through something that is sexually arousing
and pleasing doesn't change the reality. It
just makes it deeper and more important
because the responses to the object become
physiological responses that are sexual and
sex itself becomes synonymous with
dominance.
OTI: Some feminists are trying to reconstruct
what it means to be a woman and defining it in
terms of the male establishment. There are
some who believe sado-masochism is a form
of liberating self-expression.
AD: We grow up in a sado-masochistic
society, we learn to eroticize power dif-
ferences between men and women, we
learn to eroticize being powerless as
women. Obviously some women have
learned to eroticize being sadists as well,
although not very many. A political defense
of it is something else. To say that sado-masochism opposes the world instead of
being a part of the world as usual is deeply
destructive and a total mind fuck for women.
OTI: A lot of radical lesbian/feminist political
argument against heterosexuality is that it is
impossible to have any equity in heterosexual
relationships because of the power differentials
between men and women. There is an attempt
through lesbian sexual politics to find equality in
sexuality. Do you personally think that's
possible?
AD: It's not my way of approaching it. I have
never felt that lesbians per se were exempt from any of the power hierarchies that men
and women also experience. I think that
being powerless is not good for people, it
hurts and damages them. So when you put
two people who are powerless together, you
don't necessarily get more equality except
that they've both been hurt. Sometimes you
get strength, and sometimes you get political conviction and commitment. Sometimes
for the women themselves there is a tremendous sense of freedom and integrity but
this is no panacea. You solve the problem
out in the world or you don't solve it at all.
People may find many personal islands in
their own lives where they can experience
some kind of reciprocity, and mutuality. I
think some women find it with some men
but it's very hard because in the real world
inequality exists.
OTI: So the separatist argument is not for you.
AD: It's never been a convincing argument. I
really do see it as the ultimate personal
solution and in that sense I reject it. I think
that there has to be a complete change in
gender. I don't think gender is real, I think
gender is constructed. I am about ultimately
redistributing power, and the redistribution
of power means taking masculinity away
from men. So when men say "feminists
want to castrate us", in a sense they're right.
We see the artifice of gender and radical
equality demands the kind of institutional
change that will ultimately destroy gender.
That's what I hope, that's what I work for.
But the problem here is that a lot of
women (especially as things get harder over
time) think that you just envision a better
world and you carry that vision around in
your head and things are better because you
have a better attitude. What I see is that you
destroy male power or male power destroys
you. There is no way to the other side of the
destruction of gender without actually destroying gender. In other words, the institutions of male power are real and this is a
real fight. I think there is real value in social
conflict towards change but women avoid
social conflict.
OTI: They avoid it because they are economically psychologically and financially so dependent on the people who are in power, who are
men. How do you fight an enemy who has
outposts in your head? How do you sell the
idea of revolution and freedom to women who
are now making 60 thousand dollars a year and
don't give a damn about this stuff because
they've got it made?
AD: If there's been any kind of split in the
women's movement over the issue of pornography, it's been between rich and poor.
Pornography is an issue that has mobilized
poor women; the kind of women who have
been in pornography or prostitution, the
women who have been incest victims or
homeless. Women all over the country who
make the 60 thousand dollars a year also
control the media in the women's movement. They are the ones who are saying,
"Shut up, we really don't want the stigma of
this issue on us." Whereas, the poor women
are saying, we have no escape from the
impact of what pornography means in our
lives. It's a real rich/poor issue.
OTI: What about the fact that the pornography
industry helped fund the pro-choice movement?
AD: That's very upsetting. The pornographers have always been politically
smart and Hefner bought a lot when he
gave money to various parts of the women's
movement. He bought loyalty for a very
long time, but the legal fight of feminists for
the right to abortion went down the wrong
track. Right now, since Roe vs. Wade, we
have abortion protected under a constitutionally inferred right to privacy. We never
fought it out on the basis of sex equality and
that's the only way we're ever really going to
have it. What the pornographers used their
money to do was to get the women's
movement to fight it out on a legal basis
that also protects pornography. The right to
have an abortion and the right to read
pornography in your own home (a man's
home is his castle) are protected under the
same legal rulings. The few dissenting
voices in the women's movement who said
this is wrong are really getting screwed. But
that's changing now. Nobody any longer
thinks that the pornographers have women's
rights at heart. People say that we may lose
the right to abortion. What we need is to
have reproductive rights established as a
fundamental civil right, not as an inferred
right of privacy but as a right of sex equality
OTI: What is your vision for the feminist
movement in the future?
AD: I think we have a resistance movement
now, not a revolutionary movement. We
have a movement of people who are resisting male dominance and trying to survive
day by day. They are trying to forge an
understanding of how it works, and at the
same time, trying to leave clues behind for
another generation which is finally going to
do it right and blow the whole fucking thing
up, I hope.
OTI: Then what, blow it up, then what?
AD: We're all so tired. It takes a lot to
sustain the struggle. All those blows to self
esteem that begin when you're so young,
when you're taught second class status,
when you're taught that you're really not
worth very much. Then there is the
egregious and systematic sexual abuse that
women undergo starting from childhood.
Ours is a population of political people who
have been hurt in these ways. How do such
people find the strength and the conviction
to fight for equality?
To me the word "equality" is not a sterile
word; it has a whole lot of resonance, going
back to the French Revolution which was the
first revolution for real equality.
It's amazing to me how little attraction the
word "equality" really has for people. How
they so deeply get their pleasure from forms
of inequality of all kinds. It seems to me that
if a society had real equality, the forms of
sensuality that would exist between people
would be deeper and richer and more
various, less fetishized and alienated.
With pornography, we're talking about the
Left defending commodity capitalism in all
of its forms so that when you defend free
speech, what it means in this country is that
you're defending the right of the people
who have money, who have been able to
buy speech, over the rights of the people
who have been disenfranchised from the
system. The Left is defending NBC's right to
do what it wants, defending the rights of all
the multinational corporations to do what
they want.
OTI: Where does all of this leave or lead us?
AD: It makes me think a lot about the future
and what's going to happen to us. I wonder
if anything that we've done over these years
is going to survive in any form, because in
fact we don't control most of communications. You can watch yourself being written
out of it as you live. I fear for what's going to
happen to what we found out. I would hate
for another generation of women to have to
begin inventing the wheel all over again. I
think we have found out a lot, contributed a
lot, understood a lot despite everything
that's been done to try to make us think that
we have accomplished nothing. I don't know
how much time we all have anyway, none of
us know that, but I just hope that somehow
we've managed to short circuit male dominance so that more generations of women
don't have to be a population of raped
people. I don't want women to have
to suffer.
It's extraordinary to me that feminists do
on some level have a deep commitment to
reproductive rights, but don't have the same
commitment to stopping rape. They think
that they can clean up after it, want to help
the people who are hurt by it, but they don't
think they can stop it and if your goal isn't to
stop it then you'll accept it as an inevitability.
This is the difference between radical and
liberal. I think that liberal feminists say we
have to make our way in this world very
much as it is, and radical feminists are
saying we have to transform this world, we
cannot make our way in it as it is, and I think
radical feminists are right.
People criticize me by saying I dwell too
much on the horrible things that happen to
women. I started out being Utopian but got
beaten down by rape and battery. When you
are part of a movement for social change,
part of what you're doing is trying to pass
information on in ways that will ensure that
women won't be hurt in the same ways that
you were hurt. You try to make life easier for
them and then with that relief, that escape,
that burden that's no longer on their backs,
they should be able to run farther and faster
than ever before.
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