Letters From a War Zone
Dworkin, Andrea
LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE: WRITINGS 1976-1989 Andrea Dworkin/E. P. Dutton/337 pp. $18.95 Florence King Mothers of book reviewers' are famed for advising their young, "If you can't say something...
...and Intercourse, an oddly decorous title for a radical feminist, in which she defines the sex act as a "scarring, hurting, jagged edge of pain and grief," and delivers herself of a comparison that ranks as a classic Dworkinism: "Intercourse and women's inequality are like Siamese twins, always in the same place at the same time, pissing in the same pot...
...In 1975, at the height of the feminist movement, she received an invitation from the ACLU on letterhead studded with the names of prominent women...
...I began reading this book in the spirit of such unabashed prejudice that I was, even prepared to blame Andrea Dworkin- for the Orioles' loss of the American League East, but now I like her...
...It's their form of charity work...
...A collegiate Law Review editor who got a lump in his throat whenever he thought about the First Amendment insisted on major changes in a piece she wrote for him, and turned it down when she refused to make them...
...Union...
...I am asking you to help the exploited, not the exploiters...
...She is the author of such sanguinary non-fiction works as Woman Hating...
...I am tired of the sophistry of the ACLU and also of its good reputation among progressive people...
...By securing property, life and liberty can scarcely fail of being secured: where property is safe by rules and principles, there is liberty, for the objects and motives of tyranny...
...Describing the warm reception she got at a Toronto symposium on porn and media violence, her bemused innocence is almost comical...
...e]xiting from the plane, I was, in the crush, felt up quickly but definitively by one of the men who had been trailing me...
...The longer they wait, the more they drink...
...She also published a novel, Ice and Fire, wherein intercourse becomes "coitus" ("Coitus is the punishment for being a woman"), and a chapter _epigraph is taken from Baudelaire: "Don't look for my heart any more...
...Having been followed, harassed, and "seductively" called dirty names, [by] readyto-pounce men...
...In 1981, still on the ACLU's mailing list, Dworkin received a fund-raising letter signed by none other than Mr...
...The First Amendment absolutists operated precisely on unembodied principle...
...Her critique of Wuthering Heights veers off into a tortured examination of racism simply because Heathcliffwas swarthy and described as a "gypsy brat...
...Letters From a War Zone is an extremely discrete collection of articles and literary criticism written over the past thirteen years...
...There is nothing as dangerous as an unembodied principle: no matter what blood flows, the principle comes first...
...The pornographers give them lots of money," Dworkin says...
...Although she had only earned $1,679 that year, she sent them a $15 membership fee...
...One of the early pieces, a 1978 self-interview intended to parody themany self-interviews of Norman Mailer, does not come off...
...And what were the Nazis and the Klan, I asked myself...
...Chopped liver...
...There are enough references to incest for a small monograph called The Uncle From M.A.N., as well as a trite bow to those famous "ancient matriarchies" that came into being in the early 1970s when feminists took up anthropology a go-go and drained Atlantis...
...But I can't...
...I panned Intercourse and Ice and Fire in a dual review in Newsday three years ago and fully intended to do another hatchet job on Letters From a War Zone...
...Accusing them of the old "bait and switch" scam, she demanded and got her money back...
...Her continuing attacks on capitalism and her insistence that property rights are somehow at odds with human rights fly in the face of.Fisher Ames's dictum...
...In the stark Q&A duel, undecorated with exposition, she rises to such Boudicean heights of dignity and fighting spirit that a priest on the commission, the Rev...
...than my I.Q...
...I believe that this speech was a breakthrough in reaching right-wing women...
...One feminist in particular has always struck' me as such a threat to the Edenic arrangement that she calls to mind the childhood rhyming game that left the unwary in pain: "Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me-Tight/ went down-to the river to have a fight/ When Adam and Eve were swept out of sight/Who was left...
...Bruce Ritter, thanked her for her "extraordinary and very moving testimony...
...are removed...
...As men wait, they drink...
...In a merciless essay, "The ACLU: Bait and Switch," she tells the story of how she was snookered into joining the organization...
...She also casts a cold eye on the claim of professional Helpists that pornography cures frigidity and impotence and saves marriages...
...Pornography is now used in increasing numbers of medical schools and other institutions of higher learning that teach 'human sexuality' . . . its apologists are everywhere...
...Among other things, it founders on Dworkin's wish that she could go back in time and sleep with George Sand to save her from all those men, and sinks like a stone with the statement, "I wish Bella were King...
...And the reality is that that constituency who went so long without lettuce, who went so long without grapes, consumes pornography and defends pornography...
...After a few hours, an airport on a stormy day is filled with drunken, cruising men who fix their sloppy attention on the few lone Women...
...Its fight is not against the Right in any form, including the Moral Majority or opponents of the...
...She still indulges in occasional Dworkinese: "On the pedestal, immobile like waxen statues, or in the gutter, failed icons mired in shit...
...Prophecies and-Discourses on Sexual Politics...
...Now that I've "caught up," as they say in affirmative-action circles, the only thing traveling men want from me is the aisle seat...
...Dworkin does not seem to realize—or perhaps want to realize—just how conservative she has become...
...In the next few years, the ACLU castigated anti-porn feminists for their "contempt of free speech" and rushed to defend pornographers, as well as Na7i.c and the Ku Klux Klan...
...Misogyny, stupidity, and the arrogance of children aside, this editing business 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 has gotten out of hand...
...Finally, she persists in the sophomoric spelling of "Amerika" that long ago became one of her trademarks...
...The audience was mostly right-wing...
...The Nazis and the Klan they help on principle...
...The stern purity with which Dworkin views her calling serves as an inspiration to conservative writers in a liberal-dominated industry: "Writers get underneath the agreed-on amenities, the lies a society depends on to maintain the status quo, by becoming ruthless, pursuing the truth in the face of intimidation, not by being compliant or solicitous...
...Books by feminists usually bring out the dutiful daughter in me...
...As they say in the soaps, I tried, God knows I tried, but once I got into this book I kept running up against an indisputable fact: Andrea Dworkin emerges here as a Florence King's last book, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, is a Literary Guild selection...
...Equal...
...While we feminists piddled around, the ACLU wasdoing the serious business of defending freedom...
...Calling them "radical boy lawyers" with "aging penises" who are "afraid that feminists are going to take their dirty pictures away from them," she heaps scorn on their monomaniacal defense of First Amendment guarantees of free speech, and demolishes their fashionable leftist claim that porn is socially redeeming and culturally valuable by pointing out that the days of erotically decorated Grecian urns are over: When pornography was in fact writing, etching, or drawing it was possible to consider it something exclusively cultural, something on paper not life...
...It never happened to me, not even back when my weight was twenty pounds lower...
...In her assessment of this run-around Dworkin manifests a refreshingly unfeminist dry wit: "Why did I have to run this gauntlet to get this essay in print...
...Its fight is for an absence of distinctions...
...It is time for the ACLU to come clean...
...Once she had joined, _however, the subsequent letters she received were written on stationery containing -nothing but male names...
...Dworkin's description of sexual harassment in a snowbound airport in 1978 throbs with feminist obsessiveness: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 43 Most of the bored passengers-to-be are men...
...She then submitted the piece to the anti-censorship Harvard Women's Law Journal, who tried to censor it further and eventually forced her to make some compromises...
...Most of the articles are about Dworkin's work in the anti-obscenity organization Women Against Pornography, and the "Take Back the Night" marches the group has staged against porn shops and theaters showing "snuff" movies in which women are raped and tortured...
...Martin's Press...
...it has become police work for liberals...
...A companion volume, Lump It or Leave It, will be published in 1990 by St...
...All this is not to say that Letters From a War Zone is without fault...
...I am asking you as individuals to have the courage, because I think it's what you will need, to actually be willing yourselves to go and cut that woman down and untie her hands and take the gag out of her mouth, and to do something, to risk something, for her freedom...
...McGovern's letter claims...
...Where is the famous humanist outcry...
...Dworkin's difficulties in getting articles past editors who abhor censorship are legion...
...Why is this always happening to radical feminists...
...an outcry that we might expect if dogs or cats were being treated the same way...
...Reading it, one could only believe the passion and purpose of the ACLU was to triumph over the terrible and terrifying Right...
...Nonetheless, I can't remember when I have been so happy to be wrong about someone...
...Dworkin's-bete noire is the American Civil Liberties...
...The letter said that the ACLU was fighting the Right, the Moral Majority, the Right to Life Movement, the New Right, and the evangelical Right...
...And as for the eminence grise that wraps the fish: "I have never been able to publish anything on the op-ed page of the New York Times, even though I have been attacked by name and my politics and my work have been denounced editorially so many times over the last decade that I am dizzy from it...
...Challenged on her belief in an organized boycott of pornography, she replied in words that warm the cockles of a right-wing heart: I grew up in an era when people were prepared not to eat lettuce, not to eat grapes, not to eat tuna fish under certain ci—imstances when the tunas weren't being caught the right way...
...The essay "Pornography Is a Civil Rights Issue" contains her testimony before the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in 1986, when feminist supporters of the "sexual revolution" and representatives of Penthouse, who sat with ACLU lawyers, heckled her as she spoke...
...Since the invention of the camera, any such view of pornography is completely despicable and corrupt...
...Our Blood...
...Rights Amendment (as Mr...
...These are Teal women being tied and hung, gutted and trounced on, whipped and pissed on, gang-banged and hit, penetrated by dangerous objects and animals...
...rock 'em, sock 'em Carrie Nation who has won my admiration and respect...
...McGoo himself, George McGovern...
...Her opinion of "mainstream" feminism certainly reaches right-wing women—it's the same opinion held by Phyllis Schlafly: "In the United States, there is a feminist establishment, twenty years in the making, media-created and media-controlled, that is fairly corrupt, bought out by the privilege of its own prominence...
...A welter of early-feminist psychobabble (dominance, vulnerability, androgynous ideal) obscures what was very likely the simple truth: having been abandoned on the streets of Liverpool, Heathcliff was probably Black Irish like the Brontes themselves...
...Dworkin contends that the ACLU doesn't even know the difference between the right and left because it does not know the meaning of distinction...
...As for the endless academic research about the effects of pornography, Dworkin, who describes herself as a self-educated writer, replies with the horse sense so often found in people who did not go to college: "I am entirely outraged that someone has to study whether hanging a woman from a meat hook causes harm or not...
...18.95 Florence King Mothers of book reviewers' are famed for advising their young, "If you can't say something nasty, don't say anything at all...
...the beasts have eaten it...
...I.e., if you can't seize property, why bother...
...I am happy to say that the audience responded with a very long, loud, standing ovation...
Vol. 23 • January 1990 • No. 1
