/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

Memory

I read some years ago about a study in which a mother chimpanzee was fitted with a harness that had knives sticking out; her babies were released into her presence; trying to embrace her they were cut; the more cut they were the more they tried to hold tight to her; the more they were hurt the more they wanted their mother. The research itself is repug­nant, but the terrifying story of what happened during it strikes me as an accurate parable of a child’s love, blind love, and desperate need. Remembering and forgetting are aspects of needing and loving, not rulers of what the heart does or does not know. Those who say children are lying when they remember as adults abuse they endured as children are foolish- as are those who think children categorically do not know when they’ve been hurt.

#enfance #amour

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

Heartbreak

My ideology is simple and left: I believe in redistributing the wealth; everyone should have food and health care, shelter and safety; it’s not right to hurt and deprive people so that they become prostitutes and thieves.

(...)

Men are shits and take pride in it.

(...)

Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you rights, honor, and knowledge because you earn them; but it also takes from you too much tenderness.

(...)

I long to touch my sisters; I wish I could take away the pain; I’ve heard so much heartbreak among us. I think I’ve pretty much done what I can do; I’m empty; there’s not much left, not inside me. I think that it’s bad to give up, but maybe it’s not bad to rest, to sit in silence for a while. I’m told by my friends that it’s not evil to rest. At the same time, as they know, there’s a child being pimped by her father with every­one around her either taking a piece of her or looking the other way. How can anyone rest, really ?

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

Counting

I’m saying that white gets to say, “Yes, it happened” or "No, it didn’t. ” I’m saying that there are always either too many or too few. I’m saying that I don’t count sheep at night; I see in my mind instead the women I’ve met, I see their faces and I can recollect their voices, and I wish I knew what to do, and when people ask me why I’m such a hard-ass on pornography it’s because pornography is the bible of sexual abuse; it is chapter and verse; pornography is the law on what you do to a woman when you want to have mean fun on her body and she’s no one at all. No one does actually count her. She’s at the bottom of the barrel. We’re all still trying to tell the white guys that too many - not too few - women get raped. Rape is the screaming, burning, hideous top level of the rotten barrel, acid-burned damage, what you see if you look at the surface of violence against women. Rape plays a role in every form of143
Heartbreaksexual exploitation and abuse. Rape happens everywhere and it happens all the time and to females of all ages. Rape is inescapable for women. The act, the attempt, the threat - the three dynamics of a rape culture - touch 100 percent of us.

#culture_du_viol

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M
The women

The world gets meaner as prostitution and pornography are legitimized. Now women are the slave population, an old slavery with a new technology, cameras and camcorders. Smile; say “bleed” instead of “cheese. ”

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

The women
(TW)

I found women whose whole lives were consumed by pornography: “I’ve been involved in pornography all my life until 1987. I was gang-raped, that’s how I conceived my daughter, and she was born in a brothel in Cleveland, Ohio”; the child “was beaten to death by a trick - she used to get beat up a lot by tricks. I’ve often wondered if some of the physical damage that was done to her simply [was because] maybe a child’s body wasn’t meant to be used that way, you know. Maybe babies aren’t meant to be anally penetrated by things or snakes or bottles or by men’s penises, but I don’t know for sure. I’m not really sure about that because that’s what my life was. ”

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

Anita

(...) what was wrong with prostituting ?
I told her about my own experiences in the trade, especially about the #dissociation that was essential to doing the deed. You had to separate your mind from your body. Your con­sciousness had to be hovering somewhere near the ceiling behind you or on the far side of the room watching your body. No one got through it without having that happen. I also told her that she’d begin to hate men; at first manipulating them would seem like power, but eventually and inevitably the day would come when one perceived them as coarse and brutal, smelly, dirty bullies. She had said that she liked sex and that she had had sex with the guy who was now trying to pimp her. I told her that the sex with Abbie’s friend was a setup to make her more pliant and that in prostituting one lost the ability to feel, so if one liked sex it was the last thing, not the first thing, that one should do. I told her that most people thought that women prostituted in order to get money for drugs, but it was the other way around; the prostitution became so vile, so ugly, so hard, that drugs provided the only soft: landing, a kind of embrace - and on the literal level they took away the pain, physical and mental.

#prostitution #misandrie #sexe #drogue

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

True Grit

Years later, after watching rapists and batterers go free almost all the time, my pacifism would collapse like a glass tower, leaving me with jagged cuts everywhere inside and out and half-buried as well. I began to believe that the bad guys should be executed - not by the state but by the victim, if she desired, one shot to the head.

#usure #endurance

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

It takes a village

It takes a village of women to nail a rapist

The credibility issue is gender specific: it’s amazing how with all the rapes there are so few rapists.

#me_too #injustice #légitimité #crédibilité

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

The Grand Jury

You tell the truth and people can shit all over it, (...) but somehow once it’s said it can’t be unsaid; it stays living, somewhere, in someone’s heart.

#vérité #justice

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

The fight

I loved Allen Ginsberg with the passion that only a teenager knows, but that passion did not end when adolescence did.

(...)

On the day of the bar mitzvah newspapers reported in huge headlines that the Supreme Court had ruled child pornogra­phy illegal. I was thrilled. I knew that Allen would not be. I did think he was a civil libertarian. But in fact, he was a pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man- Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck children and his constant pursuit of underage boys.

(...)

Ginsberg would not leave me alone. He followed me every­where I went from the lobby of the hotel through the whole reception, then during the dinner. He photographed me con­stantly with a vicious little camera he wore around his neck. He sat next to me and wanted to know details of sexual abuse I had suffered. A lovely woman, not knowing that his interest was entirely pornographic, told a terrible story of being molested by a neighbor. He ignored her. She had thought, “This is Allen Ginsberg, the great beat poet and a prince of empathy. ” Wrong. Ginsberg told me that he had never met an intelligent person who had the ideas I did. I told him he didn’t get around enough. He pointed to the friends of my godson and said they were old enough to fuck. They were twelve and thirteen. He said that all sex was good, including forced sex.I am good at getting rid of men, strictly in the above-board sense. I couldn’t get rid of Allen. Finally I had had it. Referring back to the Supreme Court’s decision banning child pornog­raphy he said, “The right wants to put me in jail. ” I said, “Yes, they’re very sentimental; I’d kill you. ” The next day he’d point at me in crowded rooms and screech, “She wants to put me in jail. ” I’d say, “No, Allen, you still don’t get it. The right wants to put you in jail. I want you dead. ” He told everyone his fucked-up version of the story (“You want to put me in jail”) for years. When he died he stopped.

#dead_men_don't_rape

#ginsberg #pédocriminel #pedophile #68 #beat_generation #tanger #contre_culture #North_American_Man_Boy_Love_Association #peine_de_mort #libertarien #vengeance #haine #meurtre #assassinat #justice

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

It would be a few years before the feminist ferment would begin to produce a renaissance of luminous and groundbreak­ing books; and Sexual Politics by #Kate_Millett did change my life. I was one of the ones it was written for, because I had absorbed the writers she exposed, I had believed in them; in the euphoria of finding what I thought were truth-tellers, I had forgotten my father’s warning that some writers lie. But still, one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know, even Mailer, even Albee.

(...)

These writers, Stein excepted, did not acknowledge women as other than subhuman monsters of sex and predation; and their prose and chutzpah made me a fellow traveler. All one can do is to fight illegitimate authority, expressed in my world by adults, and find a church. Books were my church but even more my native land, my place of refuge, my DP camp. I was an exile early on, but exile welcomed me; it was where I belonged.

#livres #contreculture #beat_generation #city_lights #68 #libération_sexuelle

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

I did get ideas from books: that’s what they’re for. I’ve been astonished by the pro-pornography argument that people are not infl­uenced by what they read or see. Why, then, bother writing or making films ?

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

There was nothing I wanted so much in life as to write the way Plato wrote: words inside ideas inside words, the calzone approach attenuated with Bach

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

Like “do no harm, ” not lying is a big one, a hard discipline, a practice of spartan ethics too often mistaken for self-righteousness.

Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-Militant.pdf
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

The Pedophilic Teacher

there is a specific kind of education the pedophilic teacher gives: the education itself is a seduction, a long, exciting-but-drawn-out coupling, an intel­lectually dishonest, soul-rending passion in which the curiosity and adventuresomeness of the younger person is used as the hook, a cynical use because the younger person needs what the older provides. It may be attention or a sense of impor­tance or knowledge denied her or him by other adults.

(...)
Because most adults lie to children most of the time, the pedophilic adult seems to be a truth-teller, the one adult ready and will­ing to know the world and not to lie about it. Lordy, lordy, I do still love that piece of shit.

#pédophilie #éducation #dworkin

Andrea #DWORKIN Heartbreak The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

Suffer the Little #Children

In Amsterdam I knew a hippie man whose children from an early marriage were coming to stay with him. They were thir­teen and eleven, I think. The older girl had been incested by her stepfather. This came into the open because the older girl tried to kill herself. This she did at least in part valiantly because she saw the stepfather beginning to make moves on the younger girl in exactly the same way he had gradually forced himself on her. The stepfather had started to wash and shower with the younger girl. The mother, in despair, wrote the hippie man, who had abandoned all of them, for help. She wanted to mend the relationship with the second husband while keeping her children safe. The hippie man made clear to those of us who knew him that he considered his older daughter responsible for the sex; you know how girls flirt and all that. His woman friend made clear to him that he was wrong and also that she was not going to take care of the chil­dren. She wouldn’t have to, he said; he would be the nurturer. When the girls arrived in Amsterdam, one recently raped, exceptionally nervous and upset by temperament or contagion or molestation, the hippie man forgot his vows of responsibility, as he had always forgotten all the vows he had ever made, and let all the work, emotional and physical, devolve on his woman friend. She wasn’t having any and simply refused to take care of them. Eventually she left.

One night I got a call from her: the hippie man had given each kid 100 guilders, set them loose, and told them to take care of themselves. He just could not be with them without fucking them, he told her (and them). In a noble and compas­sionate alternative gesture, he put them out on the streets. His woman friend made clear to me that this was a mess she was not going to clean up. I asked where they were.

They had taken shelter in the frame of an abandoned build­ing, squatters without a room that had walls. They lived up toward the wooden frame for the ceiling. Their light came from burning candles. I found them and took them home with me, although “home” would be stretching it a bit. At that moment I lived in an emptied apartment, the one I had lived in with my husband, a batterer. I had married him after I left Benn­ington for the second time (the first was Crete, the second Amsterdam). After I had played hide-and-seek with the brute for a number of months, he decided I could live in the apart­ment he had cleaned out. By then I was grateful even if it meant that he knew where I was. A woman’s life is full of such trade-offs. So when the girls came with me, it wasn’t to safety or luxury or even just enough. The apartment, however, did have walls, and one does learn to be grateful.

The older girl thought that she was probably pregnant. Her father, the hippie man, did light shows, many for rock bands; he had the habit of sending musicians into the older girl’s bed to have sex with her; the younger daughteslept next to the older girl, both on a mattress on the floor. They were wonder­ful and delightful girls, scared to death; each put up the best front she could: I’m not afraid, I don’t care, none of it hurts me.

The first order of business, after getting them down from the wood rafters illuminated by the burning candles, was get­ting the older one a pregnancy test. If she was pregnant, she was going to have an abortion, I said. I’m not proud now of using my authority that way, but she was a child, a real child; anyway, for better or worse, I would have forced one on her. In Amsterdam the procedure was not so clandestine nor so stigmatized. It turned out that she wasn’t pregnant.

One day she was suddenly very happy. One of the adult rockers sent into her bed by her father was going to Spain and he wanted to take her. This was proof that he loved her. I knew from the hippie father that he had paid the rocker to take the girl. Finally I was the adult and someone else was the child. I told her. I told her carefully and slowly and with love but I told her the truth, all of it, about the rotten father and the rotten rocker. Her mother now wanted her and her sister back. I sent them back. Nothing would ever be simple for me again. A strain of melancholy entered my life; it was the fusion of responsibility with loss in a world of bruised and bullied strangers.

#liberation_sexuelle

oh mais dworkin a écrit sur Kazantzakis !!? Le premier texte que j’ai lu d’elle parle de la crète exactement comme lui, dans « la liberté ou la mort », enfin, de l’autre côté du miroir...
►http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Heartbreak-The-Political-Memoir-of-a-Feminist-M

autobio qui n’est pas traduite en français visiblement