On Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant:
An Interview with Andrea Dworkin

BR: In your chapters on the Left and on the murder of Petra Kelly (the founder of the Green Party) by her lover, you described experiences of confronting intense sexism within activist organizations. What more can you communicate to women and girls about the possibilities or problems of working with male activists or with the contemporary Green Party?

AD: Well, working with male activists, you’ll always confront some kind of deep-seated double standard or misogyny. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it, but do it with your eyes open. There’s a tendency that many of us have, I include myself—to romanticize men who are on our side or who claim to be on our side. My view has always been about this, that we know them by what they do, not by what they say. Not that words aren’t important, but it’s easy enough to be a sympathizer with feminism and in particular a sympathizer with a particular feminist without making any kind of material contribution. I think that it’s on the level of material contributions that men need to be known by feminist women.
     My experiences with the Green Party in Germany were very bad ones. I was on a panel,—I think my book on pornography was being published in German--- and it was a huge audience of about a thousand people, and I’m told there were two thousand more outside wanting to get in. The Green Party had said that they would send one of their top political honchos but instead they sent this stoned, unknowledgeable woman, who was just high as a kite, and all she had to say was that we should be making our own pornography. Now that’s become a material reality in the United States—there are women who are making their own pornography. To have that as a position, especially in the face of Petra Kelly’s leadership—she was so against pornography, and for all the right reasons…
     The Green Party in the United States may be organized with different people and it may be necessary to vote for some of those people, cause it’s the best option if you want to vote. But you have to look deeper than just what Ralph Nader presents. You have to ask yourself why you never saw the candidate for vice-president (Winona LaDuke) was a woman, why she never was the one interviewed. You have to look at their plank and see—is it a feminist one or is it not? And you know, nothing takes the place of knowledge.

BR: Your descriptions of anti-Semitism and Christian dominance in your educational experience and neighborhood and in your time in Greece were really powerful and frightening to read. Your previous book, Scapegoat, engaged with Jewish identity and women in really powerful ways as well. What do you want your readers to understand about the impact of anti-Semitism in shaping your feminist politics and about the relationship between anti-Semitism and sexism?

AD: The importance that it had for me was that I found out about the Holocaust when I was very young, and before American Jews talked about it, and they certainly didn’t talk about it in front of children. I’ve written about that I think in an essay in Life and Death, where I went to an aunt’s house—I just called her an aunt, but she was actually a cousin—and she was bouncing off the walls. It was April, and that was the month that was hardest for her. She was a survivor of all the concentration camps on Schindler’s list, but she was never one of Schindler’s Jews, and so she also had the experience of the death march from Auschwitz. She had what we now call flashbacks. She was re-living what had happened to her, and she was telling me about it, and I was ten. She was describing it for me. I didn’t have any intellectual barriers to it, so I could see what she was describing. So, I knew things about the Holocaust that at that time other people in the United States didn’t know, and it always made me feel very strongly about torture, about human rights. It set me off in the direction of wanting to do something about what I call social sadism. You know, accepted sadistic acts against people.
      It was a very long time before gender figured into that, because when I was growing up, there was no women’s movement. Most of the books that were in print in the last thirty years by women were not in print when I was growing up. I mean, you pretty much read male writers. In the literature classes I studied, which were all honors literature, George Elliott was the only woman writer—and it was her worst book, Silas Marner, that we studied. So I was put off her for life, also because of the way we studied it. It wasn’t until I was running from the man who battered me, to whom I was married, that I encountered women who were feminists. They were the only people prepared to help me. And that was a real kind of shock. One woman in particular was very influential on me, and she gave me books to read. What I saw, when I began to understand that the way I was being treated was not personal in any sense, was that there was a kind of hatred of women that was not unlike the hatred of Jews during the Holocaust. Even though the aggression and the sadism were channeled differently, they were of the same family, of the same species of social hatreds. So, it’s basically through the prism of anti-Semitism that I began to understand gender.

BR: Relative to your high school and college education, you’ve described this predatory, emotionally and sexually exploitative dynamic between male professors and female students. What can feminists do to resist and end the sexual exploitation--- or the sexist exploitation—of youth within education?

AD: Boy, that is so hard! That is such a hard question. The high school teacher that I described in Heartbreak was also the only one who would answer questions honestly or with some degree of recognizing you as an intelligent human being who was curious. Then he took advantage of that curiosity by turning it to sex, in particular sex with him. In the college that I went to, the faculty were parasites on the student body. The faculty being mostly male—almost all male—and the students being almost all female, that was taken as just par for the course. It was just considered normal. In my generation, a lot of us who were rebellious took that to be the right way to do things. We wanted to be seen as adults, and we wanted adult relationships with people. We were disgusted by being treated like children, even when we were children. There will always be predatory men who are good at exploiting the vulnerabilities of much younger people. Hopefully with feminism, there won’t be as many of them, it won’t be such a way of life. But for now, there are these manipulative men, and children are easy to manipulate. At some point it hits you—probably when you’re not so young and pretty anymore—that you’ve been used a lot by men who really don’t care about you, but only about themselves. In terms of what to do about it, as far as I can see, it’s like the sunshine laws in politics. The only thing you can do about it is be honest with kids, instead of trying to sugarcoat childhood and pretend that it’s a time of total innocence that shouldn’t be marred by knowledge. You have to really be honest with children about the kind of world they live in, not in a way that frightens them, but in a way that just doesn’t lie to them.

BR: If you were speaking to a room of teenage girls, what would you say to them about survival, and sexuality, and men?

AD: Survival and sexuality and men… well, first of all, I probably would never be asked to speak to a room of teenage girls, so there are problems I don’t have to solve. (laughter) But what I would tell them would be about the exploitation of women. And I would tell them about having more pride than to do anything just because a man tells you that he loves you or he wants to have sex with you. Try to find that thing inside that tells you what you really want to do, what choice you really want to make—and to see yourself as the choice-maker. Also realize that the world is bigger than you are, and you can’t fight it only as an individual. You have to fight it politically, as part of a movement, while at the same time, always honoring your own individual integrity. I would point out that most teenage girls who get pregnant are pregnant, the Justice Department says, by men who are very much older than they are—in their late twenties and early thirties. Those men have no sense of responsibility towards the offspring. They are breaking the law, because they are not supposed to have sex with those girls, and men often exploit women for sex. Now what some teenage girls would do would be to say: "but none of that’s true about me. You know, it might be generally true, but that’s not the way he is with me." I would say that it’s more likely to be true than not, and they would leave, believing probably what they believed when they came into the room, but later, they would remember it, and it would make a difference.

BR: In your chapter on talking with Anita Hoffman (who was married to Abbie Hoffman)--- helping talk her out of prostitution, you describe realizing that your experiences in surviving prostitution and your knowledge of sexual violence could help other women and girls. Since then, have you drawn on your experiences of prostitution in your feminist work?

AD: Well, I draw on it by writing about it--- by writing about prostitution in general, and by acknowledging my own experience with it. The BBC made a documentary of a group of prostituted women out in Oregon with whom I had very long conversations. Those conversations were filmed and edited. I have a transcript of the whole thing—seven or eight hours. That transcript is now in the Schlessinger library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have been able to network with women who are trying to get out of prostitution or have in some way or another put it behind them—and that includes famous women like Linda Marciano (aka Linda Lovelace) who just died recently, and it includes women that nobody has ever heard of, who feel like they are nobody, and other feminist activists who have had the experience. So it’s become an important part of my life. I didn’t feel that I could publish a book without going into the experience of prostitution. And that may be part of what puts people in general off about this book. They seem to find that it’s a book about sexual abuse. It’s not, really. But the last third of it certainly is about prostitution, and I felt a responsibility to do that.

BR: You’ve been the trusted recipient of so much individual testimony about sexual violence. What has it meant to you to hear and carry those stories?

AD: It’s been very hard. I still honor that women have trusted me as much as they have, women I don’t know. When I travel, I usually find that I could go to any city in the United States, and there would be a group of women who cared about whether I lived or died. That warms my heart—that obviously would make anybody feel very good. And, it validates my work. But, it’s like living inside a nightmare that doesn’t stop, and that’s really the point, that it doesn’t stop.
      People make their efforts to do what they can do, and then there’s always a reaction against those efforts that really defies rationality. I was just reading about a new book put together by Wendy McElroy, who wrote XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography. It’s called Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. And it’s pretty much all very reactionary pro-prostitution, pro-pornography writers who are in this book. They say that what happens to women who are exploited in this way is a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s very hard to have women so staunchly defending these sadistic uses of women. It makes everything harder, because I feel responsible to the people who talk to me—not for them, but to them.

BR: In your chapter, "Sister, can you spare a dime?", you described how the leadership of the National Organization for Women sicced the police on a protest of the sex industries by poor women in 1984. What has been your perception or experience of the NOW since then?

AD: I haven’t had many. Every now and then, a local chapter invites me to speak, but not very often anymore. I have nothing to do with NOW. I’m a member, but I have nothing to do with it.

BR: What do you want to communicate to upcoming feminist writers?

AD: It’s funny, I’m working on an essay on writing right now. So I’ve been thinking about it a great deal.
      The marketplace beats you down so that you dilute your work. I care about the writers who resist that. It’s a very hard road to go… to keep writing. I don’t think anybody should become a writer professionally unless there’s absolutely nothing else in the world that they want to do, and they feel both driven and committed to writing as such. I think that reading is really important for writers. There are two ways you learn how to write. One is by writing, and the other is by reading. And, unfortunately, our educational system inculcates in people a real fear of reading—a desire not to read. In the American ethos, anything you write has to have a happy ending, or be exceptionally optimistic. And, of course, most writing in the world is not like that. But those are the demands of the U.S. marketplace, and if you don’t do that, you’re going to have a terrible time. What I recommend is that the only people who should write are the ones who are determined to say what they think is true. And then one hopes that they don’t think it’s true that Blacks should be killed or Jews should be killed. Those people are "sincere" as well—and committed, and driven.
      So I think that one has to have in one’s mind a vision of change, and then one has to find the right part of that vision that goes with one’s own sensibility, and write about that. Make that your theme. Most writers write about only a couple of things, and they do it in different ways all the time. Feminists are accused of being limited, but it’s a fact that that’s what most writers do. Writing is very hard work. You have to do something else that most women have trouble doing; you have to be willing to be alone a lot. For most women, that’s the single hardest thing to do. What I suggest for women who want to be writers is face the facts. Use your optimism to fuel your writing, not necessarily as the substance of your writing, but to fuel your ability to work. And… be determined to hang on.

BR: What are you working on next?

AD: I’ve started something. I don’t know if I’m going to finish it. It’s something I’ve wanted to do, but I had the vision of doing it later in my life. It’s a piece of fiction, and I am not sure if I’ll continue with it or not. I’m very ambivalent about it—I am not writing the way I thought that this project should be. I don’t know whether to trust myself or not, to follow the kind of prose I started out with. So, I’m just not sure what I’m going to do. I still have health stuff… people tell me that the recovery from major surgery is a long one. I get more mentally tired than I used to; I tire out more easily when I do things. This is the first time in my life as a writer that I haven’t known exactly what I wanted to do. In some sense, it’s scary not to have something that’s pulling me forward.

BR: What was it like to write your memoir? Did it feel different from your other work?

AD: It was different because I was sick the last few years and was in a great deal of pain. I started working on it, and when I was trying to think about things in my earlier life—things that made me feel happy, things that I like to remember—I would make my way up to my office. We have a lot of stairs, John and I, in our house, and I have arthritis in my knees, so it was very hard for me to come up to work. I wasn’t working every night the way I used to work. I would work just a couple of hours during the day on the memoir, and I didn’t know if I had anything or not. But, it went relatively easily, and it’s the second book of my life that’s been a real gift to me. The first one was Ice and Fire, which I wrote one summer and re-wrote the next summer. This book, Heartbreak, I wrote in three or four months, after taking nine years with Scapegoat, so it felt like a gift. I wrote it in a completely different way than any of my other work has been written.

Beth Ribet's Review of Heartbreak