A Personal View of Feminism

HEARTBREAK

The Political Memoir of a

Feminist Militant

by Andrea Dworkin

Basic Books

214 pages; $24

Even among militant feminists, Andrea Dworkin seems an extremist. Wasn’t she the one who equated sexual intercourse with rape? (Not quite. She simply pointed out how sex in masculinist cultures is too often associated with conquest and domination.) Hasn’t she launched a relentless assault on the 1st Amendment by claiming that pornography has nothing to do with free expression and everything to do with violence against women and children? (Pretty much.) Certainly Dworkin does not mince words. She writes out of raw emotion. Nor does she tend to temper her gut responses with qualifications and second thoughts. Indeed, as she stresses in “Heartbreak,” Dworkin regards extremism in defense of women and children to be no vice, nor moderation in the pursuit of a fairer, less violent society to be a virtue.

Dworkin’s strongly held views are very much rooted in her personal experience with misogynist violence, as a victim and as ear-witness to other victimized women. This memoir highlights some of the links between Dworkin’s personal history and her emerging feminist ideology. Alas, it is a rather patchy, piecemeal production, more like a set of notes than a finished book. But it does convey some sense of where she is coming from. Interestingly, it also reveals the complex and curious ways in which her militant feminism grew out of her experiences with radicals in the 1960s.

Dworkin’s girlhood idols were the intellectuals, rebels and free spirits who seemed to point the way out of suburban conformity, philistine insensitivity and racial-religious prejudices. Soon, as she tells us, she was meeting writers like Allen Ginsberg, hanging out with jazz musicians, hippies, antiwar activists, even tithing a portion of her meager earnings to the Black Panthers. When it came to their treatment of women and children, however, Dworkin’s idols turned out to have feet of clay. The man she marries beats her so badly that her doctor is shocked. Antiwar activists she knows devour pornography and talk of women with contempt. (“Weren’t we the love children, not the hate children?” she asks.) The intense fervor of Dworkin and other feminists who came out of the 1960s radical movement is reminiscent of those anticommunists who were once communists and saw their god fail.

Yet long after turning against it, Dworkin is still influenced by this mid-century radical milieu in perhaps more ways than she recognizes. Her style and stance are radical: She has a penchant for coarse language and fierce vituperation, an instant affinity for taking the most extreme position and expressing it in the most attention-grabbing manner possible. Indeed, in some ways, her take-no-prisoners brand of feminism resembles nothing so much as the infantile masculinist posturings of a Norman Mailer. Ironically, what turned her off to the 1960s radicals was their tendencies toward brutality, violence and insensitivity.

The chief strength of “Heartbreak” is that it baldly points a finger at something all too prevalent: men abusing women and children. The book’s chief weakness is that Dworkin sounds almost as angry at her ninth-grade English teacher for giving her a B on an essay as she is at men who brutalize women or sexually molest their children. Still, one cannot accuse Dworkin of lacking a sense of responsibility. At the end of one of her fulminations against a teacher who tried to force her to sing “Silent Night,” Dworkin offers this advice: “Adults need to be stood up to by children, period.... Pushing kids around is ugly.... On the other hand, students should not, must not shoot teachers. The nobility of rebellion student-to-teacher requires civil disobedience, not guns, not war.”

Dworkin is also capable of making some subtler points, many of them quite eye opening. Responding to the familiar argument that any form of censorship is wrong because it is impossible to draw the line between art and hard-core porn, she notes: “These are some of life’s easier distinctions. I used to ask groups of folks how the retailers of pornography could tell the difference between Joyce and hard-core visual pornography. I noted that although, generally speaking, they weren’t the best and the brightest, they managed never to stock ‘Ulysses.’ If they could do it, I thought, so could the rest of us.”