Life and Death
Andrea Dworkin
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0743236262
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A collection of her most incisive essays and unpublished speeches, Life and Death makes it clear why Dworkin has found her place in the canon of modern political thought. She begins here with a poignant autobiographical piece, in which she recounts with rare tenderness her childhood in Camden, New Jersey, her political odyssey, and the crushing pain of her brother's death. Lending her hand to tragic current events, or what she calls "emergencies, " like the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, the Hedda Nussbaum child abuse case, and the mass murder of female students at a college in Montreal, Dworkin makes clear in her inimitable way the obvious things we stubbornly fail to notice. Finally, she guides us back to the core issues at stake in women's lives - pornography, domestic violence, rape, and prostitution - and reminds us that even after decades of feminist so-called progress, gender is an ongoing war.
The press never thought it was worth a line of newsprint. The press, too, is composed of sane men. Between the male journalists who know right from wrong and the male politicians who know right from wrong, women are in a vise: information and public policy controlled by Mack's “any man”—men protecting men who hurt women because “any man” will or might or can. If Wright’s time had not come, if he were not under indictment by the House Ethics Committee, the public would not have been told about
accepting that that’s normal is if we refuse to have amnesia every day of our lives—if we remember what we know about the world we live in and get up in the morning determined to do something about it. We need to understand how male violence works. That’s one of the reasons that studying pornography and fighting the pornography industry are so important—because that’s the Pentagon, the war room. Pornographers train the soldiers; then the soldiers go out and do the actions on us. Were the
will live with a fair amount of pain for most of our lives. If your first priority is to live a painless life, you will not be able to help yourself or other women. What matters is to be a warrior. Having a sense of honor about political struggle is healing. Discipline is necessary. Actions against men who hurt women must be real. We need to win. We are in a war. We have not been fighting back. We need to win this war. We need a political resistance. We need it aboveground. We need it with our
irrelevant; they say that force is a natural part of sex and a normal expression of masculinity. We say that force is rape. Men continue to rationalize the use of force in intercourse as if force indicates the degree of desire, the intensity of the urge. Feminists are charged with hating sex (rape) because we hate forced sex. We are charged with confusing the horrible crime of rape (rape with the most brutality imaginable) with intercourse (which involves less force, though how much less the men
of physical pain; well, you remember the Old Testament. You’ve read the Book. You’ve seen the movie. What you haven’t done is live it. In Israel, Jewish women do. The husband has the sole right to grant a divorce; it is an unimpeachable right. A woman has no such right and no recourse. She has to live with an adulterous husband until he throws her out (after which her prospects aren’t too good); if she commits adultery, he can just get rid of her (after which her prospects are worse). She has to