Our Blood: Prophecies and discourses on sexual politics
Andrea Dworkin
Language: English
Pages: 87
ISBN: 006011116X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is a collection of speeches Andrea Dworkin made during the 1970's wherever she could get her brand of feminism across in a largely patriarchal American society. As way of introduction Dworkin tells of her struggles to be heard- especially by other women and the (mostly bad) reactions she received from her lectures. Her perseverance to carry on trying to spread her ideas is admirable even if you are critical of her ideas. It is worrying though how much of her speeches ring true- even if you believe Dworkin a rabid man-hater or one who faces up to the truth that a male dominated society refuses to acknowledge. There also can be no denying Dworkin's ability to move people or make her points punchy, clear and with no bows to sentimentality.
Dworkin talks about rape, abuse and inequality forwardly and without apology. She challenges the established institutions- the courts, the government, the education system. Some of her ideas are very memorable such as making Halloween an official mourning day for all the women who were killed by ignorant and misogynistic societies for practicing "witchcraft".
reported that in 1974, 55, 210 women were raped in this country. This was an 8 percent increase over 1973, and a 49 percent increase over 1969. The FBI notes that rape is “probably one of the most under-reported crimes due primarily to fear and/or embarrassment on the part of its victims. ”21 Carol V. Horos, in her book Rape, estimates that for every rape reported to the police, ten are not. 22 Applying Horos’ estimate to the number of rapes reported in 1974 brings the total estimate of rapes
and 1960, a full 43 percent of all rapes were multiple rapes (16 percent pair rapes, 27 percent group rapes). 33 I want to tell you about two multiple rapes in some detail. The first is reported by Medea and Thompson in Against Rape. A twenty-five-year-old woman, mentally retarded, with a mental age of eleven years, lived alone in an apartment in a university town. She was befriended by some men from a campus fraternity. These men took her to the fraternity house, whereupon she was raped by
that their sexism is manifested only in relation to women—that is, that if they refrain from blatantly chauvinistic behavior in the presence of women, then they are not implicated in crimes against women. That is not so. It is in male bonding that men most often jeopardize the lives of women. It is among men that men do the most to contribute to crimes against women. For instance, it is the habit and custom of men to discuss with each other their sexual intimacies with particular women in vivid
climbing, playing ball; mathematics and science; composing music, earning money, providing leadership. Any list could go on and on— because the fact is that girls are taught to be afraid of everything except domestic work and childrearing. By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it. Instead of “I am afraid, ” we say, “I don’t want to, ” or “I don’t know how, ” or “I can’t.
he gave me books to read, and talked about all of his ideas with me, and watered every ambition that I had so that those ambitions would live and be nourished and grow—but he did.* * My mother has reminded me that she introduced me to libraries and that she also always encouraged me to read. I had forgotten this early shared experience because, as I grew older, she and I had some conflicts over the particular books which I insisted on reading, though she never stopped me from reading them.