Resistance
Andrea Dworkin
It's been an incredible pleasure to be here today because it had begun
to seem that the women's movement had become a kind of sexual pro
tection racket, and that our only purpose on earth was to make sure
that nobody hurt sex, that nobody talked bad about it, that nobody
had any bad attitudes toward it, that no nasty political thinkers began
to make any of us feel uncomfortable about it. And, of course, in the
most material way, that has meant consistent defenses of the pornog
raphy industry. And where there hasn't been an aggressive political
defense of the pornography industry, there has been the most aston
ishing passivity and apathy and indifference on the part of women
who deeply in their hearts are feminists but who will not get their
asses out on the street to do something for the women who are being
hurt.
And it had begun to seem, truly, that the pornographers were win
ning. And what is so exceptionally peculiar about that is that for the
first time, they're scared. And they have reason to be, because we have
hurt their business. They never thought we could. They are the em
perors of profit and pain. Nothing can touch them.
In the early days, when the women's movement began to take on
the pornography industry, people said: "It's pointless. It's hopeless.
You can't go up against them. There's nothing we can do." Their power
seemed so overwhelming because their money was overwhelming. The
fact that they owned media made them a formidable kind of opponent.
We didn't own very much. Their access to legitimacy— the stables of
lawyers that they have to protect their interests; what were we going
to do in the face of all of this?
And we would take our raggedy little signs and we would march
10,000 miles in a circle. And we'd be tired and dead and defeated, and
we would say, "W e're not getting anywhere." And the next day we
would go out again, and we would march another 10,000 miles in an
other circle somewhere. And all over this country, in cities and in towns,
everywhere, women were activists against pornography.
The-media never reported it. Whole bunches of people didn't care
about it. But feminism was alive and well throughout the country be
cause women were activists on the issue of pornography and, at the
same time, were using pornography to build a very sophisticated and
new understanding of the reality of sexual abuse: how all the sexual
abuses cohere to hurt us, to put us down, to turn us into commodities.
Then in Minneapolis we developed a civil-rights law, and suddenly
the pornographers understood that we were trying to take their money
away from them. Not only were all these strange little women march
ing in circles and making themselves dizzy, but we actually thought
we were going to walk into a courtroom and say: "We're breaking your
piggybanks open, and we're taking all your change, and we're using it
for women. That's what we're going to do."
Their reaction, their mobilization against the civil-rights ordinance,
has been spectacular. It hasn't been spectacular because they think the
ordinance isn't going to work. Their anger, their hostility, their frustra
tion, their aggression, is because finally they take us seriously as a
political presence that can hurt them.
And, horribly, at exactly the same moment, the ground collapses
out of the women's movement. And everybody turns into chicken shit
and runs. Now we try not to tell them that. We try to keep it to our
selves as much as we can and we don't say, "Weil, you know, really,
we use mirrors." We have approached them as if we know what we're
doing, as if we know what they're doing, as if we know what they're
going to do tomorrow the same way that we figured out what they did
yesterday.
But the reality is that the will to destroy them has gone out of fash
ion, because destroying them is a bad thing, because destroying them
is censorship. And if little Bob Guccione can't say what he wants to
say— even though he happens to need a woman's body to say it—
then the country is poorer in ideas, in political freedom— our political
freedom, we're told. We have to protect him in order to protect our
political freedom. Our bodies are his language that he's expressing
himself in, and our responsibility is to make sure that he keeps doing
it.
And the horror has been that women have fallen for it, women have
bought into it, women have been intimidated, women have been shut
up in defense of this First Amendment that is not even ours to use.
You have to be able to express your communication before it's entitled
to First Amendment protection and you can't express it if you are too
poor, not to mention if you are too crazy, which a hell of a lot of women
are after what we have all been through, not to mention if you have
been silenced by sexual abuse, not to mention if it began when you
were a child, and you have been fighting, and fighting, and fighting
for your identity and your integrity because somebody tried to destroy
it back then before it was even fully formed. This silence that we live
in is supposed to be okay. We're supposed to accept it.
Then the reality— the hard thing, the difficult thing— is that men
use sex to express their dominance over us. And that is a very nice
way of putting it. Sex is constructed, as people have said, specifically
to be male dominance. That is what it is in a society that men run and
control and in which we are unequal and sexually subordinated.
I think it is not a surprise in this system that women have learned
to eroticize being powerless. It is a tragedy, but it is not a surprise.
And the beautiful benefit to male dominance of women's learning to
feel sexual pleasure in being powerless is that it makes it a lot easier to
be dominant. The police force isn't what keeps this subject population
subjected.
I don't know why we don't think that we have a right to exist, just
to exist. The pornographers can feel safe walking down the streets. I
don't know why all the stores that sell pornography feel safe day in
and day out, but they're safe. I don't feel safe but they're safe. They're
not worrying about anyone. They're not worrying about us. What are
we going to do to them? We could do plenty but we don't do anything.
Now what I am asking for, pleading for, is a consistent and militant
activism against those institutions and systems of exploitation that hurt
women. I would beg you to consider pornography a primary one of
those institutions. But wherever it is that you want to put your heart
and your spirit and your body in fighting for women's freedom, you've
got to tell someone or show someone. You can't just have it in your
head and be good at heart. You have to be willing to be a little bit
heroic, to take the blows that come when you are, to take the punish
ment— you're going to get punishment for being a woman anyway,
you're going to get hurt anyway.
The difference is that when you become politically active, as I'm
sure many of you know, they learn your name. And then they say:
"Get her. Pick that one. Get that one. Make sure." They write down
your name. They understand. They have a list of priorities. And if they
know your name, you're at the top of the list, and not just at the bot
tom. And so you risk something, because you can get punished more.
I am asking you not to let us lose what we have gained through
fifteen years of an effort to understand sexual abuse, an effort to un
derstand the way sexual violation becomes normative in this society,
every effort that we have made to fight the people who are purpose
fully trying to hurt us. There's no ambiguity about it. They're not lying
about it. They're really not. They admit it. They just don't want you to
care ahout it, or do anything about it, or think you can do anything
about it.
We've made tremendous gains. If there is no women's movement—
no real, political, organized resistance, active and militant— we will not
make more gains. Mirrors can only take you so far. I plead with you
to find some way to reinvigorate your activism against woman-hating,
against sexual violation of women, and not to be part of the women's
movement as a protection racket for sex, and especially for all kinds of
sexual practices that specifically and clearly hurt women.
