have innocent clients, each time the public takes the sucker
punch: I have a sister; he has a sister; see his pretty suit; look
at how wel groomed he is. Her, she’s a mess. Wel , yes, she’s
been raped; it kind of messes you up. Oh, now we’re playing
victim, are we? Advice to young women: try not to be his first,
because then there aren’t others to confirm your story. You
can’t earn credibility; you can’t buy it; you can’t fake it; and
you’re a fucking fool if you think you have any.
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s husband is so good at sliming
the women he’s abused - and he has had so much help - that
it might take two vil ages.
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True Grit
Becoming a feminist - seeing women through the prism of
feminism - meant changing and developing a new stance. For
instance, I hate prisons, but the process of becoming a feminist made me face the fact that I thought some people should be in jail. Years later, after watching rapists and batterers go free
almost al the time, my pacifism would collapse like a glass
tower, leaving me with jagged cuts everywhere inside and out
and half-buried as well. I began to believe that the bad guys
should be executed - not by the state but by the victim, if she
desired, one shot to the head.
When I was still a baby feminist (this being the lingo of the
movement), I was asked to go and interview a felon named
Tommy Trantino, who had published a book of drawings and
stories called Unlock the Lock. The person who had asked me
to go thought that I could write something about Trantino
that might help to get him out.
I went to Rahway State Prison, a maximum-security prison
in New Jersey. I talked to Trantino in a small, transparent
room, almost al glass. I was surrounded by the prison population, not in lockdown. Trantino had been convicted of killing
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Heartbreak
two cops. I read a lot about him before I went. The same
day on which he had kil ed the cops he had also beaten up a
couple of women.
I asked Trantino al the obvious questions, including “Did
you do it?” His response was that he didn’t remember. Then
I departed from the script. I said that I knew he had been in
jail a long time, but had he heard of the women’s movement
and what did he think of it? Hands in his pants pockets, he
spread his legs wide open and said, “Wel , I'm good with women
and I'm bad with women.” That was enough for me, but ever
the intrepid reporter I said that I had noted that he had beat
up two women on the day of the killings; did he think he
would stil beat up on women if he was out? His answer was
an equivocating no, but I heard yes as clear as church bel s on
a Sunday, and as far as I was concerned he could stay in jail
forever. I didn’t think that this was the right way to think, but
I couldn’t stop thinking it.
I began the Socratic course of discussing the problem with
my friends, stil mostly on the pacifist left. Everyone told me,
in different ways, that I had an obligation to help Trantino get
out: prison was the larger evil. Here I was, virtually overlooking the murders of the two policemen; but he hit those women, and I didn’t think there was anything to suggest that if or
when he was out he wouldn’t hit more women.
One weekend someone took me to a benefit for one of the
pacifist groups. I was so offended by the anti woman lyrics to
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True Grit
a song that I got up and walked out. Someone else did, too.
We reached the pavement at approximately the same time.
“I have a question I'd like to ask you, ” I said to the stranger.
I then presented the Trantino problem, which was really
gnawing at me. “It sounds like you already know what you
want to do, ” he said. Yes, I nodded. “You want him to stay in,
right? ” “Yes, ” I said out loud. The man was John Stoltenberg,
and I've lived with him for nearly twenty-seven years. I called
up the friend who had asked me to write the piece and said I
police.
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Anita
The same friend asked me to go talk with Anita Hoffman,
whose husband, Abbie, had just gone underground after being
busted for selling cocaine. I had donated some money to
Abbie’s defense fund and said he should just keep running.
I didn’t real y know why I was going to see Anita.
The apartment was small and crowded, distinguished only
by a television set the size of a smal country. Anita’s child with
Abbie, America, was playing. She and I sat on what was her
bed to talk.
She and Abbie had not been together for a while. It was
clear that she was poor. She said that she didn’t know what to
do, that a friend of Abbie’s had offered her work as a prostitute (“escort, ” high end of the line) and was put ing a lot of pressure on her. Abbie’s latest caper had left her destitute. This
guy was a friend of Abbie’s, so he had to be okay, right? She
had thought of doing organizing - poor, single mothers like
herself who had no political power in the system; but real y,
what was wrong with prostituting? She could earn a lot of
money and she was lonely. Honey, I thought, you don’t begin
to know what lonely is.
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Anita
I told her about my own experiences in the trade, especial y
about the dissociation that was essential to doing the deed.
You had to separate your mind from your body. Your consciousness had to be hovering somewhere near the ceiling behind you or on the far side of the room watching your body.
No one got through it without having that happen. I also told
her that she’d begin to hate men; at first manipulating them
would seem like power, but eventually and inevitably the day
would come when one perceived them as coarse and brutal,
smel y, dirty bullies. She had said that she liked sex and that
she had had sex with the guy who was now trying to pimp
her. I told her that the sex with Abbie’s friend was a setup to
make her more pliant and that in prostituting one lost the
ability to feel, so if one liked sex it was the last thing, not the
first thing, that one should do. I told her that most people
thought that women prostituted in order to get money
for drugs, but it was the other way around; the prostitution
became so vile, so ugly, so hard, that drugs provided the only
soft: landing, a kind of embrace - and on the literal level they
took away the pain, physical and mental.
I didn’t see or talk to Anita again after that night, but the
friend who had asked me to go said that Anita had moved to
California and had a job as an editor. I don’t know if Anita
ever tried the prostituting, but if so I helped her get out fast
and if not I helped with that, too. I was lucky to have the
chance to talk with her, and I began to understand that my
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Heartbreak
own experiences could have meaning f
or other women in
ways that mattered. I began to trust myself more.
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Prisons
Perhaps because I came from the pacifist left, I had an intense
and abiding hatred for prisons (even though the U. S. prison
system was developed by the Quakers). After the publication
of Our Blood, I wrote a proposal for a book on prisons. I was
struck by the way prisons stayed the same through time and
place: the confinement of an individual in bad circumstances
with a sadistic edge and including al the prison rites of passage.
I was struck by how prisons were the only places in which men
were threatened with rape in a way analogous to the female
experience. I was struck by the common sadomasochistic
structure of the prison experience no mat er what the crime
or country or historical era. That proposal was rejected by a
slew of publishers. I found myself at a dead end.
But an odd redemption was at hand. I had noticed that in
al pornography one also found the prison as leitmotif, the
sexualization of confining and beating women, the ubiquitous
rape, the dominance and submission of the social world in
which women were literally and metaphorically imprisoned.
I decided to write on pornography because I could make
the same points - show the same inequities - as with prisons.
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Heartbreak
Pornography and prisons were built on cruelty and brutalization; the demeaning of the human body as a form of punishment; the worthlessness of the individual human being; restraint, confinement, tying, whipping, branding, torture,
penetration, and kicking as commonplace ordeals. Each was a
social construction that could be different but was not; each
incorporated and exploited isolation, dominance and submission, humiliation, and dehumanization. In each the effort was to control a human being by attacking human dignity. In each
the guilt of the imprisoned provided a license to animalize
persons, which in turn led to a recognition of the ways in
which animals were misused outside the prison, outside the
pornography. Arguably (but not always), those in prison had
commit ed an offense; the offense of women in pornography was in being women. In both prisons and pornography, sadomasochism was a universal dynamic; there was no chance for reciprocity or mutuality or an equality of communication.
In prison populations and in pornography, the most
aggressive rapist was at the top of the social structure. In
prison populations gender was created by who got fucked; so,
too, in pornography. It amazed me that in pornography the
prison was recreated repeatedly as the sexual environment
most conducive to the rape of women.
The one dif erence, unbridgeable, intractable, between prisons
and pornography was that prisoners were not expected to like
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Prisons
being in prison, whereas women were supposed to like each
and every abuse suffered in pornography.
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Sister, Can You
Spare a Dime?
In 1983 Catharine A. MacKinnon and I drafted, and the City
of Minneapolis passed, a civil law that held pornographers
responsible for the sexual abuse associated with the making
and consuming of pornography If a woman or girl was forced
into making pornography or if a woman or girl was raped or
assaulted because of pornography, the pornographer or retailer
could be held responsible for civil damages. If a woman
was forced to view pornography (commonplace in situations
of domestic abuse), the person or institution (a school, for
instance) that forced her could be held responsible. The burden
of proof was on the victim. In addition, the law defined
pornography as sex discrimination; this meant that pornography helped to create and maintain the second-class status of women in society - that turning a woman into an object or
using her body in violent, sexual y explicit ways contributed
to the devaluing of women in every part of life. The pornography itself was defined in the statute as a series of concrete scenarios in which women were sexual y subordinated to men.
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Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?
In 1984 I went with a group of activists and organizers to
the convention of the National Organization for Women in
order to get NOW’s support for this new approach to fighting
pornography.
The convention was held in New Orleans in a posh hotel.
Sonia Johnson, an activist especially associated with a radical
crusade to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, was running
for president of NOW, and she sur endered her time and space
so that I could address the convention on her behalf; our
understanding was that I would talk about pornography and
the new approach MacKinnon and I had developed.
It was a hot, hot city in every sense. Leaving the hotel one
saw the trafficking in women in virtually every venue along
Bourbon Street. The whole French Quarter, and Bourbon
Street in particular, was crowded with middle-aged men in
suits roving as if in gangs, dripping sweat, going from one sex
show to the next, searching for prostitutes and strippers.
In the hotel, NOW women were herded into caucuses and
divided into cliques. I'm a member of NOW, even though its
milksop politics deeply offend me. Now I was going to try to
persuade the members that they should pursue the difficult
and dangerous task of addressing pornography as a civil rights
issue for women.
It is hard to describe how insular NOW is. It is run on the
national level by women who want to play politics with the
big boys in Washington, D. C., where NOW’s national of ice
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Heartbreak
is located. I had, over the years, spoken at ral ies and events
organized by many local NOW chapters al over the country.
On the local level, my experience with NOW was entirely
wonderful. The members were valiant women, often the sole
staf for battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers,
often the only organized progressive group in a smal town or
city. I’ve never met better women or bet er feminists. Those
who run the nationally visible NOW are different in kind:
they stick to safe issues and mimic the politics and strategies
of professional political lobbyists.
Soon after I came back from Amsterdam, I spoke at a ral y
organized by the local NOW chapter in Washington, D. C. At
the time the burning issue was the Equal Rights Amendment,
a proposed amendment to the U. S. Constitution that would
have given women a basic right to equality. There was a lot
of of icial (national) NOW literature on the Equal Rights
Amendment that I saw for the first time in D. C. I couldn’t
understand why reading it made me question the ERA - a
question I had only on contact with national NOW, its literature and its spokespeople. But of course, I did understand - I just wasn’t schooled yet in the ways of this duplicitous feminist organization. The literature was al about how the ERA would benefit men. Guts were sorely lacking even back then.
A decade later, the organization was torn o
ver pornography.
The big girls in the big of ice didn’t want to get their hands
dirty - the issue demanded at least an imagined descent down
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Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?
the social ladder. Lots of local NOW activists were fully
engaged in the fight against pornography and brought those
politics to the convention. Then there were what I take to be
honorable women who believed the pornographers' propaganda that the civil rights approach would hurt freedom of speech. Then there were the women, a small but determined
group, who thought that equality meant women using
pornography in the same ways that men did. We wanted a
resolution from NOW supporting the civil rights approach.
We got it, but, speaking for myself, at great emotional cost.
NOW runs its meetings using Robert’s rules of order,
which is democracy at its most degraded. One had to know
whether to hold up a red poster or a green poster or a yellow
poster to be recognized by the chair to speak. I can’t even now
articulate the points of order involved. When I got home, I
dreamt about those posters for months.
A vote was held on whether I could speak for Sonia Johnson.
The women voted no. So much for free speech. In place of
addressing the whole convention, we organized a meeting to
which anyone interested could come. I was speaking, and in
the middle NOW cut off the electricity for the mike. More
free speech. I was in tears, real y. The woman who cut off the
juice and then physically repossessed the mike - just following
orders, she said - claimed that we had not followed the rules
for holding our meeting. We had, but never mind.
Then the most miraculous thing happened. We had a suite
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Heartbreak
in the hotel, as did other subgroups of NOW, so that people
could come by, talk, pick up literature, find out for themselves
who we were and what we believed.
I was approached by a black woman who worked in the
hotel and asked if we would march down Bourbon Street