with the workers in the hotel and the local chapter of the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
(ACORN) to protest the pornography and prostitution so
densely located there. This woman might well have made my
bed that morning. It was an overwhelming mandate. Of
course we said yes and tried to get the NOW women to join,
which they pretty solidly refused to do.
New Orleans is like most other cities in the United States
in that the areas in which pornography and prostitution flourish are the areas in which poor people, largely people of color, live. We were being invited to stand up with them against the
parasitic exploitation of their lives, against the despoiling of
their living environment.
The group was poor. They took packages of paper plates,
wrote on the plates “No More Porn, ” and stuck the inscribed
plates up on storefronts and bars al along Bourbon Street.
Demonstrators also carried NOW logos. There were maybe a
hundred people marching (as opposed to the thousand or
so back in the hotel). I was privileged to speak out on the
street with my sisters, a bullhorn taking the place of a microphone.
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Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?
Meanwhile someone in the leadership of NOW had called
the police to alert them to an illegal march, a march without
a permit. As our rally came to an end and we were marching
out of the French Quarter the police approached. We ran. They
ar ested one of us at the back of the line. He, an organizer
from Minneapolis, went to jail for the night, a martyr for the
feminist cause. And it became a bad feminist habit for the rich
to rat out the poor, turn on the poor, keep themselves divided
from the poor - no mixing with the dispossessed. The ladies
with the cash to go to New Orleans from other parts of the
country did not want to be mistaken for the downtrodden.
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The Women
The first time a woman came up to me after a speech to say
that she had been in pornography was in Lincoln, Nebraska -
at a local NOW meeting in the heartland. I knew a lot about
pornography before I started writing Pornography: Men
Pos es ing Women because, as an intellectual, I had read a lot of
literary pornography and because, as a woman, I had prostituted. In pornography one found the map of male sexual dominance and one also found, as I said in a speech, “the
poor, the illiterate, mar ied women with no voice, women
forced into prostitution or kept from get ing out and women
raped, raped once, raped twice, raped more times than they
[could] count.”
Pornography brought me back to the world of my own
kind; I looked at a picture and I saw a live woman.
Some women were prostituted generation after generation
and, as one woman, a third-generation prostitute, said, “I’ve
done enough to raise a child and not make her a prostitute
and not make her a fourth generation. ”
I found pride - "I got a scar on my hand; you can’t real y
see it, but a guy tried to slice my throat, and I took the knife
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The Women
from him and I stabbed him back. To this day I don’t know if
he’s dead, but I don’t care because he was trying to take my
life. ”
I found women whose whole lives were consumed by
pornography: “I’ve been involved in pornography al my life
until 1987. I was gang-raped, that’s how I conceived my
daughter, and she was born in a brothel in Cleveland, Ohio”;
the child “was beaten to death by a trick - she used to get beat
up a lot by tricks. I’ve often wondered if some of the physical
damage that was done to her simply [was because] maybe a
child’s body wasn’t meant to be used that way, you know.
Maybe babies aren’t meant to be anally penetrated by things
or snakes or bot les or by men’s penises, but I don’t know for
sure. I’m not really sure about that because that’s what my life
was. ”
of me from the time I was a baby until just a few years ago. ”
I even found women wanting something from the system:
“I wish that this system, the courts and, you know, our judicial system that’s supposed to be there to help would have done something earlier in our life. I wish they would have
done something earlier in our daughter’s life and I wish that
they would do something now. ”
Women in pornography and prostitution talked to me, and
I became responsible for what I heard. I listened; I wrote; I
learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me
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Heartbreak
enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one
can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to
pick one kind of pedagogy over al others, I pick listening. It
breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed
limits; it takes one into another’s life, her hard times and, if
there is any, her joy, too. There are women whose whole lives
have been pornography and prostitution, and still they fight
to live.
The world gets meaner as prostitution and pornography are
legitimized. Now women are the slave population, an old
slavery with a new technology, cameras and camcorders. Smile;
say “bleed” instead of “cheese. ”
I’m tired, very weary, and I cry for my sisters. Tears get
them nothing, of course. One needs a generation of warriors
who can’t be tired out or bought of . Each woman needs to
take what she endures and turn it into action. With every tear,
accompanying it, one needs a knife to rip a predator apart;
with every wave of fatigue, one needs another platoon of
strong, tough women coming up over the horizon to take
more land, to make it safe for women. I’m willing to count the
inches. The pimps and rapists need to be dispossessed, forced
into a mangy exile; the women and children - the world’s true
orphans - need to be empowered, cosseted with respect and
dignity.
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Counting
Are there really women who have to worry about a fourth
generation’s becoming prostitutes? How many are there? Are
there five, or 2, 000, or 20 million? Are they in one place - for
instance, the Pacific Northwest, where the woman I quoted
lives - or are they in some sociological stratum that can be isolated and studied, or are they al in Thailand or the Philippines or Albania? Are there too many or too few, because in either
case one need not feel responsible? Too many means it’s too
hard to do anything about it; too few means why bother. Is it
possible that there is one adult woman in the United States
who does not know whether or not a baby’s body should be
penetrated with an object, or are there so many that they
cannot be counted - only their form of saying "I don’t know”
comes in the guise of labeling the penetration "speech” or
“free speech”?
A few nights ago I heard the husband of a close frien
d on
television discussing antirape policies that he opposes at a
university. He said that he was willing to concede that rapes
did take place. How white of you, I thought bitterly, and then
I realized that his statement was a definition of “white” in
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Heartbreak
motion - not even “white male” but white in a country built
on white ownership of blacks and white genocide of reds and
white-indentured servitude of Asians and women, including
white women, and brown migrant labor. He thought that
maybe 3 percent of women in the United States had been raped,
whereas the best research shows a quarter to a third. The male
interviewer agreed with this percentage pulled out of thin air:
it sounded right to both of them, and neither of them felt
required to fund a study or read the already existing research
material. Their authority was behind their number, and in the
United States authority is white. Whatever trouble these
two particular men have had in their lives, neither has had
to try to stop a fourth generation, their own child, from prostituting.
“I had two daughters from [him], ” said a different woman,
“and he introduced me into heroin and prostitution. I went
further into drugs and prostitution, and al my life the only
protection I ever had was my grandmother, and she died
when I was five years old. ” This woman spoke about other
males by whom she had children and was abused. She spoke
about her mother, who beat her up and closed her in dark
closets. It’s good that her grandmother was kind because her
grandfather wasn’t: “I can’t remember how old I was when
my grandfather started molesting me, but he continued to
rape me until I became pregnant at the age of thirteen. ” Can
one count how many women there are on our fingers and
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Counting
toes, or does a bunch of us have to get together to have enough
fingers and toes, or would it take a small army of women to
get the right numbers?
There is another woman who was left in a garbage can
when she was six months old. She was born drunk and had to
be detoxified in her incubator. She was, in her own words,
“partially mentally retarded, ” “abandoned, ” and “raised in and
out of foster homes, ” some of which she says were good. She
had the chance to stay with a foster family but chose to be
with her father, since that was her idea of family. He was a
brute, good with his fists, and first raped her when, as a child,
she was taking a bath with her kid brother; and like many incest-
rapists, he’d rape her or make her perform sex acts and then
give her a child’s reward. “I just wanted him to be my father;
that’s al I wanted from him, ” she said. At twelve she was
stranger-raped. The stranger, a fairly talented pedophile, would
pick her up from school and talk with her. Eventual y he
slammed her against a garage and raped her: “Nobody had
ever talked to me about rape, so I figured he was just showing
me love like my father did. ” On having the rape discovered,
the girl was called no good, a whore, and shunned by her
family. “My father had taught me most of what I needed to
learn about pleasing men, ” she says. “There was a little bit more
that [the pimp] needed to teach me. So [the pimp] would
show me these videos, and I would copy on him what I saw
was going on in the videos, and that’s how I learned to be a
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Heartbreak
prostitute. ” Her tricks were professional men. She worked in
good hotels until she found herself streetwalking. “I ended up
back in prostitution. I worked out on Fourth Street, which is
the strip, and St. Carlos in San Jose. There were [many] times
that I would get raped or beat up. ” Daddy pimped.
One night she was trying to bring home her quota of
money when a drug-friend of her father’s came by. “He raped
me, he beat me up, he held a gun [in] his hand [to my head].
And I swear to this day I can stil hear that gun clicking. ”
She then worries that she is taking up too much of my time.
I’m important; she’s not. My time matters; hers doesn’t. My
life matters; hers does not. From her point of view, from the
reality of her experience, I embody wealth. I speak and some
people listen. I write and one way or another the books get
published from the United States and Great Britain to Japan
and Korea. There is a splendidness to my seeming importance,
especial y because once parts of my life were a lot like parts of
hers. How many of her are there? On my own I’ve counted
quite a few.
These women are proud of me, and I don’t want to let them
down. I feel as if I’ve done nothing because I know that I
haven’t done enough. I haven’t changed or destabilized the
meaning of “white, ” nor could anyone alone. But writers
write alone even in the context of a political movement. I’ve
always seen my work as a purposeful series of provocations,
especially Pornography: Mlen Pos es ing Women, Ice and Fire,
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Counting
Intercourse, and Mercy. In other books I’ve devoted myself to
the testimony of women who had no other voice. These
books include Let ers from a War Zone, currently being published in Croatia in its lonely trip around the world; the introduction to the second edition of Pornography: Men Pos es ing Women, which can also be found in Life and Death: Writings
on the Continuing War Against Women, a collection of essays;
and In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings,
edited with Catharine A. MacKinnon and published by Harvard
University Press. I still don’t get to be white, because the
people who care about what I say have no social importance.
I’m saying that white gets to say, “Yes, it happened” or "No,
it didn’t. ” I’m saying that there are always either too many or
too few. I’m saying that I don’t count sheep at night; I see in
my mind instead the women I’ve met, I see their faces and I
can recollect their voices, and I wish I knew what to do, and
when people ask me why I'm such a hard-ass on pornography
it’s because pornography is the bible of sexual abuse; it is
chapter and verse; pornography is the law on what you do to
a woman when you want to have mean fun on her body and
she’s no one at al . No one does actually count her. She’s at the
bot om of the barrel. We’re al stil trying to tel the white guys
that too many - not too few - women get raped. Rape is the
screaming, burning, hideous top level of the rot en barrel,
acid-burned damage, what you see if you look at the surface
of violence against women. Rape plays a role in every form of
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Heartbreak
sexual exploitation and abuse. Rape happens everywhere and
it happens al the time and to females of al ages. Rape is
inescapable for women. The act, the attempt, the threat - the
three dynamics
of a rape culture - touch 100 percent of us.
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Heartbreak
How did I become who I am? I have a heart easily hurt. I
believed that cruelty was most often caused by ignorance.
I thought that if everybody knew, everything would be different. I was a silly child who believed in the revolution. I was torn to pieces by segregation and Vietnam. Apartheid broke
my heart. Apartheid in Saudi Arabia still breaks my heart.
I don’t understand why every story about rising oil prices does
not come with an addendum about the domestic imprisonment of women in the Gulf states. I can’t be bought or intimidated because I’m already cut down the middle. I walk
with women whispering in my ears. Every time I cry there’s a
name at ached to each tear.
My ideology is simple and left: I believe in redistributing
the wealth; everyone should have food and health care, shelter
and safety; it’s not right to hurt and deprive people so that
they become prostitutes and thieves.
What I’ve learned is that women suffer from terrible shame
and the shame comes from having been complicit in abuse
because one wants to live. Middle-class women rarely understand how complicit they are unless they’ve experienced torture,
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Heartbreak
usually in the home; prostituting women know that every
breath is bought by turning oneself inside out so that the
blood covers the skin; the skin is ripped; one watches the
world like a hunted animal on al fours in the darkest part of
every night.
There is nothing redemptive about pain.
Love requires an inner fragility that few women can afford.
Women want to be loved, not to love, because to be loved
requires nothing. Suppose that her love brought him into
existence and without it he is nothing.
Men are shits and take pride in it.
Only the toughest among women wil make the necessary
next moves, the revolutionary moves, and among prostituted
women one finds the toughest if not always the best. If prostituted women worked together to end male supremacy, it would end.