“A lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on.”
- Donald Rumsfeld

Having never been classically trained in feminism I was painfully unaware of many feminist hall-of-famers until recently. In fact, I remembered this embarrassing detail a few days ago: I didn’t know who Gloria Steinem was until she showed up in an episode of The L Word. So, needless to say, it was only a few years ago that I first heard someone say Andrea Dworkin’s name.

Initially, all I noted was that mention of her name invoked dramatic reactions – mainly of the negative persuasion. A couple months ago during a small feminist gathering I attended someone declared something to the effect of “the world would be a better place had she not been born.”

With these kinds of reactions from the feminist community itself it may not be surprising that none of Dworkin’s 11 published non-fiction books made the recent Ms Magazine list of top 100 feminist non-fiction books of all time. It would be hard to argue that Dworkin was simply unknown to the magazine or its readers considering Ms. Magazine founder, and a peer of Dworkin’s, Gloria Steinem has said of her: “She is, I always thought, our Old Testament prophet raging in the hills, telling the truth.” Considering her prominence (regardless of how one feels of her specific politics) in the movement―it is a striking omission.

So why the hate on? When I was trying to figure this out it seemed like the big ones were that Dworkin was credited was saying things like “all sex with men is rape” and “all men are rapists.” Unbeknownst to me, most of the people who repeated these phrases had not actually read any of her work or speeches. Neither had I.

When I found out she had a memoir I thought it the perfect opportunity to take a closer look. The first thing that struck me about Heartbreak was its readability. It has some welcoming wide margins and double spacing. The second thing was that it reminded of Assata Shakur’s memoir. Which maybe seems like a strange comparison. A year apart in age both activists were in New York City during the same time period of civil rights and anti-war movements. Dworkin, throughout much of her life had very little money but she reported to have routinely donated to the Black Panther youth and literacy programs (programs Assasta Shakur was heavily involved with). Both were avid readers and self educators – critical of the huge gaps in the public education system. Dworkin read all the works of Darwin and most of Marx and Freud before she finished high school. Most striking for me was a similar sensation in their writing – the two books felt more like a two-way conversation than a telling. Both asked many questions of the reader and I often felt like I was talking with them.

“I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will.”  - Andrea Dworkin

Heartbreak isn’t a political manifesto. If you’re interested in dissecting her analysis this isn’t the place to turn. It is the place to turn to give one a fuller picture of the woman most feared and ridiculed in the feminist movement.

My top 4 moments in the book:

• In grade 6 she refused to sing Silent Night with her class because she decided she liked the idea of the separation of church and state. This was also when she learned to be critical of the way adults manipulate and lie to children, “I recognized that there were a lot of ways of lying, and pretending that Christmas and Easter were secular holidays was a big lie, not a small one.”
• She took writing very seriously and spent years on her poetry. She obviously thought constantly about how to best articulate stories and arguments. She writes, “Can one write for the dispossessed, the marginalized, the tortured? Is there a kind of genius that can make a story as real as a tree or an idea as inevitable as taking the next breath?”
• In 1992 eco-feminist Petra Kelly was shot and killed by her partner (who then killed himself). Dworkin attended the memorial with many other activists and was disgusted by the speakers who almost exclusively spoke of her partner’s devotion to pacifism and only mentioned Kelly in passing. “I couldn’t believe nothing had changed―peace, peace, peace, love, love, love; they did not understand nor would they even consider that a man murdered a woman.”  This, of course, would not be the first or last time that a feminist was awe struck by misogyny within the progressive left.
• There are many more instances in the book when her perception of a moment of injustice feels spot on. Near the end of the book she has this one, “A few nights ago I heard the husband of a close friend on television discussing antirape policies that he opposes at the university. He said that he was willing to concede that rape did take place. How white of you, I thought bitterly, and then I realized that his statement was a definition of ‘white’ in 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 labour. He thought 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 the 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.”

Charges of being divisive to “the movement” have historically been used to silence women of colour, lesbians, queers, trans, and disability justice activists. Not to mention women in general within the progressive left. This is something that’s going on now in parts of the Occupy movement. I’m not going to say that you’re splintering the movement by reading up on Dworkin and critiquing her analysis. But, if you do find yourself hating her and wishing she’d never been born I suggest that you read this book. She was radical, and critique is important, but blanket hatred uncesscarily nullifies her valuable contributions.

The only other Andrea Dworkin I have read is her 1983 speech, “I want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape.” This challenging and fiery speech was delivered to a room full of 500 men.  If nothing else the woman deserves our respect.  And, maybe the boots of truth will have a chance to catch up.

A recent addition to my personal list of Books That Should Be Included in the High School Curriculum is Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur. Being amazed at having never heard of this book or the woman who wrote it until a few weeks ago I feasted on it and nearly finished it in one sitting on a train ride from Jasper to Vancouver (hence the blog title…very punny indeed).

Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army in the 60s and 70s. 
In addition to exposing the disgusting history of the American government and FBI’s attempts to defame and criminalize Black nationalists and civil rights activists –  the memoir proved to be immensely readable and engaging. What was most fascinating to me, however, were the parallels that could be indentified between her experiences in the civil rights movement and being a racialized woman in North America a few decades ago with observations about being a woman and a feminist in North America right now. What follows is a somewhat disorderly free flow of her quotes and my reactions that I thought might be worth sharing.

“We had been completely brainwashed and we didn’t even know it. We accepted white value systems and white standards of beauty and, at times, we accepted the white man’s view of ourselves…From when I was a tot, I can remember Black people saying “niggas ain’t shit” and “You know how lazy niggas are”

I think about the way women talk about other women today. I feel like it’s gotten worse in my short life time. I wrote a blog on how I see this manifesting in women’s comedy. It’s the idea of ‘calling out’ “whores” and “sluts.” Melissa McEwan talks a bit about this pressure in her amazing article Misogyny Up Close and Personal. She identifies the societal push for her to confirm that, “I am an ally against certain kinds of women. Surely, we’re all in agreement that Britney Spears is a dirty slut who deserves nothing but a steady stream of misogynist vitriol whenever her name is mentioned, right? Always the subtle pressure to abandon my principles to trash this woman or that woman, as if I’ll never twig to the reality that there’s always a justification for unleashing the misogyny, for hating a woman in ways reserved only for women.”

I think one of the grimmest examples of the oppressed oppressing the oppressed is the discrimination that went on in nazi concentration camps among the prisoners themselves as outlined by Primo Levi in his memoir Survival in Auschwitz.  It’s the most destructive result of living in an unequal and exploitative society; all of us internalize prejudice and discrimination.

Though I still like to quote Madeleine Albright on this topic, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help women.”

“The usual way the people are taught to think in amerika is that each subject is in a little compartment and has no relation to any other subject.  For the most part, we receive fragments of unrelated knowledge, and our education follows no logical format or pattern.  It is exactly this kind of education that produces people who don’t have the ability to think for themselves and who are easily manipulated.”

Assata Shakur is a strong advocate for all-inclusive and empowering education for Black youth. I think this quote was particularly acute in its description of the problems with North America’s public education system.  What specifically comes to mind for me is the garbage dump that is sex ed.  My main concern is a lack of comprehensive history, context and language surrounding the issue of consent.  We will never defeat the rape culture if we can’t even teach youth what consent actually means and looks like. There was recently a blinding spotlight put on this dangerous misinformation when Naomi Woolf,  much celebrated feminist, argued with Jaclyn Friedman on Democracy Now that a woman couldn’t possibly have been raped if she consented to sexual relations earlier in the night. If Naomi Woolf doesn’t even have the big picture around consent and rape in our society than I fear the reality of what youth believe these days. Thankfully people like Jaclyn Friedman are working hard to correct this with education such as her book Yes Means Yes.

 “That was one of the big problems in the [Black Panther] Party. Criticism and self-criticism were not encouraged, and the little that was given often wasn’t taken seriously. Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them.”

This may be obvious. I do also think that the feminist movement is really good at relentlessly analyzing its internal oppressions. But, we’ve become so quick to shoot down criticism if it affects something we’ve come to believe as personally empowering. Meghan has already written about this a few times on the blog. And you know it’s widespread once The Onion satirizes the issue.

“Everyday out in the street now, I remind myself that Black people in amerika are oppressed. It’s necessary that I do that. People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”

Yes.

To go off on a tangent this is why science fiction and dystopian books can be so damn accurate in highlighting this specific aspect of oppression. If you’ll remember a bit of the plot of Brave New World: children are created and raised in ‘hatcheries’ and ‘conditioning centres’  where they are they divided into five castes designed to fulfill predetermined positions within the social and economic system of the World State. Fetuses chosen to become members of the lower castes receive chemical interference to cause arrested development in intelligence or physical growth.   So they are deliberately limited in their cognitive and physical abilities, as well as the scope of their ambitions and the complexity of their desires, thus rendering them easier to control. (thanks Wikipedia for summary). I flagged this passage from the book when I read it years ago which sums it up well:

“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do.  All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.”

A newer book that looks at this compulsory conditioning to accept one’s “inescapable social destiny” is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I don’t want to put any spoilers in though because it’s less well known than Brave New World and it’s a worthy read.

I have no specific or cohesive conclusion for this mish-mash of ideas, except to re-emphasise just how important reading and sharing stories really is. Most of us are fed a constant diet of cultural and social stereotypes and as Chimamanda Adichie says in her enlightening talk, “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”  The Anti-Racism Resource Centre in Peterborough, Ontario defines anti-racism as: an active and consistent process of change to eliminate individual, institutional and systemic racism as well as the oppression and injustice racism causes.

Maybe some of this process of change can start with the building of collective knowledge through story telling and sharing. So, don’t bug me when I’m reading on the train.

On the winter holidays that I’m not working, or watching Schindler’s List alone in my apartment with a six pack, I visit my Grandmother in the States.  A highlight of these visits, beyond mocking people on Judge Judy, is that I’m left with many hours of reading time. This year my obsession was the Hunger Games trilogy. No spoilers ahead.

Though it’s been on the New York Times best seller list for quite a while most people I speak with in my peer group haven’t heard of the series. I had not myself until my neighbour suggested them once she heard that I was a fan of His Dark Materials.  It may seem like an unusual thing to write about in a feminist blog but there are a number of issues with the books that I think are unprecedented for popular teen fiction. Since I’m a fan of bullet points:

• Written by a female author who didn’t get pressured to use initials to make her name gender neutral. Yes, this is why J.K. Rowling is not Joanne Rowling. (Though, I’m sure it’s thanks to Rowling’s success in particular that Suzanne Collins isn’t S.K. Collins)
• Female main character who is strong, complex and moral. This may seem not too revolutionary but let me tell you that I’m so used to reading adventure, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic style books with a male lead that even though, at the very beginning, it’s revealed that the main character has a long braid and an attraction to a male friend, before my brain even let me consider that a girl could be the protagonist, I was thinking “holy shit this adventure book is going to star a gay boy with a braid!”
• A diverse range of female characters are very present throughout the series, even as political and military leaders. Holy female representation Batman!
• The first popular teen marketed books, that I’ve read, that have overt and subtle progressive politics on capitalism, consumerism, colonialism and poverty.  In the world of the have and have-nots (the parallels to current society are not lost) the young readers are grimly exposed to a brutal reality of inequalities.  A scene that stands out to me is when the main character from one of the poorest ‘districts’ views a meal from the wealthy ‘capital.’ She marvels at how much energy it takes to get together one dinner that is common place for the wealthy. Because she knows what it’s like to hunt, gather, cook, and scrounge. I imagine myself reading this series at 15 years old having never passed a thought on where crops are grown, who farmers and labourers are, what animals are hunted or even the origins of virtually anything I ate growing up.  This would have made an even greater impact on me than reading about The Boxcar Children earning money to buy their own milk.

Most importantly, I think, is considering teens/young adults as capable of understanding grim social injustices.  This is the world we live in and kids especially shouldn’t be completely sheltered from this reality.

Kurt Vonnegut has a good quote from one of his novels which summarizes my sentiment on the importance of speculative fiction. Vonnegut doesn’t get an A+ from me for his representations of women in his books but this rant by a character directed at authors of the genre is one of my favourites:

“You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”

1. Do google the male co-author. Yes, it’s the same Neil Strauss that generously bestowed us with his experiences as a “pick-up artist” in his novel The Game. Chapters in The Game are dedicated to such subjects as Select A Target (naturally, I’m assuming ‘target’ is synonymous for a woman), Isolate A Target, and Blast Last Minute Resistance. So, when the ‘targets’ won’t go home with a budding PUA (Strauss’ acronym for Pick Up Artist) they say “I thought you were spontaneous. I thought you did want you wanted.” Direct quote.

Needless to say, I was not psyched about Strauss’ involvement in this book.

2. Delight in losing some negative expectations with surprising quirky frankness by Jenna the porn star.  When describing how she got her now famous surname she recalls:

“I grabbed the phonebook underneath the kitchen sink and flipped to the J surnames…Jenna Jameson, alcoholic, rock and roller. Right on. The name just stuck. I suppose if I were pickier I would have kept going through the J’s and ended up with Jenna Johnson or Jenna Justus or Jenna Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.”

3.  Appreciate (on my many levels) the queer content.  And, not sensationalized girl on girl action.

Her first time:

“It wasn’t just a peck on the lips, or one of those fake sexy kisses that girls do with other girls to turn men on. It was a full-on tongue-exploration-mouth soul kiss.  My breath quickened, and my mind raced.  I was in shock. But, at the same time, I wasn’t…I wanted to run my hands through her hair, feel her check against mine, and hold her in my arms.  I had to make a split decision. And that decision was yes. Yes, I wanted to throw down with this girl.”

Her reflections after more experiences:

“A relationship with a woman is much different than a man. There is a stronger emotional connection between women; with a man, there is more of a power dynamic at work.”

“After working at the Crazy Horse [strip club in Los Vegas] for so long, every man in my mind was a cheater, a liar, and a shitty human being…I was angry…Add to this my experiences with Jennifer and Nicki, and I was pretty sure I was gay.”

4.  Expect violence and drug abuse. There’s a part in the memoir when Jenna Jameson says that people often assume that she “suffered some sort of childhood trauma” in order to have ended up in the porn industry. She shrugs this off as mostly inaccurate and attributes it to teenage desires to become a model and then to impress her older boyfriend.  You only have to read the first two chapters to understand that it is not as simple as that.

Her first experience of ‘sex’ was rape. She discovered the dead body of her first close friend, another stripper named Vanessa, who was murdered by her own father. The same man who raped Jenna when she was sixteen.

Jameson won’t call out the entire porn industry as inherently anti-women but she will expose its darkest secrets on a whim. *A warning that the following excerpt is graphic and disturbing:

“Every day, World Modeling recruits for nude magazines and movies.  Dozens of girls arrive, strip down, get Polaroids taken, and then fill out a questionnaire. On the form they check boxes next to what they are willing to do: girl-girl, boy-girl, anal, double penetration, and so on. The main event comes once every three months when World Modelling holds a massive day-long cattle call. Most of the directors and producers in the industry come down, meet the girls, and inspect them like, well, cattle.  Some of the gonzo guys arrange to wait in the office, so that they can nab the best new girls before anyone else sees them. In a worst-case scenario, a gonzo director will take a girl to a hotel room and have their friends shoot a cheap scene in which she is humiliated in every orifice possible. She walks home with three thousand dollars, bowed legs, and a terrible impression of the industry.  It’s be her first and last movie, and she’ll regret it― to her dying day.”

5. Be frustrated, but not surprised, that after all her feminist observations, such as…

“I was no longer a daughter, a sister, a student, or a girl with any identity of her own whatsoever. I was just Jack’s girlfriend.  That’s how I usually introduced myself.”

…she’s still firmly entrenched in the belief that feminism is not the solution to the extreme vices of the industry:

“Though watching porn may seem degrading to some women, the fact is that it’s one of the few jobs for women where you can get to a certain level, look around, and feel so powerful, not just the work environment but as a sexual being. So, fuck Gloria Steinem.”

6. Remember (and this is one I have to keep working on) that all women’s stories are important.  We can learn so much from each other.

I collect quotes from books.  I felt in the mood to share some of my favs from some of my fav women writers. Represent.

“The black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.  The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence.  It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”

- I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

“I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove.  The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.”

- One! Hundred! Demons! By Lynda Barry

“For a second I couldn’t tell what pissed me off more, the assumption that any woman who is willing to call a black man out on his shit must be eating pussy or his depiction of me as a brainwashed Sappho, waving the American flag in one hand and a castrated black male penis in the other.”

- When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks it Down by Joan Morgan

“When it comes to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody’s guess is as good as mine. But when you talk bout love I don’t have to guess. I have love and I have been love. And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can’t be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan. It don’t suprise me you love Shug Avery, he say. I have love Shug Avery all my life.”

- The Color Purple by Alice Walker

“Obviously, only lesbians could believe in anything so audacious as equity and fair play.”

- Black Tights: Women, Sport And Sexuality by Laura Robinson

“When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teachers often said: ‘Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!’”

- Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams.  We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves—our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”

- Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood