Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

Years later, Dworkin’s comrade Susan Brownmiller, the authorof the radical feminist classic Against Our Will: Men,Women and Rape, spoke out against Hedda Nussbaum’s complicityin the murder of her daughter, Lisa Steinberg. (Lisawas abused to death by her father, Nussbaum’s husband, JoelSteinberg. ) In response, Dworkin published a piece in the LosAngeles Times called “What Battery Really Is, ” in which shetried to explain her experience—Nussbaum’s too, she asserted.“When I would come to after being beaten unconscious,the first feeling I would have was an overwhelmingsorrow that I was alive. I would ask God please to let me dienow. My breasts were burned with lit cigarettes. He beat mylegs with a heavy wood beam so that I couldn’t walk. I waspresent when he did immoral things to other people. I didn’thelp them. Judge me, Susan. ”These experiences formed the basis of Dworkin’s worldview.She wrote about them in her first published book,Woman Hating, which came out shortly after her return to thestates in 1974. And in some way or other, these nightmarishpieces of her reality were picked over, deconstructed, andretold in everything she ever wrote. If you have never experiencedsuch things, it can be difficult to relate to Dworkin.Sometimes, when you are reading her work, it can seem almostimpossible to reconcile the world around you with the worldon the page. Dworkin knew this. “Middle-class women, includingmiddle-class feminists, cannot imagine such marginality, ”she wrote. “It’s as if the story is too weird, too ugly, and toounsightly for an educated woman to believe. ”Much of society is set up specifically to assist people intheir process of ignoring the horrors of the world. Dworkin’sagenda was the opposite.