Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

person in Dworkin’s life was a man: her husband. JohnStoltenberg remembers feeling “ like we had walked off acliff” when he first met Dworkin. As if the force of their connectionhad rendered the world weightless beneath his feet.He was 29 and she was 27, and they started talking out on thestreet in the West Village after they’d both walked out of abenefit for the War Resisters League because they thoughtthe protest songs were sexist. They started spending most oftheir time together.It was 1974. “There was a party at the apartment where I wasstaying, ” Stoltenberg told me. “ She was there, and I think wewere dancing, and then I think I passed out because I had hada lot to drink. And this could be a little bit of revisionism, but Iremember coming to consciousness with a clarity that Icouldn’t imagine life without her. ” Thirty-one years later, almostto the day, he was forced to. Dworkin died of heart failureon April 9 , 2005, at the age of 58 in her bed in the Washington,D. C., apartment they shared.At the time of her death, Dworkin felt clearheaded enoughto write for only a few hours a day, the toll of a lifetime of insomniaand all the pain medication she was taking for severeosteoarthritis, but she had just finished a proposal for a book ofliterary criticism. When I went to visit the apartment in earlyMay, Stoltenberg had left untouched the yellow legal pad onwhich she’d been taking notes: “ Use against Hemingway,Hitler and Bush, ” it said in red pen. Above her desk was aposter that read DEAD MEN DON’T RAPE.John Stoltenberg says Dworkin’s first book, Woman Hating,“saved my life. ” When he met Dworkin, Stoltenberg consideredhimself gay, and does to this day, although hepreferred the word queer before it got trendy. (Stoltenberg