This is probably going to be long. And I'm probably not going to cut it. Suck it up; life's a challenge.

I first read Andrea Dworkin when I was 17. I had no business doing so, for lo, I was an idiot. If there were ever an argument for censorship, it should be to keep 17-year-olds from reading books too weighty for their limited intellect. The book was called Right Wing Women and having never heard of the author I thought it would be a defense of being one. (I was writing a 5-page paper on rape for my Rhetoric 101 class -- because as we all know "rape" is a topic that can be easily covered in 5 pages -- and needed sources to present "the other side." How cute is that, that I'd end up with Dworkin in the process.)

jactitation was right; Susie Bright is the perfect person to eulogize her. The whole thing's good, but this is the bit that sticks with me:

I wondered if she had any close girlfriends or women she considered her intellectual peers. The people she admired most in life were her father, her brother, and partner John Stoltenberg. She was a scholar of great men, and the one she studied the most, the Marquis de Sade, was someone she could quote up one side and down the other. I'm the one who said she was his feminist reincarnation. She rewrote his Juliette when she wrote her novel Ice and Fire. So much for man-hating.

Back when I was 17 I got really sick of hearing about Andrea's dad. How great he was. Oh he was just so very fabulous. No human like him had ever walked the face of the planet. Et cetera. Obviously I had my own issues around that time -- mainly that when I heard about women whose fathers respected them I'd get mad (jealous) enough to spit -- but when I think about her now the thing I keep returning to is her hyper-identification with men, not as "men" per se but through & via their unearned status as the Default Humans, and how she refused, more than any other feminist thinker I can name, to back the fuck down on that stance. What's good for the gander was bloody well her entitlement, too.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to say BOO-yah, I won't be complicit in sexism, I'll never take comfort in the parting gifts that girls receive for being good at being female, and then after a while I remember, oh yeah... it would be a lot like being Andrea Dworkin. Which I guess is why most women don't do it.

I didn't always know this. My mom was a feminist and until I was 8 or 9 I thought I was a person, not a girl. It was a shock to realize that the world didn't see it that way, that no matter what decisions I made or how I chose to present myself, large segments of the population would go right on treating me like a female: either one who was doing it right or one who was doing it wrong. There weren't a whole lot of rewards for doing girldom wrong -- at least, not ones that paid off immediately. Occasionally I was strong enough to put up with the bullshit. Occasionally I was not.

Frankly? There's a lot of safety in those parting gifts. I realized that in third grade, when the wrestling coach came to our class and asked all the boys if they wanted to join the elementary wrestling team. They all said they did. How many of them really wanted to and how many knew they had to if they wanted to get out of the school day alive I don't know, but I remember looking at one boy [space] friend of mine and feeling sorry for him as he took his place in line. He was the one who always played with the girls on the playground, the one who read our magazines and told us how to do our hair. I knew the thought of knocking on the doors of Jock World mortified him, but it's not like he was going to be the only boy in the whole class who rejected such crap, so he was stuck.

A couple weeks later the wrestling coach published the results of the first meet in the local paper. Some of the boys had won, some of them had lost, but this boy's name was listed first because he lost the quickest: 17 seconds. Even the second-worst boy had held out for a couple of minutes. I read that and curled up on the couch, fetal. At 8 I didn't have the language to articulate what I was feeling, but I remember being flooded. First there was the embarrassment on his behalf, and then the immediate anger that I should feel that way, since "being good at wrestling" was hardly anything I valued, though I knew the rest of the village people did, but then again I didn't value them either, so there you go. What was left after that was a profound, aching pity, not because he'd lost but because he had to go through the whole fucking spectacle in the first place. And I hated having to pity him. He was the classmate I most admired, the one who was always sharp, always funny, always loaning me his mother's V.C. Andrews novels. Genuinely cool. Seeing him reduced was almost more than I could take.

Finally, there was the relief. I sucked at sports, too, and I knew I'd avoided this particular humiliation because I was a girl and therefore wasn't in the running in the first place. "I'd hate to be a boy," I thought. If I wanted a baby when I grew up I'd have to find a woman willing to share hers with me. I wouldn't be able to cry in public or admit I had no idea why the car broke down. I'd have to wear boring clothes, take apart toasters, and climb the rope in gym. My mother's brand of feminism implied I should be ashamed of this feeling, and I was. But these parting gifts are hard to resist.

Of course in the grand scheme of things being out of the running wasn't consolation at all, and I understood that, too, though I worked to find some other way to analyze it since this was the most painful truth of all. I'd been able to avoid this and other tests like it because my inferiority was assumed and permanent; I had "17 seconds" branded on my forehead without even taking my place on the mat. In losing so quickly my friend had become like a girl, and that was the horror of it for both of us: for him because it meant he was a loser, and for me because it meant losers were like me.

Now I write this with the perspective of having lived a life that's been mostly okay in spite of it all, so remembering that day seems banal, almost funny. A bunch of scrawny little 8-year-old boys climbing on top of each other under the tutelage of older men, who declared some of them "winners" over the others. What a ridiculous way to establish hierachy. But contests like that went on for years, boys competing with other boys in spaces that excluded girls (whose very presence would lower the bar), money, sex, cars, and verbal thrashings gradually replacing sheer physicality as the preferred method of establishing dominance over each other. If we were allowed to compete with them on their own terms it was mostly as a joke or sideshow; if there were things we as a group were genuinely better at (drawing, writing, typing, dancing, walking across a room without tripping over shit) these things were denigrated as not worth doing in the first place. As a child -- figuring out for the first time how the world works -- it was a brutal realization. My final impulse was to just not think about it anymore and concentrate on something good, because seeing myself in that diminished light was too humiliating. Women will go through all kinds of mental gymnastics to deny ever having such a moment, but this was the thing Andrea Dworkin never forgot. She hung on to that shit every day of her life for almost 60 years. Once you imagine women as Default Humans rather than a piece of Adam's rib who's done well for herself considering, the whole body of her work makes sense. It also becomes really hard to read without feeling sick.

Gradually I stopped thinking of gender in terms of "boys" and "girls" but rather as "us" vs. "them." They were the ones who fell into line: the guys who played football and bragged about slapping their girlfriends, and the girls who laughed appreciatively whenever one of said guys made noises with his armpit. We were everybody else: the boys who eschewed sports, the girl (singular) who took Senior Math, everyone in drama and/or chorus, the guy who wore a pink sports coat and listened to Depeche Mode, all the Japanese exchange students. Later it occurred to me that there was a pretty clear correlation between androgyny and intellect, but I still felt betrayed every.fucking.time when one of the so-called smart kids would cross the us/them line and reap the rewards offered to them by virtue of their gender. This happened most often in physics class, when the boys I used to consider my allies lapped up the attention of my sexist science teacher, monopolized the discussion, interrupted me and got away with it. I hated them more than I hated the jocks. After years of defending them against the psychological onslaught of a small Midwestern town that had no place for unathletic boys, they sold us out without looking back. This was their time, their reward for all the crap they'd endured, and they were taking hold of it with both fists. Why? Because they could. It was easy. All their fondness for scathing social critique slid away once they were on top.

For years I thought I was pissed because they were granted favors I was not, but now I think it was their lack of loyalty more than anything else that got me. Without the prior decade of smart, bitchy girls coming to their defense, they would have spent even more time upside down in their lockers than they already had. Were they thankful? Fuck no. Our defense embarrassed them, made them look effeminate, and now, for once, they could pretend they'd gotten where they were on their own merits. They were finally in the position to look down on the girls like the rest of their male peers had been doing for years, and they made no attempt whatsoever to hide their relief at this shift.

The thing I appreciate most about second-wave feminism is that as a movement it's aware of the pain that sexism fosters, for men and women alike. William wants a doll -- and everyone laughed at him those bastards!!!11! I'm thankful that the women of my generation have critiqued the feminists of my mother's generation for their racism, classism, their imperialism and their heterosexism, but it was women like my mother -- born one year before Andrea Dworkin -- who remember a sexism so pronounced that the classifieds section of the newspaper was divided into "jobs for men," "jobs for women," and "jobs for both." These women were acutely aware of what it meant to be told you were limited and deficient because of a trait you could not help, a sentiment so basic we rarely discuss it anymore but one that underlies all discussions of human rights. Their version of womanhood was limited, and for that we've called them on the carpet, but their fundamental message was one of pure, almost naive, equality, and that's not nothing.

One of the thing that strikes me about Dworkin is how little contempt she had for women who sold out, which I guess compared to her would be about every woman on the planet. You look at her apparently joyless, sexless life, and assume she must have been seething with rage at the thought of women shaving their legs and waxing their eyebrows in the hopes of getting a little trickle-down privilege. But she didn't. She defended all those women, albeit in her own rotten and disgusted way, but defended them nonetheless. Good god, can you blame them? she asks, even when she's talking about the likes of Phyllis Schlafly. Of _course_ they do this fucked up thing and say they like it. If they confronted the truth of their lives they wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning.

I don't agree with her take on pornography. I think sexuality is too complex to be reduced to I'm OK/You're Illegal, but I also realize she was responding to the time and circumstances she happened to be dropped into. Three hundred years from now she will have written herself into oblivion. Her critiques will seem obscure and strange, the result of her own influence. As Susie Bright said: Here's the irony... every single woman who pioneered the sexual revolution, every erotic-feminist-bad-girl-and-proud-of-it-stiletto-shitkicker, was once a fan of Andrea Dworkin. We all were. She was the one who got us looking at porn with a critical eye, she made you feel like you could just stomp into the adult bookstore and seize everything for inspection and a bonfire. Once all this becomes old hat -- and by "this" I mean the assumption that women have the right to own their sexuality, on their own terms -- what's now considered the histrionics of a fat girl in overalls will seem quaint and trite. That's the tragedy of it all. I read the studies done a hundred years ago that "proved" women's reproductive organs would not be damaged by getting a higher education and, oh, I laugh and I laugh, not only because the question was raised at all but because the women who undertook this research did so with such a serious sense of purpose. Of course in the end that joke's on me, because if it weren't for them defending my right to an education I wouldn't be reading their old-fashioned studies in the first place. This is Andrea Dworkin already, and she hasn't been dead a week.