pornography men possessing women andrea dworkin

It was this, she says, that made her abandon pacificism: 'I finally got away not because I knew that he would kill me but because I thought I would kill him.' Four paragraphs down she alludes to the 'beating and torture I experienced in marriage some 30 years ago'. It was my compass.' Her experience is there again, on the first page of her new book, Scapegoat, published today. 'When I wrote Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women, I used my life in every decision I made. 'Autobiography is the unseen foundation of my non-fiction work', she has written. In 1972 she made a vow, 'that I would use everything I know in behalf of women's liberation'. 'They pretty much tore me up inside with a steel speculum and had themselves a fine old time verbally tormenting me as well.' She married a brutal man, an 'assassin', who battered and tortured her for several years, beating her with planks and burning her breasts with cigarettes, until a feminist helped her go into hiding: 'Every trip outside might mean death if he found me'. In 1965 she was arrested and imprisoned after joining an anti-Vietnam war demonstration, then assaulted by the two male prison doctors who gave her an internal examination. She was first raped at nine: 'Though not legally,' she writes in an autobiographical essay, 'since fingers and a hand were used for penetration, not the officially requisite penis.' She worked as a prostitute. Her experiences at the hands of men have been more than horrible: diabolical.

When she campaigns against pornography and prostitution, rape and abuse, Dworkin knows whereof she speaks: 'The premises of the prostituted woman are my premises.' It is true, for example, that that Dworkin once prostituted herself on the streets, or as she has put it: 'I fucked for food and shelter and whatever cash I needed.' This personal experience, the website confirms, 'is part of what informs the commitment behind all her writing'.

Where photographic evidence is not available, the site relies on the author's written or spoken word.

Pornography men possessing women andrea dworkin