Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

applause lasted nearly ten minutes. It was one of the most

astonishing experiences of my life. Many of the talks I gave

received standing ovations, and this was not the first, but I

had never spoken to such a big audience, and what I said

contradicted rather strongly much of what had been said

before I spoke. So the response was amazing and it

overwhelmed me. The coverage of the speech also overwhelmed me. One New York weekly published two vilifications. One was by a woman who had at least been present.

She suggested that men might die from blue-balls if I were

ever taken seriously. The other was by a man who had not

been present; he had overheard women talking in the lobby.

He was “enraged. ” He could not bear the possibility that “ a

woman might consider masochistic her consent to the means

of my release. ” That was the “danger Dworkin’s ideology

represents. ” Well, yes; but both writers viciously distorted

what I had actually said. Many women, including some

quite famous writers, sent letters deploring the lack of

fairness and honesty in the two articles. None of those

letters were published. Instead, letters from men who had

not been present were published; one of them compared my

speech to H itler’s Final Solution. I had used the words

“limp” and “penis” one after the other: “limp penis. ” Such

usage outraged; it offended so deeply that it warranted a

comparison with an accomplished genocide. Nothing I had

said about women was mentioned, not even in passing. The

speech was about women. The weekly in question has since

never published an article of mine or reviewed a book of

mine or covered a speech of mine (even though some of my

speeches were big events in New York City). * The kind of

fury in those two articles simply saturated the publishing

establishment, and my work was stonewalled. Audiences

around the country, most of them women and men,

continued to rise to their feet; but the journals that one

might expect to take note of a political writer like myself, or

a phenomenon like those speeches, refused to acknowledge

my existence. There were two noteworthy if occasional

exceptions: Ms. and Mother Jones.

In the years following the publication of Woman Hating,

it began to be regarded as a feminist classic. The honor in

this will only be apparent to those who value Mary

Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication o f the Rights o f Women or

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. It was a great

honor. Feminists alone were responsible for the survival of

Woman Hating. Feminists occupied the offices of Woman

* After Our Blood was published, I went to this same weekly to beg—yes,

beg—for some attention to the book, which was dying. The male writer

whose “release” had been threatened by “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’ ” asked to meet me. He told me,