The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

No one got through it without having that happen. I also told

her that she’d begin to hate men; at first manipulating them

would seem like power, but eventually and inevitably the day

would come when one perceived them as coarse and brutal,

smel y, dirty bullies. She had said that she liked sex and that

she had had sex with the guy who was now trying to pimp

her. I told her that the sex with Abbie’s friend was a setup to

make her more pliant and that in prostituting one lost the

ability to feel, so if one liked sex it was the last thing, not the

first thing, that one should do. I told her that most people

thought that women prostituted in order to get money

for drugs, but it was the other way around; the prostitution

became so vile, so ugly, so hard, that drugs provided the only

soft: landing, a kind of embrace - and on the literal level they

took away the pain, physical and mental.

I didn’t see or talk to Anita again after that night, but the

friend who had asked me to go said that Anita had moved to

California and had a job as an editor. I don’t know if Anita

ever tried the prostituting, but if so I helped her get out fast

and if not I helped with that, too. I was lucky to have the

chance to talk with her, and I began to understand that my

125

Heartbreak

own experiences could have meaning for other women in

ways that mattered. I began to trust myself more.

126

Prisons

Perhaps because I came from the pacifist left, I had an intense

and abiding hatred for prisons (even though the U. S. prison

system was developed by the Quakers). After the publication

of Our Blood, I wrote a proposal for a book on prisons. I was

struck by the way prisons stayed the same through time and

place: the confinement of an individual in bad circumstances

with a sadistic edge and including al the prison rites of passage.

I was struck by how prisons were the only places in which men

were threatened with rape in a way analogous to the female

experience. I was struck by the common sadomasochistic

structure of the prison experience no mat er what the crime

or country or historical era. That proposal was rejected by a

slew of publishers. I found myself at a dead end.

But an odd redemption was at hand. I had noticed that in

al pornography one also found the prison as leitmotif, the

sexualization of confining and beating women, the ubiquitous

rape, the dominance and submission of the social world in

which women were literally and metaphorically imprisoned.

I decided to write on pornography because I could make