essay on Andrea Dworkin's Mercy
Andrea’s Mercy
Andrea’s Mercy
There's this Lovelace girl on
the marquee; and even the junkies are laughing, they think it's so swell; and I
think who is she, where's she from, who hurt her, who hurt her to put her here;
because there's a camera;...and if there's a camera there's a plan; and if it's
here it's for money, like she's some animal trained to do tricks; when I see
black men picking cotton on plantations I get that somewhere there's pain for
them, I don't have to see it, no one has to show it to me for me to know it's
there; and when I see a woman under glass, I know the same, a sex animal
trained for sex tricks; and the camera's ready; maybe Masta's not in the
frame...(G)etting fucked in the throat is good; you get fucked and
female...(H)ow come all these assholes buy it?...(S)he's someone real…
--Mercy, p. 297
It is, of course, tiresome to
dwell on sexual abuse. It is also simple-minded...The notion that bad things
happen is both propagandistic and inadequate...This axiom is too reductive
to be seriously entertained, except, of course, by the poor, the uneducated,
the lunatic fringe...
--Mercy, "Not
Andrea: Epilogue," p. 334
Donna Minkowitz describes
masturbating to descriptions of a mentally retarded girl who was
gang-raped...She also describes trawling Andrea Dworkin's novel Mercy, searching
for descriptions of sexual violence..."Late at night, I turn the lights
down low, uncap some Astroglide, and pull out Andrea Dworkin, trawling for
passages..." (Minkowitz, 1995). The passage Minkowitz quotes from Mercy
ends with the words: "he kept tearing me to pieces."
Acccording to sex radicals, if
a woman masturbates to the description of a mentally retarded girl gang raped
or a woman raped by jailers, tricks, and her husband, well, such is life...The
sex radical wants her porn and her orgasm is more important than anything or
anyone else.
--Christine Stark, "Girls
to Boyz," p.286-287
There is a very divisive line between
whether one believes that humans live in a patriarchal society or not, and even
whether it matters much whether society as a whole is patriarchal. [1]
Even in feminist (self-proclaimed and/or genuine) discussions (which frequently
degenerate into petty arguments), it is even debated whether or not society is
indeed male supremacist. Also debated is what forms patriarchy takes. Does it
include capitalism, globalization, prostitution, child sexual abuse,
sadomasochism, culture’s very definition of sex? [2]
Since the early 1970s, Andrea Dworkin has entered the debate within (and
outside of) feminism. She has taken a decidedly radical feminist stance, which
her detractors deride as “anti-sex”, “puritan,” “man hating,” and so on, to no
end. Also, women calling themselves feminist have said that because her novel Mercy
contains graphic descriptions of sexual abuse, that they thought masturbation
may have been an appropriate response (Levy, 2005; Minkowitz, 1995, cited by
Stark, 2004).
In Mercy, the narrator’s
experiences with child sexual abuse, rape, poverty, homelessness, prostitution,
pornography, and religion shape the narrator’s life and politics. Dworkin uses
her character’s insistent, pleading, enraged voice to force one to be witness
to what can only be named atrocity.
Mercy
begins and ends in sexual violence. At the age of nine, the narrator is molested
by a stranger in a movie theatre. She tells her parents: [3]
I wasn’t raped until I was almost ten which is pretty good
it seems when I ask around because many have been touched but are afraid to say
…So you try to make them understand that yes something did happen honest you
aren’t lying and you say it again, thicklipped from biting your lips, your
chest swollen from heartbreak, your eyes swollen from tears all salt and
bitter, holding your legs funny but you don’t want them to see and you keep
pretending to be normal… (p 13-14)
From the age of 14, she has
sexual relationships with adult men. She believes her quest to know, to live
outside her mother’s strictures lead her to the men. At this point she doesn’t
realize that it is men who invented sexist restrictions on women’s freedom.
Near the novel’s end, she speaks of her uncle who sexually abused his children:
(I)nfants even, a man sticks it in the mouths of infants, I
know such a man; oh, he’s real; an uncle of mine; an adult, look up to him,
listen to him, obey him, love him, he’s your uncle…he got rich and prominent,
an outstanding citizen; five infants, in the throat, men like the throat, his
own children, it was a daddy’s love…and God watched… (p. 284)
When she’s 18, Andrea is raped by her
boyfriend’s acquaintance. She never tells, just tries to pick up the pieces on
her own, which happens increasingly as the novel progresses. Soon after, she is
arrested and sent to prison for protesting the Vietnam War. The “peace boys”
know that women get raped there and elsewhere, they just don’t care. Within 24
hours they bail out all the men-they specifically say it’s because men get
raped in prison. The women are nothing to them:
But even after the pacifists didn’t say, see, these girls
hate the War…Even the girl who’s stupid enough to type our letters and bring us
coffee hates the War. Even these dumb girls who walked through a door into hell
hate the War. Even these silly cunts we left in a torture pit knowing full well
they’d be hurt but so what hate the War. They are too stupid to hate us but
they hate the War…It was funny, how some bourgeois cunt couldn’t take it…I
couldn’t speak anymore at all… (p. 68-69)
Partially because
she is female, Andrea, never gains a strong, immitigable sense of self-worth,
so when she finds herself homeless (kicked out by her parents for being raped
in prison-imagine, she had the gall to bleed from it, to tell about it), she
finds herself prostituting. After all, it happens to women so much; how could
there be anything wrong with it? The light prostituted people stand under
makes them look grotesque, just
inhuman enough, same species but not really, you can stick it in…not female
ones of you, even a fucking rib of you; you got ones in good light for that.
They stick it in boys too; anything under these lights is here to be used.
You’d think they’d know that boys was real, same species, with fists that work
of will someday, but someday isn’t their problem…(p. 116)
It’s just happening to women, girls and boys, so there’s
no need for the Leftist men to be concerned. They can just keep on buying and
writing about it. Or so they think.
While criticizing the
Left, Andrea also realizes that these “peace boys” are secretly racist-they
sacrifice black men to prison so they can further the cause against the war:
(t)he peace boys talked words but the words were trash.
When the time came Jay stood there, a hulking six-foot black man and I know he
wanted to cry, and the Feds took him out and he was gone for five years. The
peace boys were white. He was afraid and the peace boys were exuberant. He
didn’t have words…he almost fell down from the shock and the reality of it…his
mother and sisters were there and they had tears, not words, and the peace boys
had no tears, only words about the struggle of the black against the racist war
in Vietnam, I couldn’t stop crying…(p. 61-62)
They weren’t against the
abuse and killing of racial minorities so much as against being sent to die in
war. They are essentially egotistical cowards-and privileged, lest we forget
their Daddy’s money. They have no problem collaborating with the status quo
when it involves self-aggrandizement over lesser beings.
White males’ dominance over “lesser”
beings is also demonstrated in American soldiers treatment of other nationalities.
In Mercy, Andrea lives in Greece for two years. There the soldiers treat
the Greeks contemptuously:
they call the Cretans niggers. They laugh
at them and shout and them and call them cunts, treat them like dirt…(T)hey are
the kings of the world all flatulent with white wealth and the darkies are
meant to serve them. They make me ashamed. They hate anything not Amerikan and
anyone with dark skin…I didn’t believe any words were dirty until I heard the
white boys say cunt. (p. 81-82)
Throughout her life various abuses aren’t
experienced as separate phenomena. The above-mentioned abuses, as well as
battery, pornography, and so-called sadomasochism are entwined. For example,
Andrea considers sadomasochism to be a form of woman battery, rape, slavery, etc.
As she says of being physically and sexually abused by her husband and how it’s
considered “kinky”:
And I let him tie me up so it’s on
me what happened…I been facing what I liked since I was born and being tied up
isn’t what they think, the words they use like “sadomasochism” or “bondage,”
three-dollar words for getting a trick to come, and they get all excited just
to say them because they read about them in books and they are all philosophers
from the books and I hate them, I hate the middle-class goons who have so much
to say but never spent one fucking day trying to stay alive. And when you are a
fucking piece of ground meat, hamburger he left on the floor…it’s what you
wanted, what you are, what’s inside of you, like you planned it all along, like
your General Westmoreland or something instead of messed up, bleeding
trash…fucking middle-class hypocrite farts. I have a list. I remember you ones.
You try to pull the wool over someone else’s eyes about how smart you are on
the side of whoever’s hurting. Nelson Mandela provoked it. What do you think
about that, assholes? (p. 158)
As the above quote also helps to illustrate, Dworkin becomes a
very angry force, maybe even a revolutionary. She comes to view violent
retaliation against those who hurt women, including pimps, johns,
pornographers, pedophiles, and rapists, as necessary. The author of this essay
has been reluctant to write of this, because as the novel progresses, Andrea
becomes increasingly focused on doing violence to, even killing masses of men.
Some argue that Andrea loses her sanity. [4]
Most of the criticism of the novel comes from the conclusions about patriarchy
and what women need to do about it (Pagnattaro, 1998). For example, Andrea
takes karate lessons to better learn how to fight men, which she has to quit
because of being to poor to pay for it. Discussing why she severely assaults
defenseless homeless men, she cruelly and only somewhat understandably states:
“I fucking don’t care about fair; discuss fair at the U.N.; vote on it; from
with I enunciate another political principle, It is obscene for a girl to think
about fair.” (p. 324). The judicial system has failed her, and every girl given
to the man who molests her, every woman who's rapist has been found not guilty,
every woman who was killed a little inside while the abusive
man/pimp/john/rapist lived on to do it again:
I was in the courtroom. The
walls were brown…God’s name was written on the wall…The rapist smiled; at the
woman. He had kidnapped her. He had held her for nearly two days, or was it
four, or were there five of them, each being tried separately? He had fucked
her over and over, brutally. He had sliced her with a knife. He had sodomized
her. He had burned her. She shaked; she shivered; she screamed; she cried. He
walked; the jury found her guilty. I was in the court. The walls were gray. He
beat the woman near to death; they were married; the judge didn’t see the
problem; she’s the wife, after all; the guy walked…God’s name was written on
the wall…The walls were green…God’s name was written on the wall...The daddy
had raped the kid, over and over, so many times, she was four, he wanted
custody, he got it, it was a second marriage, the first kid was raped too but
the judge wouldn’t admit it into evidence, said it was prejudicial…how many
times does he get to do it in his lifetime, to how many…I want each one
followed. I want each one killed. It is very important for women to kill men.
(p. 329-330)
Her outrage comes from something laughing in her face while it
slaughters her and her sisters: male violence against women. Andrea's goal can
also be witnessed in this description of a photographed arrested black man she
knows:
I see there is no look of shame
or coyness on his face, he ain't saying fuck me. I see that his nakedness is
different than mine, that his pride is unknown to me...Huey is vivid and real
and alive, he's jumping off the page...he's bursting with defiance, the raised
chest, however painful, is bursting with pride. I wonder if anyone would ever
jerk off to the picture; you know, black boy in chains; but I don't believe
they would, I don't, he's nobody's piece of meat, his eyes wouldn't let you and
you'd worry what he'd do when he's uncuffed later, his eyes would see you and
he'd come to get you and you'd know it in your heart and in your hand. He's
oppressed...He's been low, he knows. (p. 243)
Women may or may not know they are, but they too are oppressed,
says Andrea. Unimaginably. Help us, she pleads. Don't wait, she demands. We
need to pick up the shreds of our lives. Men need to stop.
[1] Patriarchy
is here defined as male supremacy and the forms it takes.
[2] Patriarchy
needs to be understood as multifaceted and changing. For example, when it first
came into existence, it most likely didn’t include capitalism. Since, it has
grown to create and/or include heterosexism, capitalism, racism, globalisation,
etc. It has also diversified its methods of oppressing women. Without these
insights, feminism fails to understand the whole, or even majority, of patriarchy.
Consequently, “feminism” will actually help to perpetuate forms of patriarchy.
[3] Both the
narrator and the author have experienced many of the same incidents of
violence; the work is semi-autobiographical, yet called a novel. However, that
is outside the scope of this essay. Dworkin (1997) says of why she wrote it: “I felt, certainly, a much larger abandonment,
a more terrifying desolation, essentially impersonal: how the lives of women
and children were worthless to men and God…I broke the picture open into a
universe of complex and concrete detail dreadful with meaning, in particular
about incest and the power of the father--the patriarchal right of invasion
into the bodies of women and children. At the end of writing Mercy's
Massada chapter, I felt as if I had finally seen that earlier picture whole.”
[4] Some also
say that Dworkin herself must be insane. For example, Bernard Chapin
(2005) believes that because in this novel Andrea compares God to a sadistic,
incestuously abusive father that Dworkin is crazy. Phyllis Chesler had
misrepresented that issue in the novel as something Dworkin said in nonfiction
writing.
Of that Dworkin (1994) says, “Deciding what she will see, what she can know, I am detached from her
and cold in how I use her. I do not ever think she is me. She is not my
mouthpiece. She does not directly speak my views or enumerate my ideas or serve
as a mannequin in words displaying my wounds of body or soul. I am more than
the sum of all her parts; and she can live in the reader's mind but the
reader's mind cannot know me through knowing her.”