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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The anti-porn feminist's strange tale of drugged rape in a European hotel has even her allies wondering.
Sep 20, 2000 | In an article published in the New Statesman magazine and the Guardian newspaper in June, American radical feminist Andrea Dworkin told a harrowing story. She was, she told her readers, drinking her second kir royale one afternoon in the garden of a European hotel when she became ill ("sickish or weakish or something"). She staggered up to her room and collapsed on the bed. The bartender's assistant brought up her dinner. "I don't know how he got inside," Dworkin wrote, "since the door was dead-bolted. He appeared suddenly, already in." Then she lost consciousness. When she awoke, it was night, the curtains hadn't been drawn and she was in pain. "I hurt deep inside my vagina ... I went to the toilet and found blood on my right hand, fresh, bright red, not menstrual blood, not clotted blood. I'm past bleeding. I tried to find the source of the blood. My hand got covered in it again."
In trying to puzzle out how she could have sustained a bloody injury while she was unconscious, Dworkin gradually became convinced she'd been drugged and raped. She speculated in detail about how her attackers might have done the deed: "I couldn't remember, but I thought they had pulled me down toward the bottom of the bed so that my vagina was near the bed's edge and my legs were easy to manipulate." To a woman who had already experienced the full measure of sexual victimization in her life (her Web site autobiography recounts molestation as a child, beatings and torture as a wife, an assault in jail, rape and prostitution), the idea that she had been used sexually while unable to resist was particularly horrifying. "In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice, " Dworkin wrote. "I had decided long ago that no one would ever rape me again; he or they or I would die. But this rape was necrophiliac: they wanted to fuck a dead woman ... I thought that being forced and being conscious was better, because then you knew; even if no one ever believed you, you knew."
Given Dworkin's particularly visible and strident brand of feminism -- highlighted by the argument in her provocative 1987 book "Intercourse" that even consensual sexual penetration is a paradigm of oppression -- it's conceivable that there are men in the world who would consider violating her a good evening's entertainment. Dworkin seems to think her story should be taken as further evidence of masculine malevolence. There are those who would be willing to accept it as such, of course, if only they felt sure it really happened. Within a week, on the very day that Dworkin's new book, "Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation," was published in the U.K., Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett voiced her doubts about the veracity of Dworkin's story.
