Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

These are miracles, political miracles, and there will be so many more.

Middle-class women rarely understand how complicit they are unless they’ve experienced torture, usually in the home; prostituting women know that every breath is bought by turning oneself inside out so that the blood covers the skin; the skin is ripped; one watches the world like a hunted animal on all fours in the darkest part of every night.

My ideology is simple and left: I believe in redistributing the wealth; everyone should have food and health care, shelter and safety; it’s not right to hurt and deprive people so that they become prostitutes and thieves.

My ideology is simple and left: I believe in redistributing the wealth; everyone should have food and health care, shelter and safety; it’s not right to hurt and deprive people so that they become prostitutes and thieves.

Rape is inescapable for women. The act, the attempt, the threat - the three dynamics of a rape culture - touch 100 percent of us.

Rape is inescapable for women. The act, the attempt, the threat - the three dynamics of a rape culture - touch 100 percent of us.

In addition, the law defined pornography as sex discrimination; this meant that pornography helped to create and maintain the second-class status of women in society - that turning a woman into an object or using her body in violent, sexually explicit ways contributed to the devaluing of women in every part of life.

In pornography one found the map of male sexual dominance and one also found, as I said in a speech, “the poor, the illiterate, married women with no voice, women forced into prostitution or kept from getting out and women raped, raped once, raped twice, raped more times than they [could] count.”

The one difference, unbridgeable, intractable, between prisons and pornography was that prisoners were not expected to like being in prison, whereas women were supposed to like each and every abuse suffered in pornography.

Arguably (but not always), those in prison had committed an offense; the offense of women in pornography was in being women.