She Would Love to Know You
My hands are shaking. I’m going to publish this anyway.
John Stoltenberg messaged me tonight. Andrea’s husband. The man who lived with her for thirty-one years and has spent the twenty since her death as the custodian of her work, reading every bad-faith citation, every lazy thinkpiece, every journalist who couldn’t be bothered to open Intercourse before writing about what it said. He read my essay. He told me it is one of the best things about her he has ever read. He told me the analysis is stunning. He told me she would love to know me.
I am crying as I type this. I have been crying on and off for an hour. I cried reading his messages and I cried answering them and I cried when I put my phone down and I am crying now.
I wrote “Dworkin’s a TERF and You’re a Sexist” out of rage. Rage at the decades-long project of turning the most materially rigorous feminist of the twentieth century into a cartoon. Rage at the retrofitting of a slur onto a corpus that does not support it. Rage at how the slur gets used to make it permissible, even righteous, to refuse to read her. Rage because the disappearance of Andrea Dworkin is a template. She was canonized just enough to be teachable, flattened into a position, discarded as an embarrassment, and then reanimated only as a weapon against living women saying uncomfortable things. Rage because I have watched this happen to women I love. Rage because the women I love are being hunted and the archive that could arm them is being held hostage by people who have never read it.
The person who knew her best read what I wrote and said I got her right.
I don’t know how to describe what this does to me. Every time I publish something unhedged, some small frightened part of me waits for the correction. For someone older and more credentialed to tell me the women I am writing about were not what I think they were. That I have projected a radicalism onto a tradition that was really more moderate, more reasonable, more palatable than I have made it. That correction is the entire job of establishment feminism now. Managing the radicals of the past into respectability. Making them safe for syllabi. Ensuring they cannot be used as weapons by the living.
John Stoltenberg told me her words and ideas live through me, and it moved him greatly.
Live through you. He said live through you. I keep reading it. Her words live through me. He said that. The man who edited her, who slept beside her, who watched her write the sentences that changed my life, he read me and felt her there. He felt her alive in my writing. He told me so. He said she would love to know me. He said she would love to know me and I am sitting here, a thirty-something dyke on Substack, sobbing because Andrea Dworkin’s husband told me his dead wife would love to know me.
I have spent years being told I am too strident. Too certain. Too unwilling to extend grace to my opponents. Too mean. Too angry. Too much. I have been told this by liberals and leftists and the therapy-brained and the discourse-poisoned and by people who genuinely love me and wish I would soften for my own sake. I have held the line anyway because I believed the women who built this tradition were right. I believed their rightness was recoverable. I believed recovering it mattered to the people I love who are currently in danger.
Tonight the man who loved Andrea Dworkin told me I am doing what she did.
I want to be good enough for this. I want to be worthy of it. I want to write the next essay and the one after that and the one after that with the same care and the same rage and the same refusal to hedge. I want to keep going. I want her to be proud of me wherever she is. I know that sounds insane. I don’t care. I want it anyway.
Andrea, I am trying. I am trying so hard. Thank you for the blueprint. I will not put it down.
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