Rest In Peace, Andrea Dworkin

I've been trying for days to think of what to post about the death of Andrea Dworkin. Clearly, I've thought about it for too long, because good ol' Flea at One Good Thing
(scroll to 4/12) has already posted everything that was in my head.

Well, almost everything.

I started rereading my favorite Dworkin speech. "I Want a 24-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape" was delivered in 1983 to a group of 500 pro-feminist men. To end this speech, she says:

... I want one day of respite, one day off, one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for less--it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.

I dare you to try it. I demand that you try it. I don't mind begging you to try it. What else could you possibly be here to do? What else could this movement possibly mean? What else could matter so much?

And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing because it is nothing: it is not real; it is not true. But on that day it becomes real. And then, instead of rape we will for the first time in our lives--both men and women--begin to experience freedom. If you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong. You cannot change what you say you want to change. For myself, I want to experience just one day of real freedom before I die. I leave you here to do that for me and for the women whom you say you love.

I think I love this speech so much because this is a woman who is constantly and unfairly drug around as the ultimate stereotype of the feminist man-hater and yet her optimism is so obvious... A single day where no one is raped. She makes it sound so attainable. I'm sorry she never got to see it happen.