Letter: No computer, no list of enemies and no 'non-genital man'

I WOULD like to correct some wrong and misleading information about me in Zoe Heller's profile 'The New Eve'.

1. I don't have a computer and I don't keep a list of enemies, even by hand. There are some people who have written about me in the past that I don't want to speak to. This seems reasonable to me.

2. I have never referred to my friend John Stoltenberg as a 'non-genital man'.

3. I have never used my personal history as a way of evading political debate. In 20 years I have written very little autobiographical non-fiction. With respect to John Irving's pro-free speech article in the New York Times, I did directly address his lame and condescending argument, which was that those of us who oppose pornography are ignorant, puritanical and philistine.

4. The civil rights ordinance developed by Catharine A MacKinnon and myself in Minneapolis in 1983 has never been argued before the US Supreme Court. A circuit appeals court found a different version of it (passed in Indianapolis) unconstitutional once, which technically is binding only in that jurisdiction.

5. There are mistakes about the biographical details of my life, including the chronology.

6. Ms Heller repeats her opinion of Mercy as 'mad, bad'. As a liberal feminist she probably believes in repression and the subconscious. So let's finish the quote: 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'. I'd say there is a lot of meaning in the unspoken part.

Andrea Dworkin

Brooklyn, New York