THC: You’ve said on several occasions, including in your book, that you think rape victims should be allowed to execute their rapists. Is this rhetorical hyperbole or policy proposal?

AD: It’s not rhetorical hyperbole, it’s something I believe. I’ve been a pacifist most of my life, and I’ve been very sad and miserable about any kind of violence. I’ve really rejected violence. But now I’ve reached a point where I don’t see how women can possibly survive if we don’t learn to defend ourselves, and if we don’t learn to retaliate against men who hurt us, I just don’t know what we will do if we don’t do that.

THC: But you see how this is obviously a comment that people will take out of context. How has the way you’ve been vilified in the media affected you?

AD: Well, it’s affected me, but not as much as people would think. You don’t have the kind of experience I’ve had in my life and get easily insulted or easily dismayed because people have something nasty to say about you. I think that you have force yourself to say what you think is true, even when that truth is something that hurts you and you don’t like it.

THC: What do you think people get wrong about you most often?

AD: [laughs]. That I’m violent. People get wrong about me that I’m authoritarian. That’s what they get wrong.

THC: I wanted to ask you about Scapegoat, which was published a year and a half ago. What’s your take on the worsening situation in the Middle East?

AD: It just breaks my heart. Nobody’s going to stop what’s happening in the Middle East until they can deal with the situation of women in both countries. What I said in Scapegoat was that in every country, women are the scapegoats of that country. I think that that’s true in Israel, and I think that that’s true in the area that the Palestinian Authority has control over. I think when we’re talking about the kind of violence that we’ve seen in the Middle East in the last six months, we’re talking about violence in male identity, and what it means. And I think that Arab men have presented us with an extraordinary question, which is, how is it that masculinity sees itself through suicide? I mean, most of the time masculinity sees itself through killing other people, not killing oneself.

THC: On the topic of current events, what do you think should be the top items on the feminist agenda in 2002?

AD: I think rape, battery, pornography and prostitution. And in other countries, female genital mutilation and acid burning of women. In Pakistan, for example, when men want revenge on other men, they will rape the women who are seen to belong to other men. And they will cut off the noses of those women. So all of those kinds of disfigurement and humiliation and sadism, all of those things are the issues that we have to deal with in the coming decade. We just have to. Because if we don’t, women have nothing.