"Scapegoat" the book is an alarming, confrontational, full-tilt boogie through the vast catalog of injustices and horrors, individual and institutional, that have been visited on women and Jews through the ages. In a florid, violent and accusatory synthesis of two different strands of classic victimology, Dworkin makes comparisons between phenomena like rape and pogroms, Nazi hate literature and pornography. The parallels she draws are not particularly original, but no one denies the importance of pointing out the way that the often similar persecution of Jews and women illustrates the dark side of human behavior in situations of unequal power. Yet both groups, the heroes of Dworkin's implied morality play, are analyzed solely as victims -- at least until Dworkin comes to the establishment of the state of Israel. For most of history, Dworkin says, women and Jews have had little or no capability or strength of their own, and thus have simply -- and nobly, and righteously, and innocently -- suffered.

Another of Dworkin's theses is equally banal and simplistic: Evil begets evil. Those who are persecuted will want to persecute others in their turn. When the downtrodden attain their own ugly measure of power, they will -- inevitably, she implies -- begin to abuse others, just as "masculinist" Israel now stomps on its own pitiful women and the helpless Palestinians. Women who are co-opted by male supremacy are like wartime collaborators, or the vicious female guards and doctors in the Nazi concentration camps. They will even victimize other women and thus become, in Dworkin's world, "honorary men."

Dworkin's most original and controversial conclusion to all this is that "women need land and guns." Women must reject pacifism and literally create their own militant, separatist territory (or Lebensraum?). As a practical concept, of course, the idea is nothing short of nuts. But even as an exercise in rhetoric it is unconvincing, mainly because it is unclear why Dworkin believes that Womanland would be immune to the temptations of structural power she has just been at such pains to illustrate. If the Israelis are practicing the sadism they learned from anti-Semites on the Palestinians, won't women also find their own scapegoats?

Dworkin also does not seem to see the inconsistency between her own blistering, demonizing prose and her condemnations of hate speech and hate literature. "Words make killing easier, legitimate, or inevitable," she writes. "Words can kill." Why, then, does Dworkin spew so much intemperate rhetoric herself, rhetoric that overtly justifies violence? Because, it seems, the people she is scapegoating deserve it.

Again, it is easy -- perhaps too easy -- to see the symbolic connections between the subject of Dworkin's book and the way she herself has been publicly vilified -- and pitied -- for her rape story. A common charge is that her essay was just a publicity stunt, that with it Dworkin not only had succeeded in obtaining sympathetic attention for her book but had perhaps deliberately told a questionable story, so that when challenged, she could continue to play the feminist martyr whose agonized cries are never believed. "It reads almost as if Dworkin wants to be doubted," Bennett wrote.

But most think that idea is far too cynical. Bright wrote a surprisingly sympathetic column on the issue. "I could easily believe she had a black-out, and nasty injuries, from an unexpected dose of alcohol and sunburn," Bright said. "I would rather have sympathy for that version of events than to believe she is maliciously making the whole thing up." Bright thinks the truth is probably simpler than that -- and sadder: "By the time you finish reading [her story], you know she has finally completely lost her mind."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"