Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality Read online

  Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

  Andrea Dworkin

  PLUME

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  Copyright © 1974 by Andrea Dworkin

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Drawing on page 98 by Jean Holabird

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  For Grace Paley

  and in Memory o f Emma Goldman

  . . . Shakespeare had a sister; but do not

  look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the

  poet. She died young —alas, she never

  wrote a word.. . . Now my belief is that

  this poet who never wrote a word and was

  buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives

  in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are

  washing up the dishes and putting the

  children to bed. But she lives; for great

  poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to

  walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within

  your power to give her. For my belief is

  that if we live another century or so—I

  am talking of the common life which is the

  real life and not of the little separate lives

  which we live as individuals —and have

  five hundred a year each of us and rooms

  of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what

  we think; if we escape a little from the

  common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each

  other but in relation to reality. . . if we

  face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is

  no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and

  that our relation is to the world of reality

  . . . then the opportunity will come and the

  dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister

  will put on the body which she has so often

  laid down. Drawing her life from the lives

  of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she

  will be born. As for her coming without

  that preparation, without that effort on

  our part, without that determination that

  when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we

  cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come

  if we worked for her, and that so to work,

  even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.

  Virginia Woolf,

  A Room of One's Own (1929)

  A C K N O W L E D G M E N T

  Ricki Abrams and I began writing this book together in

  Amsterdam, Holland, in December 1971. We worked

  long and hard and through a lot o f living and then, for

  many reasons, our paths separated. Ricki went to Australia, then to India. I returned to Amerika. So the book, in its early pieces and fragments, became mine as

  the responsibility for finishing it became mine. I thank

  Ricki here for the work we did together, and the time

  we had together, and this book which came from that

  time and grew beyond it.

  Andrea Dworkin

  C O N T E N T S

  Introduction

  17

  Part One: THE FAIRY TALES

  29

  Chapter 1 Onceuponatime: The Roles

  34

  Chapter 2 Onceuponatime: The Moral of the

  Story

  47

  Part Two: THE PORNOGRAPHY

  5 1

  Chapter 3 Woman as Victim: Story of O

  55

  Chapter 4 Woman as Victim: The Image

  64

  Chapter 5 Woman as Victim: Suck

  75

  Part Three: THE HERSTORY

  91

  Chapter 6 Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

  95

  Chapter 7 Gynocide: The Witches

  118

  Part Four: ANDROGYNY

  151

  Chapter 8 Androgyny: The Mythological Model

  155

  Chapter 9 Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and

  Community

  174

  Afterword

  197

  Notes

  205

  Bibliography

  211

  There is a misery of the body and a misery

  of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we

  looked at them, poured nectar into our

  mouths, and the grass became bread, we

  would still be sad. We live in a system that

  manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its

  mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,

  and we drown down, dead, too soon.

  . . . uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.

  Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

  The Revolution is not an event that takes

  two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out

  process in which new people are created,

  capable of renovating society so that the

  revolution does not replace one elite with

  another, but so that the revolution creates

  a new anti-authoritarian structure with

  anti-authoritarian people who in their

  turn re-organize the society so that it

  becomes a non-alienated human society,

  free from war, hunger, and exploitation.

  Rudi Dutschke

  March 7, 1968

  You do not teach someone to count only

  up to eight. You do not say nine and ten

  and beyond do not exist. You give people

  everything or they are not able to count at

  all. There is a real revolution or none at

  all.

  Pericles Korovessis, in an interview

  in Liberation, June 1973

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. It has no other purpose. It is not cerebral wisdom, or academic horsesh
it, or ideas carved

  in granite or destined for immortality. It is part o f a

  process and its context is change. It is part o f a planetary movement to restructure community forms and human consciousness so that people have power over

  their own lives, participate fully in community, live in

  dignity and freedom.

  T h e commitment to ending male dominance as the

  fundamental psychological, political, and cultural reality o f earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment. It is a commitment to transformation o f

  the self and transformation o f the social reality on every

  level. T h e core o f this book is an analysis o f sexism (that

  system o f male dominance), what it is, how it operates

  on us and in us. However, I do want to discuss briefly

  two problems, tangential to that analysis, but still crucial

  to the development o f revolutionary program and consciousness. T h e first is the nature o f the women’s movement as such, and the second has to do with the work o f the writer.

  17

  10

  Woman Hating

  Until the appearance of the brilliant anthology

  Sisterhood Is Powerful and Kate Millett’s extraordinary

  book Sexual Politics, women did not think o f themselves

  as oppressed people. Most women, it must be admitted,

  still do not. But the women’s movement as a radical

  liberation movement in Amerika can be dated from the

  appearance of those two books. We learn as we reclaim

  our herstory that there was a feminist movement which

  organized around the attainment of the vote for

  women. We learn that those feminists were also ardent

  abolitionists. Women “came out” as abolitionists —out

  of the closets, kitchens, and bedrooms; into public

  meetings, newspapers, and the streets. Two activist

  heroes o f the abolitionist movement were Black women,

  Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and they stand

  as prototypal revolutionary models.

  Those early Amerikan feminists thought that suffrage was the key to participation in Amerikan democracy and that, free and enfranchised, the former slaves would in fact be free and enfranchised. Those women

  did not imagine that the vote would be effectively denied Blacks through literacy tests, property qualifications, and vigilante police action by white racists. Nor did they imagine the “separate but equal” doctrine and

  the uses to which it would be put.

  Feminism and the struggle for Black liberation were

  parts of a compelling whole. That whole was called,

  ingenuously perhaps, the struggle for human rights.

  The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannot

  be denied. Once women experienced themselves as activists and began to understand the reality and meaning of oppression, they began to articulate a politically

  Introduction

  19

  conscious feminism. T h eir focus, their concrete objective, was to attain suffrage for women.

  T h e women’s movement formalized itself in 1848 at

  Seneca Falls when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia

  Mott, both activist abolitionists, called a convention.

  T hat convention drafted The Seneca Falls Declaration of

  Rights and Sentiments which is to this day an outstanding

  feminist declaration.

  In struggling for the vote, women developed many

  o f the tactics which were used, almost a century later,

  in the Civil Rights Movement. In order to change laws,

  women had to violate them. In order to change convention, women had to violate it. T h e feminists (suffragettes) were militant political activists who used the tactics o f civil disobedience to achieve their goals.

  T h e struggle for the vote began officially with the

  Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. It was not until

  August 26, 1920, that women were given the vote by the

  kindly male electorate. Women did not imagine that the

  vote would scarcely touch on, let alone transform, their

  own oppressive situations. Nor did they imagine that

  the “separate but equal” doctrine would develop as

  a tool o f male dominance. Nor did they imagine the

  uses to which it would be put.

  T here have also been, always, individual feminists —

  women who violated the strictures o f the female role,

  who challenged male supremacy, who fought for the

  right to work, or sexual freedom, or release from the

  bondage o f the marriage contract. Those individuals

  were often eloquent when they spoke o f the oppression

  they suffered as women in their own lives, but other

  women, properly trained to their roles, did not listen.

  20

  Woman Haling

  Feminists, most often as individuals but sometimes in

  small militant groups, fought the system which oppressed them, analyzed it, were jailed, were ostracized, but there was no general recognition among women

  that they were oppressed.

  In the last 5 or 6 years, that recognition has become

  more widespread among women. We have begun to understand the extraordinary violence that has been done to us, that is being done to us: how our minds are

  aborted in their development by sexist education; how

  our bodies are violated by oppressive grooming imperatives; how the police function against us in cases of rape and assault; how the media, schools, and

  churches conspire to deny us dignity and freedom; how

  the nuclear family and ritualized sexual behavior imprison us in roles and forms which are degrading to us.

  We developed consciousness-raising sessions to try to

  fathom the extraordinary extent of our despair, to try

  to search out the depth and boundaries of our internalized anger, to try to find strategies for freeing ourselves from oppressive relationships, from masochism and passivity, from our own lack of self-respect. There

  was both pain and ecstasy in this process. Women

  discovered each other, for truly no oppressed group

  had ever been so divided and conquered. Women began to deal with concrete oppressions: to become part of the economic process, to erase discriminatory laws,

  to gain control over our own lives and over our own

  bodies, to develop the concrete ability to survive on our

  own terms. Women also began to articulate structural

  analyses o f sexist society — Millett did that with Sexual

  Politics; in Vaginal Politics Ellen Frankfort demonstrated

  Introduction

  21

  the complex and deadly antiwoman biases o f the medical establishment; in Women and Madness Dr. Phyllis Chesler showed that mental institutions are prisons for

  women who rebel against society’s well-defined female

  role.

  We began to see ourselves clearly, and what we saw

  was dreadful. We saw that we were, as Yoko O no wrote,

  the niggers o f the world, slaves to the slave. We saw

  that we were the ultimate house niggers, ass-licking,

  bowing, scraping, shuffling fools. We recognized all o f

  our social behavior as learned behavior that functioned

  for survival in a sexist world: we painted ourselves,

  smiled, exposed legs and ass, had children, kept

  house, as our accommodations to the reality o f power

  politics.

  Most o f the women involved in articulating the oppression o f women were white and middle class. We spent, even if we did not earn or control, enormous
/>
  sums o f money. Because o f our participation in the mid-

  dle-class lifestyle we were the oppressors o f other

  people, our poor white sisters, our Black sisters, our

  Chicana sisters —and the men who in turn oppressed

  them. This closely interwoven fabric o f oppression,

  which is the racist class structure o f Amerika today,

  assured that wherever one stood, it was with at least one

  foot heavy on the belly o f another human being.

  As white, middle-class women, we lived in the house

  o f the oppressor-of-us-all who supported us as he

  abused us, dressed us as he exploited us, “treasured”

  us in payment for the many functions we performed.

  We were the best-fed, best-kept, best-dressed, most

  willing concubines the world has ever known. We had

  22

  Woman Hating

  no dignity and no real freedom, but we did have good

  health and long lives.

  The women’s movement has not dealt with this

  bread-and-butter issue, and that is its most awful

  failure. There has been little recognition that the destruction of the middle-class lifestyle is crucial to the development of decent community forms in which all

  people can be free and have dignity. T here is certainly

  no program to deal with the realities of the class system

  in Amerika. On the contrary, most of the women’s

  movement has, with appalling blindness, refused to take

  that kind o f responsibility. Only the day-care movement

  has in any way reflected, or acted pragmatically on, the

  concrete needs of all classes of women. The anger at

  the Nixon administration for cutting day-care funds is

  naive at best. Given the structure o f power politics and

  capital in Amerika, it is ridiculous to expect the federal

  government to act in the interests o f the people. The

  money available to middle-class women who identify

  as feminists must be channeled into the programs we

  want to develop, and we must develop them. In general,

  middle-class women have absolutely refused to take any

  action, make any commitment which would interfere