Right-wing Women Read online

  Right-wing Women

  Andrea Dworkin

  Also by Andrea Dworkin

  Woman H ating

  Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

  The New Womans Broken Heart

  Pornography: Men Possessing Women

  Right-wing Women

  ANDREA DWORKIN

  A Perigee Book

  Perigee Books

  are published by

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982 by Andrea Dworkin

  Copyright © 1983 by Andrea Dworkin

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in

  any form without permission in writing from the publisher. Published on

  the same day in Canada by General Publishing Co. Limited, Toronto.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the following sources

  to reprint material in this book:

  The University of California Press for the excerpt from “The Coming

  Gynocide, ” in Sappho: A New Translation , Mary Barnard, translator (1973),

  © copyright 1957 by The Regents of the University of California.

  New' Directions Publishing Corporation for six lines from “Canto 9 1 ”

  from The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Ezra Pound. Copyright © 1956 by Ezra

  Pound.

  Portions of this book have been published in slightly different form in Ms.

  and Maenad.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Dworkin, Andrea.

  Right-wing women.

  Includes index.

  1. Women’s rights— United States.

  2. Conservatism— United States.

  3. Right and left

  (Political science).

  I. Title.

  [H Q 1426. D898

  1982b]

  305. 4'2'0973

  82-9784

  ISBN 0-399-50671-3

  AACR2

  First Perigee printing, 1983

  Printed in the United States of America

  Acknowledgments

  M any people went out of their w ay to help me in different w ays in

  the course of m y w riting this book. I owe sincere thanks to Geri

  Thoma, Anne Simon, Robin Morgan, Catharine A. MacKinnon,

  Karen Hom ick, Emily Jane Goodman, Rachel Gold, Sandra Elkin,

  Laura Cottingham, Gena Corea, and Raymond Bongiovanni.

  I am very grateful to Sam Mitnick for supporting this project

  and to all the people at Perigee involved in publishing it.

  This book owes its existence to Gloria Steinem, whose idea it

  was that I expand an earlier essay, “Safety, Shelter, Rules, Form,

  Love: The Promise of the U ltra-Right” (Ms. y June 1979), into a

  book. I thank Gloria not only for the idea but also for her insistence on its importance.

  And I thank, once again, both John Stoltenberg and Elaine

  Markson, who sustain me.

  Andrea Dworkin

  New York C ity

  March 1982

  For Gloria Steinem

  In Memory of M uriel Rukeyser

  Contents

  1. The Promise of the Ultra-Right

  13

  2. The Politics of Intelligence

  37

  3. Abortion

  71

  4. Jew s and Homosexuals

  107

  5. The Coming Gynocide

  147

  6. Antifeminism

  195

  Notes

  239

  Index

  245

  Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens

  the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place,

  everywhere conceded— a place earned by personal

  merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance,

  wealth, family and position. Conceding, then, that

  the responsibilities of life rest equally on man and

  woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the

  same preparation for time and eternity. The talk o f

  sheltering woman from the fierce storms o f life is the

  sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every

  point of the compass, just as they do on man, and

  with more fatal results, for he has been trained to

  protect himself, to resist, and to conquer. Such are

  the facts in human experience, the responsibilities of

  individual sovereignty.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1892

  1

  The Promise of the Ultra-Right

  There is a rumor, circulated for centuries by scientists, artists, and

  philosophers both secular and religious, a piece of gossip as it were,

  to the effect that women are “biologically conservative. ” W hile gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or

  idea, or fact. T his particular rumor became dignified as high

  thought because it was Whispered-Down-The-Lane in formidable

  academies, libraries, and meeting halls from which women, until

  very recently, have been formally and forcibly excluded.

  The whispers, however m ultisyllabic and footnoted they sometimes are, reduced to a simple enough set of assertions. Women have children because women by definition have children. This

  “fact of life, ” which is not subject to qualification, carries with it

  the instinctual obligation to nurture and protect those children.

  Therefore, women can be expected to be socially, politically, economically, and sexually conservative because the status quo, whatever it is, is safer than change, whatever the change. Noxious male philosophers from all disciplines have, for centuries, maintained

  that women follow a biological imperative derived directly from

  their reproductive capacities that translates necessarily into narrow

  lives, small minds, and a rather meanspirited puritanism.

  This theory, or slander, is both specious and cruel in that, in

  fact, women are forced to bear children and have been throughout

  history in all economic systems, with but teeny-weeny time-outs

  while the men were momentarily disoriented, as, for instance, in

  the immediate postcoital aftermath of certain revolutions. It is entirely irrational in that, in fact, women of all ideological persuasions, with the single exception of absolute pacifists, of whom there have not been very many, have throughout history supported wars

  in which the very children they are biologically ordained to protect

  are maimed, raped, tortured, and killed. Clearly, the biological explanation of the so-called conservative nature of women obscures the realities of women’s lives, buries them in dark shadows of distortion and dismissal.

  The disinterested or hostile male observer can categorize women

  as “conservative” in some metaphysical sense because it is true that

  women as a class adhere rather strictly to the traditions and values

  of their social context, whatever the character of that context. In

  societies of whatever description, however narrowly or broadly defined, women as a class are the dulled conformists, the orthodox believers, the obedient followers, the disciples of unwavering faith.

  To waver, whatever the creed of the men around
them, is tantamount to rebellion; it is dangerous. Most women, holding on for dear life, do not dare abandon blind faith. From father’s house to

  husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a

  woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms, in order to be as safe as she can be. Sometimes it is a lethargic conformity, in which case male

  demands slowly close in on her, as if she were a character buried

  alive in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Sometimes it is a militant conformity. She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obedient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her.

  She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary

  Christian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par

  excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a perfect fidelity. The males rarely keep their part of the bargain as she understands it: protection from male violence against her person.

  But the militant conformist has given so much of herself—her la­

  bor, heart, soul, often her body, often children— that this betrayal

  is akin to nailing the coffin shut; the corpse is beyond caring.

  Women know, but must not acknowledge, that resisting male

  control or confronting male betrayal w ill lead to rape, battery, destitution, ostracization or exile, confinement in a mental institution or jail, or death. As Phyllis Chesler and Emily Jane Goodman

  make clear in W omen, M oney, and P ow er, women struggle, in the

  manner of Sisyphus, to avoid the “something worse” that can and

  w ill alw ays happen to them if they transgress the rigid boundaries

  of appropriate female behavior. Most women cannot afford, either

  m aterially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt offerings of obedience they bring to beg protection w ill not appease the angry little gods around them.

  It is not surprising, then, that most girls do not want to become

  like their mothers, those tired, preoccupied domestic sergeants beset by incomprehensible troubles. Mothers raise daughters to conform to the strictures of the conventional female life as defined by men, whatever the ideological values of the men. Mothers are the

  immediate enforcers of male w ill, the guards at the cell door, the

  flunkies who administer the electric shocks to punish rebellion.

  Most girls, however much they resent their mothers, do become

  very much like them. Rebellion can rarely survive the aversion

  therapy that passes for being brought up female. Male violence acts

  directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any

  number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her

  mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to survive. A girl m ay, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different

  pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother’s patterns in acquiescing to male authority within her own chosen set. Using both force and threat, men in all camps demand that women accept

  abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves to hearth and home with

  rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and resentment.

  It is the fashion among men to despise the smallness of women’s

  lives. The so-called bourgeois woman with her shallow vanity, for

  instance, is a joke to the brave intellectuals, truck drivers, and revolutionaries who have wider horizons on which to project and indulge deeper vanities that women dare not mock and to which women dare not aspire. The fishwife is a vicious caricature of the

  small-mindedness and material greed of the working-class wife who

  harasses her humble, hardworking, ever patient husband with

  petty tirades of insult that no gentle rebuke can mellow. The Lady,

  the Aristocrat, is a polished, empty shell, good only for spitting at,

  because spit shows up on her clean exterior, which gives immediate

  gratification to the spitter, whatever his technique. The Jewish

  mother is a monster who wants to cut the phallus of her precious

  son into a million pieces and put it in the chicken soup. The black

  woman, also a castrator, is a grotesque matriarch whose sheer endurance desolates men. The lesbian is half monster, half moron: having no man to nag, she imagines herself Napoleon.

  And the derision of female lives does not stop with these toxic,

  ugly, insidious slanders because there is always, in every circumstance, the derision in its skeletal form, all bone, the meat stripped clean: she is pussy, cunt. Every other part of the body is cut away,

  severed, and there is left a thing, not human, an it, which is the

  funniest joke of all, an unending source of raucous humor to those

  who have done the cutting. The very butchers who cut up the

  meat and throw away the useless parts are the comedians. The

  paring down of a whole person to vagina and womb and then to a

  dismembered obscenity is their best and favorite joke.

  Every woman, no matter what her social, economic, or sexual

  situation, fights this paring down with every resource at her command. Because her resources are so astonishingly meager and because she has been deprived of the means to organize and expand them, these attempts are simultaneously heroic and pathetic. The

  whore, in defending the pimp, finds her own worth in the light

  reflected from his gaudy baubles. The wife, in defending the husband, screams or stammers that her life is not a wasteland of mur­

  dered possibilities. The woman, in defending the ideologies of men

  who rise by clim bing over her prone body in m ilitary formation,

  w ill not publicly mourn the loss of what those men have taken

  from her: she w ill not scream out as their heels dig into her

  flesh because to do so would mean the end of meaning itself; all

  the ideals that motivated her to deny herself would be indelibly

  stained with blood that she would have to acknowledge, at last, as

  her own.

  So the woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine,

  but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons,

  institutions, and values that demean her, degrade her, glorify her

  powerlessness, insist upon constraining and paralyzing the most

  honest expressions of her w ill and being. She becomes a lackey,

  serving those who ruthlessly and effectively aggress against her and

  her kind. This singularly self-hating loyalty to those committed to

  her own destruction is the very essence of womanhood as men of

  all ideological persuasions define it.

  *

  M arilyn Monroe, shortly before she died, wrote in her notebook on

  the set of Let's Make Love: “What am I afraid of? W hy am I so

  afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I

  am afraid and I should not be and I must not be. ” 1

  The actress is the only female culturally empowered to act.

  When she acts w ell, that is, when she convinces the male controllers of images and wealth that she is reducible to current sexual fashion, available to the male on his own terms, she is paid and

  honored. Her acting must be imitative, not creative; rigidly conforming, not self-generated and self-renewing. The actress is the puppet of flesh, blood, and paint who acts as if she is the female

  acting. Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act

  but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however

  inspired, can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is

  no
t a dreadful form of dying. She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time.

  Death, one imagines, numbs pain that barbiturates and alcohol

  cannot touch.

  Monroe’s premature death raised one haunting question for the

  men who were, in their own fantasy, her lovers, for the men who

  had masturbated over those pictures of exquisite female compliance: was it possible, could it be, that she hadn’t liked It all along— It—the It they had been doing to her, how many millions

  of times? Had those smiles been masks covering despair or rage? If

  so, how endangered they had been to be deceived, so fragile and

  exposed in their masturbatory delight, as if she could leap out from

  those photos of what was now a corpse and take the revenge they

  knew she deserved. There arose the male imperative that Monroe

  must not be a suicide. Norman Mailer, savior of masculine privilege and pride on many fronts, took up the challenge by theorizing that Monroe may have been killed by the FBI, or CIA, or whoever

  killed the Kennedys, because she had been mistress to one or both.

  Conspiracy was a cheerful and comforting thought to those who

  had wanted to slam into her until she expired, female death and

  female ecstasy being synonymous in the world of male metaphor.

  But they did not want her dead yet, not really dead, not while the

  illusion of her open invitation was so absolutely compelling. In

  fact, her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death,

  and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer:

  no, M arilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.

  People—as we are always reminded by counterfeit egalitarians—

  have always died too young, too soon, too isolated, too full of insupportable anguish. But only women die one by one, whether famous or obscure, rich or poor, isolated, choked to death by the