Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality Page 2

  with, threaten, or significantly alter a lifestyle, a living

  standard, which is moneyed and privileged.

  The analysis of sexism in this book articulates

  clearly what the oppression o f women is, how it functions, how it is rooted in psyche and culture. But that analysis is useless unless it is tied to a political consciousness and commitment which will totally redefine community. One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an

  unfree world, and in the course o f redefining family,

  Introduction

  23

  church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. T o attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.

  T h e nature o f women’s oppression is unique: women

  are oppressed as women, regardless o f class or race;

  some women have access to significant wealth, but that

  wealth does not signify power; women are to be found

  everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut o f the machinery and way o f life which is ruinous to us. And perhaps most importantly, most women have little sense o f dignity or self-

  respect or strength, since those qualities are directly

  related to a sense o f manhood. In Revolutionary Suicide,

  Huey P. Newton tells us that the Black Panthers did not

  use guns because they were symbols o f manhood, but

  found the courage to act as they did because they were

  men. When we women find the courage to defend ourselves, to take a stand against brutality and abuse, we are violating every notion o f womanhood we have ever

  been taught. T h e way to freedom for women is bound

  to be torturous for that reason alone.

  T h e analysis in this book applies to the life situations o f all women, but all women are not necessarily in a state o f primary emergency as women. What I mean

  by this is simple. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, I would be

  oppressed as a woman, but hunted, slaughtered, as a

  Jew. As a Native American, I would be oppressed as

  a squaw, but hunted, slaughtered, as a Native Am erican. That first identity, the one which brings with it as

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  Woman Hating

  part of its definition death, is the identity of primary

  emergency. This is an important recognition because it

  relieves us of a serious confusion. The fact, for instance,

  that many Black women (by no means all) experience

  primary emergency as Blacks in no way lessens the responsibility of the Black community to assimilate this and other analyses of sexism and to apply it in their own

  revolutionary work.

  As a writer with a revolutionary commitment, I am

  particularly pained by the kinds of books writers are

  writing, and the reasons why. I want writers to write

  books because they are committed to the content of

  those books. I want writers to write books as actions. I

  want writers to write books that can make a difference

  in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to

  write books that are worth being jailed for, worth

  fighting for, and should it come to that in this country,

  worth dying for.

  Books are for the most part in Amerika commercial

  ventures. People write them to make money, to become

  famous, to build or augment other careers. Most Amerikans do not read books—they prefer television. Academics lock books in a tangled web of mindfuck and abstraction. The notion is that there are ideas, then art,

  then somewhere else, unrelated, life. The notion is that

  to have a decent or moral idea is to be a decent or moral

  person. Because o f this strange schizophrenia, books

  and the writing o f them have become embroidery on a

  dying way o f life. Because there is contempt for the

  process o f writing, for writing as a way o f discovering

  meaning and truth, and for reading as a piece of that

  same process, we destroy with regularity the few serious

  Introduction

  25

  writers we have. We turn them into comic-book figures,

  bleed them o f all privacy and courage and common

  sense, exorcise their vision from them as sport, demand

  that they entertain or be ignored into oblivion. And it

  is a great tragedy, for the work o f the writer has never

  been more important than it is now in Amerika.

  Many see that in this nightmared land, language has

  no meaning and the work o f the writer is ruined. Many

  see that the triumph o f authoritarian consciousness is

  its ability to render the spoken and written word meaningless—so that we cannot talk or hear each other speak.

  It is the work o f the writer to reclaim the language from

  those who use it to justify murder, plunder, violation.

  T h e writer can and must do the revolutionary work o f

  using words to communicate, as community.

  Those o f us who love reading and writing believe

  that being a writer is a sacred trust. It means telling the

  truth. It means being incorruptible. It means not being

  afraid, and never lying. Those o f us who love reading

  and writing feel great pain because so many people

  who write books have become cowards, clowns, and

  liars. Those o f us who love reading and writing begin

  to feel a deadly contempt for books, because we see

  writers being bought and sold in the market place — we

  see them vending their tarnished wares on every street

  corner. T oo many writers, in keeping with the Am erikan way o f life, would sell their mothers for a dime.

  T o keep the sacred trust o f the writer is simply to

  respect the people and to love the community. T o violate that trust is to abuse oneself and do damage to others. I believe that the writer has a vital function in

  the community, and an absolute responsibility to the

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  Woman Hating

  people. I ask that this book be judged in that context.

  Specifically Woman Hating is about women and

  men, the roles they play, the violence between them.

  We begin with fairy tales, the first scenarios of women

  and men which mold our psyches, taught to us before we can know differently. We go on to pornography, where we find the same scenarios, explicitly sexual and now more recognizable, ourselves, carnal

  women and heroic men. We go on to herstory —the

  binding of feet in China, the burning o f witches in

  Europe and Amerika. There we see the fairy-tale and

  pornographic definitions of women functioning in

  reality, the real annihilation of real women —the crushing into nothingness o f their freedom, their will, their lives —how they were forced to live, and how they were

  forced to die. We see the dimensions of the crime, the

  dimensions of the oppression, the anguish and misery

  that are a direct consequence of polar role definition,

  of women defined as carnal, evil, and Other. We recognize that it is the structure of the culture which engineers the deaths, violations, violence, and we look for alternatives, ways of destroying culture as we know it,

  rebuilding it as we can imagine it.

  I write however with a broken tool, a language which

  is sexist and discriminatory to its core. I try to make the

  distinctions, not “history” as the whole
human story, not

  “man” as the generic term for the species, not “manhood” as the synonym for courage, dignity, and strength. But I have not been successful in reinventing

  the language.

  This work was not done in isolation. It owes much to

  others. I thank my sisters who everywhere are standing

  Introduction

  27

  up, for themselves, against oppression. I thank my sisters, the women who are searching into our common past, writing it so that we can know it and be proud. I

  thank my sisters, these particular women whose work

  has contributed so much to my own consciousness and

  resolve — Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone, Judith Malina, and Jill Johnston.

  I also thank those others who have, through their

  books and lives, taught me so much —in particular,

  Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Daniel Berrigan, Jean

  Genet, Huey P. Newton, Julian Beck, and Tim othy

  Leary.

  I thank my friends in Amsterdam who were family

  for the writing o f much o f this book and who helped

  me in very hard times.

  I thank Mel Clay who believed in this book from its

  most obscure beginnings, the editors o f Suck and in

  particular Susan Janssen, Deborah Rogers, Martin

  Duberman, and Elaine Markson who has been wonderful to me. I thank Marian Skedgell for her help and kindness. I thank Brian Murphy who tried to tell me a

  long time ago that O was an oppressed person. Chapter

  3 is dedicated to Brian.

  I thank Karen Malpede and Garland Harris for their

  support and help. I thank Joan Schenkar for pushing

  me a little further than I was willing, or able, to go.

  I thank Grace Paley, Karl Bissinger, Kathleen

  Norris, and Muriel Rukeyser. Without their love and

  friendship this work would never have been done.

  Without their examples o f strength and commitment,

  I do not know who I would be, or how.

  I thank my brother Mark and my sister-in-law Carol

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  Woman Hating

  for their friendship, warmth, and trust. And I thank

  my parents, Sylvia and Harry Dworkin, for their devotion and support through all these years, which must have seemed to them interminable, when their daughter was learning her craft. I thank them for raising me with real caring and tenderness, for believing in me so

  that I could learn to believe in myself.

  Andrea Dworkin

  New York City, July 1973

  Part One

  THE FAIRY TALES

  You cannot be free if you are contained

  within a fiction.

  Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

  Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her

  name was

  Lilith

  Eve

  Hagar

  Jezebel

  Delilah

  Pandora

  Jahi

  Tam ar

  and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

  goddess and her name was

  Kali

  Fatima

  Artemis

  Hera

  Isis

  Mary

  Ishtar

  and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

  queen and her name was

  Bathsheba

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  Woman Hating

  Vashti

  Cleopatra

  Helen

  Salome

  Elizabeth

  Clytemnestra

  Medea

  and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

  witch and her name was

  Joan

  Circe

  Morgan le Fay

  Tiamat

  Maria Leonza

  Medusa

  and they had this in common: that they were feared,

  hated, desired, and worshiped.

  When one enters the world of fairy tale one seeks

  with difficulty for the actual place where legend and

  history part. One wants to locate the precise moment

  when fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, and

  history begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Women

  live in fairy tale as magical figures, as beauty, danger,

  innocence, malice, and gr eed. In the personae of the

  fairy tale —the wicked witch, the beautiful princess,

  the heroic prince —we find what the culture would have

  us know about who we are.

  The point is that we have not formed that ancient

  world —it has formed us. We ingested it as children

  whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on

  our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in

  fact men and women. We have taken the fairy tales of

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  33

  childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying

  in the stomach, as real identity. Between Snow-white

  and her heroic prince, our two great fictions, we never

  did have much o f a chance. A t some point, the Great

  Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed o f mounting

  the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the

  dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object o f

  every necrophiliac’s lust —the innocent, victimized Sleeping Beauty, beauteous lump o f ultimate, sleeping good.

  Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowing, sometimes

  knowing, unwilling, unable to do otherwise, we act out

  the roles we were taught.

  Here is the beginning, where we learn who we must

  be, as well as the moral o f the story.

  C H A P T E R 1

  Onceuponatime: The Roles

  Death is that remedy all singers dream of

  Allen Ginsberg

  The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave,

  what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.

  We are bom into a sex role which is determined by

  visible sex, or gender.

  We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth

  into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die.

  In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a direct

  consequence o f the imperatives of those roles, we commit homicide, suicide, and genocide.

  Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven.

  There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sex

  there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there.

  We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that

  death will release us from suffering—from guilt, sex,

  the body. We recognize the body as the source of our

  suffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished—either men or women,

  bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role

  which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any

  real self-becoming or self-realization.

  Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture. They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood

  34

  Onceuponatime: The Roles

  35

  models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes

  us into submission — if we do not become good, then evil

  will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending,

  then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, we

  forget the terror—the wicked witches and their smothering malice. We remember romantic paradigms: the heroic prince kisses Sle
eping Beauty; the heroic prince

  searches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroic

  prince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains as

  the substratum o f male-female relation — the terror

  remains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease to

  be motivated by it. Grown men are terrified o f the

  wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts o f memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be actively

  evil.

  Terror, then, is our real theme.

  The Mother as a Figure of Terror

  Whether “instinctive” or not, the maternal role in the sexual constitution originates in the fact that only the woman is necessarily present at birth. Only the

  woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child —a tie on

  which society can rely. This maternal feeling is the root of human community.

  George Gilder, Sexual Suicide

  Snow-white’s biological mother was a passive, good

  queen who sat at her window and did embroidery.

  She pricked her finger one day —no doubt an event in

  her life —and 3 drops o f blood fell from it onto the

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  Woman Hating

  snow. Somehow that led her to wish for a child “as white

  as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the

  embroidery frame.” 1 Soon after, she had a daughter

  with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and

  hair as black as ebony. ” 2 Then, she died.

  A year later, the king married again. His new wife

  was beautiful, greedy, and proud. She was, in fact,

  ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in the

  male realm, that beauty translated directly into power

  because it meant male admiration, male alliance, male

  devotion.

  The new queen had a magic mirror and she would

  ask it: “Looking-glass upon the wall, Who is fairest

  of us all? ” 3 And inevitably, the queen was the fairest

  (had there been anyone fairer we can presume that the

  king would have married her).

  One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairest

  was, and the mirror answered: “Queen, you are full

  fair, *tis true, But Snow-white fairer is than you. ” 4