Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality
Andrea Dworkin
PLUME
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Copyright © 1974 by Andrea Dworkin
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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
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