Woman Hating (2 page)

We began to see ourselves clearly, and what we saw was dreadful. We saw that we were, as Yoko Ono wrote, the niggers of the world, slaves to the slave. We saw that we were the ultimate house niggers, ass-licking, bowing, scraping, shuffling fools. We recognized all of 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 of power politics.

Most of the women involved in articulating the oppression of women were white and middle class. We spent, even if we did not earn or control, enormous sums of money. Because of our participation in the middle-class lifestyle we were the oppressors of other people, our poor white sisters, our Black sisters, our Chicana sisters —and the men who in turn oppressed them. This closely interwoven fabric of oppression, which is the racist class structure of Amerika today, assured that wherever one stood, it was with at least one foot heavy on the belly of another human being.

As white, middle-class women, we lived in the house of 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 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. There 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 of 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 of power politics and capital in Amerika, it is ridiculous to expect the federal government to act in the interests of 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 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 of 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 of redefining family, church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. To attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.

The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of 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 of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us. And perhaps most importantly, most women have little sense of dignity or self-respect or strength, since those qualities are directly related to a sense of manhood. In
Revolutionary Suicide,
Huey P. Newton tells us that the Black Panthers did not use guns because they were symbols of 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 of womanhood we have ever been taught. The way to freedom for women is bound to be torturous for that reason alone.

The analysis in this book applies to the life situations of all women, but all women are not necessarily in a state of 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 American. That first identity, the one which brings with it as 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 of this strange schizophrenia, books and the writing of them have become embroidery on a dying way of life. Because there is contempt for the process of writing, for writing as a way of discovering meaning and truth, and for reading as a piece of that same process, we destroy with regularity the few serious writers we have. We turn them into comic-book figures, bleed them of 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 of 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 of the writer is ruined. Many see that the triumph of 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 of the writer to reclaim the language from those who use it to justify murder, plunder, violation. The writer can and must do the revolutionary work of using words to communicate, as community.

Those of 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 of us who love reading and writing feel great pain because so many people who write books have become cowards, clowns, and liars. Those of 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. Too many writers, in keeping with the Amerikan way of life, would sell their mothers for a dime.

To keep the sacred trust of the writer is simply to respect the people and to love the community. To 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 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 of 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 of 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

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 Timothy Leary.

I thank my friends in Amsterdam who were family for the writing of much of 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 of
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 of strength and commitment, I do not know who I would be, or how.

I thank my brother Mark and my sister-in-law Carolfor 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
Tamar

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
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 greed
.
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 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 of a chance. At some point, the Great Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed of mounting the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object of every necrophiliac’s lust —the innocent,
victimized
Sleeping Beauty, beauteous lump of 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 of the story.

CHAPTER 1