Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of ones self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere concededa 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 of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of 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

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. While 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. This 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 multisyllabic 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 womens 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 fathers house to husbands 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 herselfher labor, heart, soul, often her body, often childrenthat 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 will 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 Women , Money , and Power , women struggle, in the manner of Sisyphus, to avoid the something worse that can and will always happen to them if they transgress the rigid boundaries of appropriate female behavior. Most women cannot afford, either materially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt offerings of obedience they bring to beg protection will 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 will, 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 may, 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 mothers 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 womens 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.