Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

by Andrea Dworkin

  Snow-white was 7 years old.

  The queen became “yellow and green with envy,

  and from that hour her heart turned against Snow-

  white, and she hated her. And envy and pride like ill

  weeds grew in her heart higher every day, until she had

  no peace.. . . ” 5

  Now, we all know what nations will do to achieve

  peace, and the queen was no less resourceful (she would

  have made an excellent head o f state). She ordered a

  huntsman to take Snow-white to the forest, kill her, and

  bring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspired

  good guy, could not kill the sweet young thing, so he

  turned her loose in the forest, killed a boar, and took its

  Onceuponatime: The Roles

  37

  heart back to the queen. T h e heart was “salted and

  cooked, and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking that

  there was an end o f Snow-white. ” 6

  Snow-white found her way to the home o f the 7

  dwarfs, who told her that she could stay with them “if

  you will keep our house for us, and cook, and wash, and

  make the beds, and sew and knit, and keep everything

  tidy and clean. ” 7 T hey simply adored her.

  T h e queen, who can now be called with conviction

  the wicked queen, found out from her mirror that Snow-

  white was still alive and fairer than she. She tried several

  times to kill Snow-white, who fell into numerous deep

  sleeps but never quite died. Finally the wicked queen

  made a poisoned apple and induced the ever vigilant

  Snow-white to bite into it. Snow-white did die, or became more dead than usual, because the wicked queen’s mirror then verified that she was the fairest in the land.

  T h e dwarfs, who loved Snow-white, could not bear

  to bury her under the ground, so they enclosed her in a

  glass coffin and put the coffin on a mountaintop. T h e

  heroic prince was just passing that way, immediately

  fell in love with Snow-white-under-glass, and bought

  her (it? ) from the dwarfs who loved her (it? ). As servants

  carried the coffin along behind the prince’s horse, the

  piece o f poisoned apple that Snow-white had swallowed

  “flew out o f her throat. ” 8 She soon revived fully, that

  is to say, not much. T he prince placed her squarely in

  the “it” category, and marriage in its proper perspective

  too, when he proposed wedded bliss —“ I would rather

  have you than anything in the world. ” 9 T he wicked

  queen was invited to the wedding, which she attended

  because her mirror told her that the bride was fairer

  Woman Haling

  than she. At the wedding “they had ready red-hot iron

  shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down

  dead. ” 10

  Cinderella’s mother-situation was the same. Her

  biological mother was good, pious, passive, and soon

  dead. Her stepmother was greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. Her ambition dictated that her own daughters make good marriages. Cinderella meanwhile was forced

  to do heavy domestic work, and when her work was

  done, her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashes

  of the stove and make Cinderella separate the lentils

  from the ashes. The stepmother’s malice toward Cinderella was not free-floating and irrational. On the contrary, her own social validation was contingent on

  the marriages she made for her own daughters. Cinderella was a real threat to her. Like Snow-white’s stepmother, for whom beauty was power and to be the most beautiful was to be the most powerful, Cinderella’s

  stepmother knew how the social structure operated,

  and she was determined to succeed on its terms.

  Cinderella’s stepmother was presumably motivated

  by maternal love for her own biological offspring. Maternal love is known to be transcendent, holy, noble, and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament of

  human (male-dominated) civilization and it is the real

  basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality:

  [When the prince began to search for the woman whose

  foot would fit the golden slipper] the two sisters were

  very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest

  went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother

  stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it,

  Onceuponatime: The Roles

  39

  for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed

  her a knife, and said,

  “Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will

  never have to go on foot. ” So the girl cut her toe off,

  and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the

  pain, and went down to the prince. Then he took her

  with him on his horse as his bride. . . .

  Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the

  blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and

  took the false bride home again, saying that she was

  not the right one, and that the other sister must try

  on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and

  got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large.

  Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, “Cut

  a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will

  never have to go on foot. ”

  So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust her

  foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down

  to the prince, who took his bride. . . .

  Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how

  the blood was flowing. . . . 11

  Cinderella’s stepmother understood correctly that her

  only real work in life was to marry off her daughters.

  Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness was

  consonant with the values o f the market place.* She

  loved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom o f

  the Indochinese, and with much the same result. Love

  in a male-dominated society certainly is a many-splen-

  dored thing.

  Rapunzel’s mother wasn’t exactly a winner either.

  *

  This depiction o f women as flesh on an open market, of crippling and

  mutilation for the sake of making a good marriage, is not fiction; cf. C hapter

  6, “Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding. ”

  40

  Woman Hating

  She had a maternal instinct all right—she had “long

  wished for a child, but in vain. ” 12 Sometime during her

  wishing, she developed a craving for rampion, a vegetable which grew in the garden of her neighbor and peer, the witch. She persuaded her husband to steal

  rampion from the witch’s garden, and each day she

  craved more. When the witch discovered the theft, she

  made this offer:

  . . . you may have as much rampion as you like, on

  one condition — the child that will come into the world

  must be given to me. It shall go well with the child, and

  I will care for it like a mother. 13

  Mama didn’t think twice —she traded Rapunzel for a

  vegetable. Rapunzel’s surrogate mother, the witch, did

  not do much better by her:

  When she was twelve years old the witch shut her up

  in a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neither

  steps nor door, only a small window above. When the

  witch wished to be let in, she would stand below and


  “Rapunzel, Rapunzel! let down your hair!” 14

  The heroic prince, having finished with Snow-white

  and Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. When

  the witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel,

  cut off her hair, and cloistered her “in a waste and

  desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery. ” 15

  The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from the

  tower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recovered

  when he found Rapunzel, and they then lived happily

  ever after. )

  Onceuponatime: The Roles

  41

  Hansel and Grethel had a mother too. She simply

  abandoned them:

  I will tell you what, husband.. . . We will take the

  children early in the morning into the forest, where

  it is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will give

  each of them a piece of bread, then we will go to our

  work and leave them alone; they will never find the

  way home again, and we shall be quit of them. 16

  Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candy

  house which belongs to an old lady who is kind to them,

  feeds them, houses them. She greets them as her children, and proves her maternal commitment by preparing to cannibalize them.

  These fairy-tale mothers are mythological female

  figures. T hey define for us the female character and

  delineate its existential possibilities. When she is good,

  she is soon dead. In fact, when she is good, she is so passive in life that death must be only more o f the same.

  Here we discover the cardinal principle o f sexist ontology—the only good woman is a dead woman. When she is bad she lives, or when she lives she is bad. She

  has one real function, motherhood. In that function,

  because it is active, she is characterized by overwhelming malice, devouring greed, uncontainable avarice.

  She is ruthless, brutal, ambitious, a danger to children

  and other living things. W hether called mother, queen,

  stepmother, or wicked witch, she is the wicked witch,

  the content o f nightmare, the source o f terror.

  42

  Woman Haling

  The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good

  What can it do? It grows,

  It bleeds. It sleeps.

  It walks. It talks,

  Singing, “love’s got me, got me. ”

  Kathleen Norris

  For a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as

  close to it as possible. Catatonia is the good woman’s

  most winning quality.

  Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after pricking

  her finger on a spindle. The kiss of the heroic prince

  woke her. He fell in love with her while she was asleep,

  or was it because she was asleep?

  Snow-white was already dead when the heroic prince

  fell in love with her. “I beseech you, ” he pleaded with

  the 7 dwarfs, “to give it to me, for I cannot live without

  looking upon Snow-white. ” 17 It awake was not readily

  distinguishable from it asleep.

  Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel

  —all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence,

  and victimization. They are archetypal good women —

  victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate,

  confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question. Sometimes they are forced to do housework.

  They have one scenario of passage. They are moved,

  as if inert, from the house of the mother to the house

  o f the prince. First they are objects of malice, then they

  are objects o f romantic adoration. They do nothing to

  warrant either.

  That one other figure of female good, the good

  fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes

  Onceuponatime: The Roles

  43

  or virtue. H er power cannot match, only occasionally

  moderate, the power o f the wicked witch. She does have

  one physical activity at which she excels — she waves her

  wand. She is beautiful, good, and unearthly. Mostly,

  she disappears.

  These figures o f female good are the heroic models

  available to women. And the end o f the story is, it would

  seem, the goal o f any female life. T o sleep, perchance

  to dream?

  The Prince, the Real Brother

  The man of flesh and bone; the man who

  is bom, suffers, and dies—above all, who

  dies; the man who eats and drinks and

  plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the

  man who is seen and heard; the brother,

  the real brother.

  Miguel de Unamuno,

  Tragic Sense of Life

  He is handsome and heroic. He is a prince, that is,

  he is powerful, noble, and good. He rides a horse. He

  travels far and wide. He has a mission, a purpose. Inevitably he fulfills it. He is a person o f worth and a worthwhile person. He is strong and true.

  O f course, he is not real, and men do suffer trying to

  become him. T hey suffer, and murder, and rape, and

  plunder. T hey use airplanes now.

  What matters is that he is both powerful and good,

  that his power is by definition good. What matters is

  that he matters, acts, succeeds.

  One can point out that in fact he is not very bright.

  44

  Woman Haling

  For instance, he cannot distinguish Cinderella from her

  two sisters though he danced with her and presumably

  conversed with her. His recurring love o f corpses does

  not indicate a dynamic intelligence either. His fall from

  the tower onto thorns does not suggest that he is even

  physically coordinated, though, unlike his modern

  counterparts, he never falls off his horse or annihilates

  the wrong village.

  The truth o f it is that he is powerful and good when

  contrasted with her. The badder she is, the better he is.

  The deader she is, the better he is. That is one moral of

  the story, the reason for dual role definition, and the

  shabby reality of the man as hero.

  The Husband, the Real Father

  The desire of men to claim their children may be the crucial impulse of civilized life.

  George Gilder, Sexual Suicide

  Mostly they are kings, or noble and rich. They are,

  again by definition, powerful and good. They are never

  responsible or held accountable for the evil done by

  their wicked wives. Most of the time, they do not notice

  it.

  There is, of course, no rational basis for considering

  them either powerful or good. For while they are governing, or kinging, or whatever it is that they do do, their wives are slaughtering and abusing their beloved

  progeny. But then, in some cultures nonfairy-tale

  Onceuponatime: The Roles

  45

  fathers simply had their female children killed at birth.

  Cinderella’s father saw her every day. He saw her

  picking lentils out o f the ashes, dressed in rags, degraded, insulted. He was a good man.

  T he father o f Hansel and Grethel also had a good

  heart. When his wife proposed to him that they abandon

  the children in the forest to starve he protested immediately—“But I really pity the poor children. ” 18 When Hansel and Grethel finally escaped the witch and found

&nb
sp; their way home “they rushed in at the door, and fell

  on their father’s neck. T h e man had not had a quiet

  hour since he left his children in the wood [Hansel,

  after all, was a boy]; but the wife was dead. ” 19 Do not

  misunderstand —they did not forgive him, for there was

  nothing to forgive. All malice originated with the

  woman. He was a good man.

  Though the fairy-tale father marries the evil woman

  in the first place, has no emotional connection with his

  child, does not interact in any meaningful way with

  her, abandons her and worse does not notice when she

  is dead and gone, he is a figure o f male good. He is the

  patriarch, and as such he is beyond moral law and human decency.

  T he roles available to women and men are clearly

  articulated in fairy tales. T h e characters o f each are

  vividly described, and so are the modes o f relationship

  possible between them. We see that powerful women

  are bad, and that good women are inert. We see that

  men are always good, no matter what they do, or do

  not do.

  We also have an explicit rendering o f the nuclear

  Woman Hating

  family. In that family, a mother’s love is destructive,

  murderous. In that family, daughters are objects, expendable. The nuclear family, as we find it delineated in fairy tales, is a paradigm of male being-in-the-world,

  female evil, and female victimization. It is a crystaliza-

  tion of sexist culture —the nuclear structure of that

  culture.

  C H A P T E R 2

  Onceuponatime: The Moral

  of the Story

  Fuck that to death, the dead are holy,

  Honor the sisters of your friends.

  Pieces of ass, a piece of action,

  Pieces.

  The loneliest of mornings

  Something moves about in the mirror.

  A slave’s trick, survival.

  I remember thinking, our last time:

  If you killed me, I would die.

  Kathleen Norris

  I cannot live without my life.

  Emily Bronte

  T h e lessons are simple, and we learn them well.

  Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

  T h e heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he does at all, let alone better.