Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

by Andrea Dworkin

  After the dancing, the witches ate. Often they

  brought their own food, rather in the tradition of picnic lunches, and sometimes the coven leader provided a real feast. The Christians alleged that the witches were

  cannibals and that their dinner was an orgy of human

  flesh, cooked and garnished as only the Devil knew how.

  Actually, the supper common to all sabbats was a simple

  meal of pedestrian food.

  The whole notion of cannibalism and sacrifice has

  been stubbornly, persistently, and purposely misunderstood. There is no evidence that any living child was killed to be eaten, or that any living child was sacrificed. There is evidence that sometimes dead infants were ritually eaten, or used in ritual. Cannibalism,

  and its not so symbolic substitute, animal sacrifice, was

  a vital part of the ritual of all early religions, including the Jewish one. The witches participated in this tradition rather modestly: they generally sacrificed a

  goat or a hen. It was the Christians who developed and

  extended the Old World system of sacrifice and cannibalism to almost surreal ends: Christ, the sacrificial lamb, who died an agonizing death on the cross to

  ensure forgiveness of men’s sins and whose followers

  symbolically, even today, eat of his flesh and drink of

  his blood — what is the Eucharist if not fossilized cannibalism?

  The final activity of the sabbat was a phallic orgy —

  heathen, drug-abetted, communal sex. The sex of the

  sabbat is distinguished by descriptions of pain. It was

  said that intercourse was painful, that the phallus of the

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  masked coven leader was cold and oversized, that no

  woman ever conceived. It would seem that the horned

  figure used an artificial phallus and could service all

  the celebrants. T h e Old Religion, as opposed to the

  Christian religion, celebrated sexuality, fertility, nature

  and woman's place in it, and communal sex was a logical

  and most sacral rite.

  T h e worship o f animals is also indigenous to nature-

  based religious systems. Early people existed among

  animals, scarcely distinct from them. Through religious

  ritual, people differentiated themselves from animals

  and gave honor to them —they were food, sustenance.

  There was a respect for the natural world — people were

  hunter and hunted simultaneously. T heir perspective

  was acute. T hey worshiped the spirit and power they

  saw manifest in the carnivore world o f which they were

  an integral part. When man began to be “civilized, ” to

  separate himself out o f nature, to place himself over

  and above woman (he became Mind, she became Carnality) and other animals, he began to seek power over nature, magical control. The witch cults still had a

  strong sense o f people as part o f nature, and animals

  maintained a prime place in both ritual and consciousness for the witches. The Christians, who had a profound and compulsive hatred for the natural world, thought

  that the witches, through malice and a lust for power

  (pure projection, no doubt), had mobilized nature/animals into a robotlike anti-Christian army. T h e witch hunters were convinced that toads, rats, dogs, cats,

  mice, etc., took orders from witches, carried curses from

  one farm to another, caused death, hysteria, and disease. They thought that nature was one massive, crawl­

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  ing conspiracy against them, and that the conspiracy

  was organized and controlled by the wicked women.

  They can in fact be credited with pioneering the politics

  of total paranoia —they developed the classic model for

  that particular pathology which has, as its logical consequence, genocide. Their methods of dealing with the witch menace were developed empirically— they had a

  great respect for what worked. For instance, when they

  suspected a woman of witchcraft, they would lock her

  in an empty room for several days or weeks and if any

  living creature, any insect or spider, entered that room,

  that creature was identified as the woman's familiar,

  and she was proved guilty of witchcraft. Naturally,

  given the fact that bugs are everywhere, particularly

  in the woodwork, this test of guilt always worked.

  Cats were particularly associated with witches. That

  association is based on the ancient totemic significance

  of the cat:

  It is well known that to the Egyptians cats were

  sacred. They were regarded as incarnations of Isis

  and there was also a cat deity.. . . Through Osiris

  (Ra) they were associated with the sun; the rays of the

  “solar cat, ” who was portrayed as killing the “serpent

  of darkness” at each dawn, were believed to produce

  fecundity in Nature, and thus cats were figures of

  fertility.. . . Cats were also associated with Hathor,

  a cow-headed goddess, and hence with crops and

  rain.. . .

  Still stronger, however, was the association of the

  cat with the moon, and thus she was a virgin goddess —

  a virgin-mother incarnation. In her character as moon-

  goddess she was inviolate and self-renewing. . . the

  circle she forms in a curled-up position [is seen as] the

  symbol for eternity, an unending re-creation. 29

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  T h e Christians not only converted the horned god into

  Satan, but also the sacred cat into a demonic incarnation. T h e witches, in accepting familiars and particularly in their special feeling for cats, only participated in an

  ancient tradition which had as its substance love and

  respect for the natural world.

  It was also believed that the witch could transform

  herself into a cat or other animal. This notion, called

  lycanthropy, is twofold:

  . . . either the belief that a witch or devil-ridden person

  temporarily assumes an animal form, to ravage or

  destroy; or, that they create an animal “double” in

  which, leaving the lifeless human body at home, he or

  she can wander, terrorize, or batten on mankind. 30

  T h e origins o f the belief in lycanthropy can be traced

  to group rituals in which celebrants, costumed as animals, recreated animal movements, sounds, even hunting patterns. As group ritual, those celebrations would be prehistorical. The witches themselves, through the

  use o f belladonna, aconite, and other drugs, felt that

  they did become animals. * The effect o f the belief in

  lycanthropy on the general population was electric: a

  stray dog, a wild cat, a rat, a toad —all were witches,

  agents o f Satan, bringing with them drought, disease,

  death. Any animal in the environment was dangerous,

  demonic. The legend o f the werewolf (popularized in

  the Red Riding Hood fable) caused terror. At Labout,

  *

  For a contem porary account o f lycanthropy, I would suggest The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), pp. 170-84.

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  two hundred people were burned as werewolves. There

  were endless stories of farmers shooting animals who

  were plaguing them in the night, only to discover the

 
; next morning that a respectable town matron had been

  wounded in precisely the same way.

  Witches, of course, could also fly on broomsticks,

  and often did. Before going to the sabbat, they an-

  nointed their bodies with a mixture of belladonna and

  aconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gave

  the sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almost

  archetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork was

  of manhood. Levitation was considered a rare but

  genuine fact:

  As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions, common to almost all peoples, that not only do supernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in the

  air at will, but so can those humans who invoke their

  assistance. Levitation among the saints was, and by the

  devout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famous instance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose ecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassment in the seventeenth century. Yet the appearance of flight, in celestial trance, has been claimed all through the history of the Church, and not only for

  such outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. Ignatius

  Loyola, or St. Teresa.. . . In the Middle Ages it was

  regarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one.

  . . . It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witches

  were believed to fly. . . [though] the Church expressly

  forbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any belief

  that witches flew. 31

  With typical consistency then, the Church said that

  saints could fly but witches could not. As far as the

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  witches were concerned, they trusted their experience,

  they knew that they flew. Here they aligned themselves

  with Christian saints, yogis, mystics from all traditions,

  in the realization o f a phenomenon so ancient that it

  would seem to extend almost to the origins o f the religious impulse in people.

  We now know most o f what can be known about

  the witches: who they were, what they believed, what

  they did, the Church's vision o f them. We have seen the

  historical dimensions o f a myth o f feminine evil which

  resulted in the slaughter o f 9 million persons, nearly

  all women, over 300 years. T he actual evidence o f that

  slaughter, the remembrance o f it, has been suppressed

  for centuries so that the myth o f woman as the Original

  Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure.

  Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture,

  woman-centered, nature-centered —all o f their knowledge is gone, all o f their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes o f their own pasts) found the massacre o f the witches too unimportant to

  include in the chronicles o f those centuries except as a

  footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance

  o f those centuries —they did not recognize the centuries o f gynocide, they did not register the anguish o f those deaths.

  Our study o f pornography, our living o f life, tells

  us that the myth o f feminine evil lived out so resolutely

  by the Christians o f the Dark Ages, is alive and well,

  here and now. Our study o f pornography, our living

  o f life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned

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  alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, the

  hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not

  changed its premises; the culture has not refuted those

  premises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth,

  to destroy it and the institutions based on it.

  Part Four

  ANDROGYNY

  When the sexual energy of the people is

  liberated they will break the chains.

  The struggle to break the form is

  paramount. Because we are otherwise contained in forms that deny us the possibility

  of realizing a form (a technique) to escape

  the fire in which we are being consumed.

  The journey to love is not romantic.

  Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

  We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions o f male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in

  its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to

  destroy the structure o f culture as we know it, its art,

  its churches, its laws: all o f the images, institutions, and

  structural mental sets which define women as hot wet

  fuck tubes, hot slits.

  Androgynous mythology provides us with a model

  which does not use polar role definitions, where the

  definitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male = good,

  female = bad, man = human, woman = other. A ndrogyny myths are multisexual mythological models. T hey go well beyond bisexuality as we know it in the scenarios

  they suggest for building community, for realizing the

  fullest expression o f human sexual possibility and

  creativity.

  Androgyny as a concept has no notion o f sexual

  repression built into it. W here woman is carnality, and

  carnality is evil, it stands to reason (hail reason! ) that

  woman must be chained, whipped, punished, purged;

  that fucking is shameful, forbidden, fearful, guilt-

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  ridden. Androgyny as the basis of sexual identity and

  community life provides no such imperatives. Sexual

  freedom and freedom for biological women, or all persons “female, ” are not separable. That they are different, and that sexual freedom has priority, is the worst of sexist hypes. Androgyny can show the way to both.

  It may be the one road to freedom open to women,

  men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us.

  C H A P T E R 8

  Androgyny:

  The Mythological Model

  It is a question o f finding the right model. We are bo rn

  into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed: Cinderella, Snow-white, Sleeping Beauty; O, Claire, Anne; romantic love and marriage;

  Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary. These models are the

  substantive message o f this culture —they define psychological sets and patterns o f social interaction which, in our adult personae, we live out. We function inside

  the socioreligious scenario o f right and wrong, good

  and bad, licit and illicit, legal and illegal, all saturated

  with shame and guilt. We are programmed by the culture

  as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous

  way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming

  operates on every level o f choice and action. For example, we have seen how the romantic ethos is related to the way women dress and cosmeticize their bodies and

  how that behavior regulates the literal physical mobility

  o f women. Take any aspect o f behavior and one can

  find the source o f the programmed response in the cultural structure. Western man’s obsessive concern with metaphysical and political freedom is almost laughable

  in this context.

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  Depth psychologists consider man the center of his

  world —his psyche is the primary universe which governs, very directly, the secondar
y universe, distinct from him, of nature; philosophers consider man, in

  the fragmented, highly overrated part called intellect,

  the center of the natural world, indeed its only significant member; artists consider man, isolated in his creative function, the center of the creative process, of the canvas, of the poem, an engineer of the culture; politicians consider man, represented by his sociopolitical organization and its armies, the center of whatever

  planetary power might be relevant and meaningful;

  religionists consider God a surrogate man, created

  precisely in man’s image, only more so, to be father

  to the human family. The notion of man as a part of the

  natural world, integrated into it, in form as distinct

  (no more so) as the tarantula, in function as important

  (no more so) as the honey bee or tree, is in eclipse, and

  that eclipse extends not over a decade, or over a century, but over the whole of written history. The arrogance which informs man’s relation with nature (simply, he is superior to it) is precisely the same arrogance which informs his relationship with woman (simply,

  he is superior to her). Here we see the full equation:

  woman = carnality = nature. The separation of man

  from nature, man placing himself over and above it, is

  directly responsible for the current ecological situation

  which may lead to the extinction of many forms of life,

  including human life. Man has treated nature much as

  he has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence.

  The phenomenological world is characterized by its

  diversity, the complexity and mutuality of its interac-

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  tions, and man’s only chance for survival in that world

  consists o f finding the proper relationship to it.

  In terms o f interhuman relationship, the problem is

  similar. As individuals, we experience ourselves as the

  center o f whatever social world we inhabit. We think

  that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions

  of our particular culture. That culture no longer organically reflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collective phenomenology o f our creative possibilities —it possesses and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow o f