Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

by Andrea Dworkin

  isolate radium which was, in the first instance, a figment of her

  imagination. The discovery of radium entirely destroyed the

  basic premise on which both physics and chemistry were built.

  What had been real until its discovery was real no longer.

  The known tried-and-true principles of reality, then, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, are often shaped out of profound ignorance. We do not know what or

  how much we do not know. Ignoring our ignorance, even

  though it has been revealed to us time and time again, we

  believe that reality is whatever we do know.

  One basic principle of reality, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, is that there are two sexes, man and woman, and that these sexes are not only distinct from

  each other, but are opposite. The model often used to describe

  the nature of these two sexes is that of magnetic poles. The

  male sex is likened to the positive pole, and the female sex is

  likened to the negative pole. Brought into proximity with each

  other, the magnetic fields of these two sexes are supposed to

  interact, locking the two poles together into a perfect whole.

  Needless to say, two like poles brought into proximity are

  supposed to repel each other.

  The male sex, in keeping with its positive designation, has

  positive qualities; and the female sex, in keeping with its negative designation, does not have any of the positive qualities attributed to the male sex. For instance, according to this

  model, men are active, strong, and courageous; and women

  are passive, weak, and fearful. In other words, whatever men

  are, women are not; whatever men can do, women cannot do;

  whatever capacities men have, women do not have. Man is the

  positive and woman is his negative.

  Apologists for this model claim that it is moral because it is

  inherently egalitarian. Each pole is supposed to have the dignity of its own separate identity; each pole is necessary to a harmonious whole. This notion, of course, is rooted in the

  conviction that the claims made as to the character of each sex

  are true, that the essence of each sex is accurately described.

  In other words, to say that man is the positive and woman is

  the negative is like saying that sand is dry and water is wet—

  the characteristic which most describes the thing itself is

  named in a true way and no judgment on the worth of these

  differing characteristics is implied. Simone de Beauvoir exposes the fallacy of this “separate but equal” doctrine in the preface to The Second Sex:

  In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not. . . like that of

  two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the

  neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate

  human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the

  negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.. . .

  “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, ”

  said Aristotle; “we should regard the female nature as afflicted

  with a natural defectiveness. ” And St. Thomas for his part pro­

  nounced woman to be “an imperfect man, ” an “incidental”

  being. . .

  Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. 1

  This diseased view of woman as the negative of man, “female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, ” infects the whole of culture. It is the cancer in the gut of every political and

  economic system, of every social institution. It is the rot which

  spoils all human relationships, infests all human psychological

  reality, and destroys the very fiber of human identity.

  This pathological view of female negativity has been enforced on our flesh for thousands of years. The savage mutilation of the female body, undertaken to distinguish us absolutely from men, has occurred on a massive scale. For instance, in China, for one thousand years, women’s feet were

  reduced to stumps through footbinding. When a girl was seven

  or eight years old, her feet were washed in alum, a chemical

  that causes shrinkage. Then, all toes but the big toes were bent

  into the soles of her feet and bandaged as tightly as possible.

  This procedure was repeated over and over again for approximately three years. The girl, in agony, was forced to walk on her feet. Hard calluses formed; toenails grew into the skin;

  the feet were pus-filled and bloody; circulation was virtually

  stopped; often the big toes fell off. The ideal foot was three

  inches of smelly, rotting flesh. Men were positive and women

  were negative because men could walk and women could not.

  Men were strong and women were weak because men could

  walk and women could not. Men were independent and

  women were dependent because men could walk and women

  could not. Men were virile because women were crippled.

  This atrocity committed against Chinese women is only one

  example of the systematic sadism acted out on the bodies of

  women to render us opposite to, and the negatives of, men.

  We have been, and are, whipped, beaten, and assaulted; we

  have been, and are, encased in clothing designed to distort our

  bodies, to make movement and breathing painful and difficult;

  we have been, and are, turned into ornaments, so deprived of

  physical presence that we cannot run or jump or climb or even

  walk with a natural posture; we have been, and are, veiled, our

  faces covered by layers of suffocating cloth or by layers of

  make-up, so that even possession of our own faces is denied us;

  we have been, and are, forced to remove the hair from our

  armpits, legs, eyebrows, and often even from our pubic areas,

  so that men can assert, without contradiction, the positivity of

  their own hairy virility. We have been, and are, sterilized

  against our will; our wombs are removed for no medical reason; our clitorises are cut off; our breasts and the whole musculature of our chests are removed with enthusiastic abandon.

  This last procedure, radical mastectomy, is eighty years old. I

  ask you to consider the development of weaponry in the last

  eighty years, nuclear bombs, poisonous gases, laser beams,

  noise bombs, and the like, and to question the development of

  technology in relation to women. Why are women still being

  mutilated so promiscuously in breast surgery; why has this

  savage form of mutilation, radical mastectomy, thrived if not

  to enhance the negativity of women in relation to men? These

  forms of physical mutilation are brands which designate us as

  female by negating our very bodies, by destroying them.

  In the bizarre world made by men, the primary physical

  emblem of female negativity is pregnancy. Women have the

  capacity to bear children; men do not. But since men are

  positive and women are negative, the inability to bear children

  is designated as a positive characteristic, and the ability to

  bear children is designated as a negative characteristic. Since

  women are most easily distinguished from men by virtue of

  this single capacity, and since the negativity of women is always established in opposition to the positivity of men, the childbearing capacity of the female is used first to fix, then to

  confirm, her negative or inferior statu
s. Pregnancy becomes a

  physical brand, a sign designating the pregnant one as authentically female. Childbearing, peculiarly, becomes the form and substance of female negativity.

  Again, consider technology in relation to women. As men

  walk on the moon and a man-made satellite approaches Mars

  for a landing, the technology of contraception remains criminally inadequate. The two most effective means of contraception are the pill and the I. U. D. The pill is poisonous and the I. U. D. is sadistic. Should a woman want to prevent conception, she must either fail eventually because she uses an ineffective method of contraception, in which case she risks death through childbearing; or she must risk dreadful disease

  with the pill, or suffer agonizing pain with the I. U. D. — and, of

  course, with either of these methods, the risk of death is also

  very real. Now that abortion techniques have been developed

  which are safe and easy, women are resolutely denied free

  access to them. Men require that women continue to become

  pregnant so as to embody female negativity, thus confirming

  male positivity.

  While the physical assaults against female life are staggering, the outrages committed against our intellectual and creative faculties have been no less sadistic. Consigned to a negative intellectual and creative life, so as to affirm these capacities in men, women are considered to be mindless; femininity is

  roughly synonymous with stupidity. We are feminine to the

  degree that our mental faculties are annihilated or repudiated.

  To enforce this dimension of female negativity, we are systematically denied access to formal education, and every assertion of natural intelligence is punished until we do not dare to trust our perceptions, until we do not dare to honor our

  creative impulses, until we do not dare to exercise our critical

  faculties, until we do not dare to cultivate our imaginations,

  until we do not dare to respect our own mental or moral

  acuity. Whatever creative or intellectual work we do manage

  to do is trivialized, ignored, or ridiculed, so that even those

  few whose minds could not be degraded are driven to suicide

  or insanity, or back into marriage and childbearing. There are

  very few exceptions to this inexorable rule.

  The most vivid literary manifestation of this pathology of

  female negation is found in pornography. Literature is always

  the most eloquent expression of cultural values; and pornography articulates the purest distillation of those values. In literary pornography, where female blood can flow without the real restraint of biological endurance, the ethos of this murderous male-positive culture is revealed in its skeletal form: male sadism feeds on female masochism; male dominance is

  nourished by female submission.

  In pornography, sadism is the means by which men establish their dominance. Sadism is the authentic exercise of power which confirms manhood; and the first characteristic of manhood is that its existence is based on the negation of the female

  — manhood can only be certified by abject female degradation, a degradation never abject enough until the victim’s body and will have both been destroyed.

  In literary pornography, the pulsating heart of darkness at

  the center of the male-positive system is exposed in all of its

  terrifying nakedness. That heart of darkness is this— that sexual sadism actualizes male identity. Women are tortured, whipped, and chained; women are bound and gagged, branded

  and burned, cut with knives and wires; women are pissed on

  and shit on; red-hot needles are driven into breasts, bones are

  broken, rectums are tom, mouths are ravaged, cunts are savagely bludgeoned by penis after penis, dildo after dildo— and all of this to establish in the male a viable sense of his own

  worth.

  Typically in pornography, some of this gruesome cruelty

  takes place in a public context. A man has not thoroughly

  mastered a woman— he is not thoroughly a man— until her

  degradation is publicly witnessed and enjoyed. In other words,

  a-’ a man establishes dominance he must also publicly establish

  ownership. Ownership is proven when a man can humiliate a

  woman in front of, and for the pleasure of, his fellows, and

  still she remains loyal to him. Ownership is further established

  when a man can loan a woman out as a carnal object, or give

  her as a gift to another man or to other men. These transactions make his ownership a matter of public record and in­

  crease his esteem in the eyes of other men. These transactions

  prove that he has not only claimed absolute authority over her

  body, but that he has also entirely mastered her will. What

  might have begun for the woman as submission to a particular

  man out of “love” for him— and what was in that sense congruent with her own integrity as she could recognize it— must end in the annihilation of even that claim to individuality. The

  individuality of ownership— “I am the one who owns”— is

  claimed by the man; but nothing must be left to the woman or

  in the woman on which she could base any claim to personal

  dignity, even the shabby dignity of believing, “I am the exclusive property of the man who degrades me. ” In the same way, and for the same reasons, she is forced to watch the man who

  possesses her exercising his sexual sadism against other women.

  This robs her of that internal grain of dignity that comes

  from believing, “I am the only one, ” or “I am perceived and

  my singular identity is verified when he degrades me, ” or “I

  am distinguished from other women because this man has

  chosen me. ”

  The pornography of male sadism almost always contains an

  idealized, or unreal, view of male fellowship. The utopian

  male concept which is the premise of male pornography is

  this—since manhood is established and confirmed over and

  against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress

  against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it. Each man, knowing his own deep-rooted impulse to savagery, presupposes this same impulse in other men and seeks to protect himself from it. The rituals of male sadism over and against the bodies of women

  are the means by which male aggression is socialized so that a

  man can associate with other men without the imminent danger of male aggression against his own person. The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men

  to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and

  trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all

  male bonding is based on it.

  This idealized view of male fellowship exposes the essentially homosexual character of male society. Men use women’s bodies to form alliances or bonds with each other. Men use

  women’s bodies to achieve recognizable power which will certify male identity in the eyes of other men. Men use women’s bodies to enable them to engage in civil and peaceable social

  transactions with each other. We think that we live in a heterosexual society because most men are fixated on women as sexual objects; but, in fact, we live in a homosexual society

  because all credible transactions of power, authority, and authenticity take place among men; all transactions based on equity and individuality take place among men. Men are real;

  therefore, all real relationship is between men; all real communication is between men; all real reciprocity is between men; all real mutuality is between men. Heterosexuality,

  which can be defined as the sexual dom
inance of men over

  women, is like an acorn—from it grows the mighty oak of the

  male homosexual society, a society of men, by men, and for

  men, a society in which the positivity of male community is

  realized through the negation of the female, through the annihilation of women’s flesh and will.

  In literary pornography, which is a distillation of life as we

  know it, women are gaping holes, hot slits, fuck tubes, and the

  like. The female body is supposed to consist of three empty

  holes, all of which were expressly designed to be filled with

  erect male positivity.

  The female life-force itself is characterized as a negative

  one: we are defined as inherently masochistic; that is, we are

  driven toward pain and abuse, toward self-destruction, toward

  annihilation— and this drive toward our own negation is precisely what identifies us as women. In other words, we are bom so that we may be destroyed. Sexual masochism actualizes female negativity, just as sexual sadism actualizes male positivity. A woman’s erotic femininity is measured by the

  degree to which she needs to be hurt, needs to be possessed,

  needs to be abused, needs to submit, needs to be beaten, needs

  to be humiliated, needs to be degraded. Any woman who resists acting out these so-called needs, or any woman who rebels against the values inherent in these needs, or any

  woman who refuses to sanction or participate in her own destruction is characterized as a deviant, one who denies her femininity, a shrew, a bitch, etc. Typically, such deviants are

  brought back into the female flock by rape, gang rape, or

  some form of bondage. The theory is that once such women

  have tasted the intoxicating sweetness of submission they will,

  like lemmings, rush to their own destruction.

  Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. As the saying goes, women are made for love— that is, submission.

  Love, or submission, must be both the substance and purpose

  of a woman’s life. For the female, the capacity to love is exactly synonymous with the capacity to sustain abuse and the appetite for it. For the woman, the proof of love is that she is