To read Dworkin at eighteen was to see patriarchy with the skin peeled back. Her work was a bloody revelation that demanded a blood oath in repayment, and who was I at that age—angry, a writer, a punk girl at the dawn of riot grrrl—to deny her? She modeled rage as authority; her imperious voice and dirty mouth represented a feminist literature empty of caveats, equivocation, or the endless positing of one’s subjective limits. To me this was a new kind of greatness—I guess it still is. So though I subsequently had a whole career of disagreeing, for the last five years, I’ve been intermittently immersed in Dworkin, reading everything by and about her—considering her as a person, a symbol, a flashpoint, and an artist—and have become a different kind of loyalist.
There are many ways to be erased. One can be obliterated by caricature—the image of fat, fuck-you Andrea Dworkin in a Hustler cartoon or raving in feminism’s most uncool margin is one way to pave over her ideas. Then there is the self-perpetuating misrepresentation, the groove made deeper with every unexamined repetition of a rumor; and a sneakier phenomenon—the feminine/feminist race to perfection which renders our movement’s dialectics shameful, our human arrogance, floundering, and failures unaccounted for in an honest intellectual history. There’s always the blithe forgetfulness of a world where women’s writing means less, is worth less, and is swiftly out of print, too. And the irrelevance accidentally initiated by the sycophant: If Dworkin is reduced to source material for a strange dogma, one that extrapolates her singular radical feminism into the present, if her writings exist only as tracts, that’s one more kind of death.
Greatness is not synonymous with perfection or popularity. In the long-arc narratives of male genius that reach far beyond a lifetime, greatness is established despite, and in the glaring light of, great flaws. Great men are by definition to be reckoned with and honored for the dilemmas they force us to confront, while the ways to castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition are second-nature and sometimes fatal, whether she’s deemed evil or merely, as they say, problematic. My point is, right or wrong—right and wrong—Dworkin’s oracular voice helped to shape the historic grassroots feminist organizing of the late ’70s and ’80s; she rallied the forces of the antipornography, antirape and battered women’s movements, and she left behind a complex, experimental body of work that will make your blood run cold.
April 3, 1973
dear Mom and Dad, received the $30 today, thank you, it always seems to be saving me from the abyss. Gringo is fine, Im ok, let myself get too tired, working too many hours, so havent been feeling so well these last days. but sleep will cure that. I finished revising the chapters that are finished. the book will be called LAST DAYS AT HOT SLIT. I just settled on that title, and you seemed to want very much to know it. Muriel just read it, just called me to say she thinks its one of the most important book of our times--wow! I must say, Im in a constant state of excitment about it, I wonder if Ill forget about it, or if Ill get more excited every day for a year until it comes out. anyway, the problem now is to finish it. be well and love to everyone.
Andrea
WOMAN HATING
1974
INTRODUCTION
This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. It has no other purpose. It is not cerebral wisdom, or academic horseshit, or ideas carved in granite or destined for immortality. It is part of a process and its context is change. It is part of a planetary movement to restructure community forms and human consciousness so that people have power over their own lives, participate fully in community, live in dignity and freedom.
The commitment to ending male dominance as the fundamental psychological, political, and cultural reality of earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment. It is a commitment to transformation of the self and transformation of the social reality on every level. The core of this book is an analysis of sexism (that system of male dominance), what it is, how it operates on us and in us. However, I do want to discuss briefly two problems, tangential to that analysis, but still crucial to the development of revolutionary program and consciousness. The first is the nature of the women’s movement as such, and the second has to do with the work of the writer.
Until the appearance of the brilliant anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful and Kate Millett’s extraordinary book Sexual Politics, women did not think of themselves as oppressed people. Most women, it must be admitted, still do not. But the women’s movement as a radical liberation movement in Amerika can be dated from the appearance of those two books. We learn as we reclaim our herstory that there was a feminist movement which organized around the attainment of the vote for women. We learn that those feminists were also ardent abolitionists. Women “came out” as abolitionists—out of the closets, kitchens, and bedrooms; into public meetings, newspapers, and the streets. Two activist heroes of the abolitionist movement were Black women, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and they stand as prototypal revolutionary models.
Those early Amerikan feminists thought that suffrage was the key to participation in Amerikan democracy and that, free and enfranchised, the former slaves would in fact be free and enfranchised. Those women did not imagine that the vote would be effectively denied Blacks through literacy tests, property qualifications, and vigilante police action by white racists. Nor did they imagine the “separate but equal” doctrine and the uses to which it would be put.
Feminism and the struggle for Black liberation were parts of a compelling whole. That whole was called, ingenuously perhaps, the struggle for human rights. The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannot be denied. Once women experienced themselves as activists and began to understand the reality and meaning of oppression, they began to articulate a politically conscious feminism. Their focus, their concrete objective, was to attain suffrage for women.
The women’s movement formalized itself in 1848 at Seneca Falls when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, both activist abolitionists, called a convention. That convention drafted The Seneca Falls Declaration of Rights and Sentiments which is to this day an outstanding feminist declaration.
In struggling for the vote, women developed many of the tactics which were used, almost a century later, in the Civil Rights Movement. In order to change laws, women had to violate them. In order to change convention, women had to violate it. The feminists (suffragettes) were militant political activists who used the tactics of civil disobedience to achieve their goals.
The struggle for the vote began officially with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. It was not until August 26, 1920, that women were given the vote by the kindly male electorate. Women did not imagine that the vote would scarcely touch on, let alone transform, their own oppressive situations. Nor did they imagine that the “separate but equal” doctrine would develop as a tool of male dominance. Nor did they imagine the uses to which it would be put.
There have also been, always, individual feminists—women who violated the strictures of the female role, who challenged male supremacy, who fought for the right to work, or sexual freedom, or release from the bondage of the marriage contract. Those individuals were often eloquent when they spoke of the oppression they suffered as women in their own lives, but other women, properly trained to their roles, did not listen. Feminists, most often as individuals but sometimes in small militant groups, fought the system which oppressed them, analyzed it, were jailed, were ostracized, but there was no general recognition among women that they were oppressed.
In the last 5 or 6 years, that recognition has become more widespread among women. We have begun to understand the extraordinary violence that has been done to us, that is being done to us: how our minds are aborted in their development by sexist education; how our bodies are violated by oppressive grooming imperatives; how the police function against us in cases of rape and assault; how the media, schools, and churches conspire to deny us dignity and freedom; how the nuclear family and ritualized sexual behavior imprison us in roles and forms which are d
egrading to us. We developed consciousness-raising sessions to try to fathom the extraordinary extent of our despair, to try to search out the depth and boundaries of our internalized anger, to try to find strategies for freeing ourselves from oppressive relationships, from masochism and passivity, from our own lack of self-respect. There was both pain and ecstasy in this process. Women discovered each other, for truly no oppressed group had ever been so divided and conquered. Women began to deal with concrete oppressions: to become part of the economic process, to erase discriminatory laws, to gain control over our own lives and over our own bodies, to develop the concrete ability to survive on our own terms. Women also began to articulate structural analyses of sexist society—Millett did that with Sexual Politics; in Vaginal Politics Ellen Frankfort demonstrated the complex and deadly antiwoman biases of the medical establishment; in Women and Madness Dr. Phyllis Chesler showed that mental institutions are prisons for women who rebel against society’s well-defined female role.
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 our selves, 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 mind-fuck 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 p
lace—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.
Last Days at Hot Slit Page 4