Andrea Dworkin: Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

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 dominance 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