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

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

willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his

sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice

of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and

redeem the masculinity of her lover.

In pornography, we see female love raw, its naked erotic

skeleton; we can almost touch the bones of our dead. Love is

the erotic masochistic drive; love is the frenzied passion

which compels a woman to submit to a diminishing life in

chains; love is the consuming sexual impulse toward degradation and abuse. The woman does literally give herself to the man; he does literally take and possess her.

The primary transaction which expresses this female submission and this male possession, in pornography as in life, is the act of fucking. Fucking is the basic physical expression of

male positivity and female negativity. The relationship of sadist to masochist does not originate in the act of fucking; rather, it is expressed and renewed there.

For the male, fucking is a compulsive act, in pornography

and in real life. But in real life, and not in pornography, it is

an act fraught with danger, filled with dread. That sanctified

organ of male positivity, the phallus, penetrates into the female void. During penetration, the male’s whole being is his penis— it and his will to domination are entirely one; the erect

penis is his identity; all sensation is localized in the penis and

in effect the rest of his body is insensate, dead. During penetration, a male’s very being is at once both risked and affirmed.

Will the female void swallow him up, consume him, engulf

and destroy his penis, his whole self? Will the female void

pollute his virile positivity with its noxious negativity? Will the

female void contaminate his tenuous maleness with the overwhelming toxicity of its femaleness? Or will he emerge from the terrifying emptiness of the female’s anatomical gaping hole

intact—his positivity reified because, even when inside her, he

managed to maintain the polarity of male and female by maintaining the discreteness and integrity of his steel-like rod; his masculinity affirmed because he did not in fact merge with her

and in so doing lose himself, he did not dissolve into her, he

did not become her nor did he become like her, he was not

subsumed by her.

This dangerous journey into the female void must be undertaken again and again, compulsively, because masculinity is nothing in and of itself; in and of itself it does not exist; it has

reality only over and against, or in contrast to, female negativity. Masculinity can only be experienced, achieved, recognized, and embodied in opposition to femininity. When men posit sex, violence, and death as elemental erotic truths, they

mean this—that sex, or fucking, is the act which enables them

to experience their own reality, or identity, or masculinity

most concretely; that violence, or sadism, is the means by

which they actualize that reality, or identity, or masculinity;

and that death, or negation, or nothingness, or contamination

by the female is what they risk each time they penetrate into

what they imagine to be the emptiness of the female hole.

What then is behind the claim that fucking is pleasurable

for the male? How can an act so saturated with the dread of

loss of self, of loss of penis, be pleasurable? How can an act so

obsessive, so anxiety-ridden, be characterized as pleasurable?

First, it is necessary to understand that this is precisely the

fantasy dimension of pornography. In the rarefied environs of

male pornography, male dread is excised from the act of fucking, censored, edited out. The sexual sadism of males rendered so vividly in pornography is real; women experience it daily.

Male domination over and against female flesh is real; women

experience it daily. The brutal uses to which female bodies are

put in pornography are real; women suffer these abuses on a

global scale, day after day, year after year, generation after

generation. What is not real, what is fantasy, is the male claim

at the heart of pornography that fucking is for them an ecstatic experience, the ultimate pleasure, an unmixed blessing, a natural and easy act in which there is no terror, no dread, no

fear. Nothing in reality documents this claim. Whether we

examine the slaughter of the nine million witches in Europe

which was fueled by the male dread of female carnality, or

examine the phenomenon of rape which exposes fucking as an

act of overt hostility against the female enemy, or investigate

impotence which is the involuntary inability to enter the female void, or trace the myth of the vagina dentata (the vagina full of teeth) which is derived from a paralyzing fear of female

genitalia, or isolate menstrual taboos as an expression of male

terror, we find that in real life the male is obsessed with his

fear of the female, and that this fear is most vivid to him in the

act of fucking.

Second, it is necessary to understand that pornography is a

kind of propaganda designed to convince the male that he

need not be afraid, that he is not afraid; to shore him up so

that he can fuck; to convince him that fucking is an unalloyed

joy; to obscure for him the reality of his own terror by providing a pornographic fantasy of pleasure which he can learn as a creed and from which he can act to dominate women as a real

man must. We might say that in pornography the whips, the