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

chains, and the other paraphernalia of brutality are security

blankets which give the lie to the pornographic claim that fucking issues from manhood like light from the sun. But in life, even the systematized abuse of women and the global subjugation of women to men is not sufficient to stem the terror inherent for the male in the act of fucking.

Third, it is necessary to understand that what is experienced

by the male as authentic pleasure is the affirmation of his own

identity as a male. Each time he survives the peril of entering

the female void, his masculinity is reified. He has proven both

that he is not her and that he is like other hims. No pleasure

on earth matches the pleasure of having proven himself real,

positive and not negative, a man and not a woman, a bona

fide member of the group which holds dominion over all other

living things.

Fourth, it is necessary to understand that under the sexual

system of male positivity and female negativity, there is literally nothing in the act of fucking, except accidental clitoral friction, which recognizes or actualizes the real eroticism of

the female, even as it has survived under slave conditions.

Within the confines of the male-positive system, this eroticism

does not exist. After all, a negative is a negative is a negative.

Fucking is entirely a male act designed to affirm the reality

and power of the phallus, of masculinity. For women, the

pleasure in being fucked is the masochistic pleasure of experiencing self-negation. Under the male-positive system, the masochistic pleasure of self-negation is both mythicized and

mystified in order to compel women to believe that we experience fulfillment in selflessness, pleasure in pain, validation in self-sacrifice, femininity in submission to masculinity. Trained

from birth to conform to the requirements of this peculiar

world view, punished severely when we do not learn masochistic submission well enough, entirely encapsulated inside the boundaries of the male-positive system, few women ever experience themselves as real in and of themselves. Instead, women are real to themselves to the degree that they identify

with and attach themselves to the positivity of males. In being

fucked, a woman attaches herself to one who is real to himself

and vicariously experiences reality, such as it is, through him;

in being fucked, a woman experiences the masochistic pleasure of her own negation which is perversely articulated as the fulfillment of her femininity.

Now, I want to make a crucial distinction— the distinction

between truth and reality. For humans, reality is social', reality

is whatever people at a given time believe it to be. In saying

this, I do not mean to suggest that reality is either whimsical or

accidental. In my view, reality is always a function of politics

in general and sexual politics in particular— that is, it serves

the powerful by fortifying and justifying their right to domination over the powerless. Reality is whatever premises social and cultural institutions are built on. Reality is also the rape,

the whip, the fuck, the hysterectomy, the clitoridectomy, the

mastectomy, the bound foot, the high-heel shoe, the corset, the

make-up, the veil, the assault and battery, the degradation and

mutilation in their concrete manifestations. Reality is enforced

by those whom it serves so that it appears to be self-evident.

Reality is self-perpetuating, in that the cultural and social institutions built on its premises also embody and enforce those premises. Literature, religion, psychology, education, medicine, the science of biology as currently understood, the social sciences, the nuclear family, the nation-state, police, armies,

and civil law— all embody the given reality and enforce it on

us. The given reality is, of course, that there are two sexes,

male and female; that these two sexes are opposite from each

other, polar; that the male is inherently positive and the female inherently negative; and that the positive and negative poles of human existence unite naturally into a harmonious

whole.

Truth, on the other hand, is not nearly so accessible as

reality. In my view, truth is absolute in that it does exist and it

can be found. Radium, for instance, always existed; it was

always true that radium existed; but radium did not figure in

the human notion of reality until Marie and Pierre Curie isolated it. When they did, the human notion of reality had to change in fundamental ways to accommodate the truth of

radium. Similarly, the earth was always a sphere; this was

always true; but until Columbus sailed west to find the East, it

was not real. We might say that truth does exist, and that it is

the human project to find it so that reality can be based on

it.

I have made this distinction between truth and reality in

order to enable me to say something very simple: that while

the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true

that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which

are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, “by virtue of a certain lack of qualities. ”

And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive

and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely

real; but the model itself is not true. We are living imprisoned

inside a pernicious delusion, a delusion on which all reality as

we know it is predicated.

In my view, those of us who are women inside this system of

reality will never be free until the delusion of sexual polarity is

destroyed and until the system of reality based on it is eradicated entirely from human society and from human memory.

This is the notion of cultural transformation at the heart of

feminism. This is the revolutionary possibility inherent in the

feminist struggle.

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic nonidentity in women—that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know

them so that this division of human flesh into two camps— one

an armed camp and the other a concentration camp— is no

longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.