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

is misogyny— and in the face of that misogyny, someone had

better reinvent integrity.

They, the masculinists, have told us that they write about

the human condition, that their themes are the great themes—

love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself. They have told

us that our themes—love, death, heroism, suffering, history

itself— are trivial because we are, by our very nature, trivial.

I renounce masculinist art. It is not art which illuminates

the human condition— it illuminates only, and to men’s final

and everlasting shame, the masculinist world— and as we look

around us, that world is not one to be proud of. Masculinist

art, the art of centuries of men, is not universal, or the final

explication of what being in the world is. It is, in the end,

descriptive only of a world in which women are subjugated,

submissive, enslaved, robbed of full becoming, distinguished

only by carnality, demeaned. I say, my life is not trivial; my

sensibility is not trivial; my struggle is not trivial. Nor was my

mother’s, or her mother’s before her. I renounce those who

hate women, who have contempt for women, who ridicule and

demean women, and when I do, I renounce most of the art,

masculinist art, ever made.

As feminists, we inhabit the world in a new way. We see the

world in a new way. We threaten to turn it upside down and

inside out. We intend to change it so totally that someday the

texts of masculinist writers will be anthropological curiosities.

What was that Mailer talking about, our descendants will ask,

should they come upon his work in some obscure archive.

And they will wonder—bewildered, sad— at the masculinist

glorification of war; the masculinist mystifications around killing, maiming, violence, and pain; the tortured masks of phallic heroism; the vain arrogance of phallic supremacy; the

impoverished renderings of mothers and daughters, and so of

life itself. They will ask, did those people really believe in

those gods?

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great

river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless

stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based

on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which

will take the great human themes— love, death, heroism,

suffering, history itself— and render them fully human. It may

also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now

that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new

theme, one as great and as rich as those others— should we

call it “joy”?

We cannot imagine a world in which women are not experienced as trivial and contemptible, in which women are not demeaned, abused, exploited, raped, diminished before we are

even bom— and so we cannot know what kind of art will be

made in that new world. Our work, which does full honor to

those centuries of sisters who went before us, is to midwife

that new world into being. It will be left to our children and

their children to live in it.

2

Renouncing Sexual “E q u a lity ”

Equality: 1. the state of being equal; correspondence in

quantity, degree, value, rank, ability, etc. 2. uniform character, as of motion or surface.

Freedom: 1. state of being at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint. . . 2. exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc. 3.

power of determining one’s or its own action. . . 4.

Philos, the power to make one’s own choices or decisions

without constraint from within or without; autonomy,

self-determination. . . 5. civil liberty, as opposed to subjection to an arbitrary or despotic government. 6. political or national independence. . . 8. personal liberty, as opposed to bondage or slavery. . .

— Syn. f r e e d o m ,i n d e p e n d e n c e ,l i b e r t y refer to an absence of undue restrictions and an opportunity to exercise one’s rights and powers, f r e e d o m emphasizes the opportunity given for the exercise of one’s rights, powers,

desires, or the like. . . i n d e p e n d e n c e implies not only

lack of restrictions but also the ability to stand alone, unsustained by anything else. . .

— Ant. 1-3. restraint. 5, 6, 8. oppression.

Justice: 1. the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness . . . 2. rightfulness or lawfulness. . . 3. the moral principle determining just conduct.

4. conformity to this principle, as manifested in conduct;

just conduct, dealing, or treatment. . .

from The Random House Dictionary

of the English Language

In 1970 Kate Millett published Sexual Politics. In that book

she proved to many of us— who would have staked our lives

Delivered at the National Organization for Women Conference on Sexuality ,

New York City, October 12, 1974.

on denying it— that sexual relations, the literature depicting

those relations, the psychology posturing to explain those relations, the economic systems that fix the necessities of those relations, the religious systems that seek to control those relations, are political. She showed us that everything that happens to a woman in her life, everything that touches or molds her, is political. 1

Women who are feminists, that is, women who grasped her

analysis and saw that it explained much of their real existence

in their real lives, have tried to understand, struggle against,

and transform the political system called patriarchy which

exploits our labor, predetermines the ownership of our bodies,

and diminishes our selfhood from the day we are bom. This

struggle has no dimension to it which is abstract: it has

touched us in every part of our lives. But nowhere has it

touched us more vividly or painfully than in that part of our

human lives which we call “love” and “sex. ” In the course of

our struggle to free ourselves from systematic oppression, a

serious argument has developed among us, and I want to bring

that argument into this room.

Some of us have committed ourselves in all areas, including

those called “love” and “sex, ” to the goal of equality, that is,

to the state of being equal; correspondence in quantity, degree, value, rank, ability; uniform character, as of motion or surface. Others of us, and I stand on this side of the argument,

do not see equality as a proper, or sufficient, or moral, or