Andrea Dworkin: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

what she needs, her processes o f thinking and feeling,

her proper place. It links men and women in an erotic

dance o f some magnitude: the sado-masochistic complexion o f O is not trivial —it is formulated as a cosmic principle which, articulates, absolutely, the feminine.

Also, O is particularly compelling for me because I

once believed it to be what its defenders claim — the

mystical revelation o f the true, eternal, and sacral

destiny o f women. T h e book was absorbed as a pulsating, erotic, secular Christianity (the joy in pure suffering, woman as Christ figure). I experienced O with the same infantile abandon as the Newsweek reviewer who

wrote: “What lifts this fascinating book above mere

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perversity is its movement toward the transcendence

o f the self through a gift of the self. . . to give the body,

to allow it to be ravaged, exploited, and totally possessed can be an act of consequence, if it is done with love for the sake of love. ” 1 Any clear-headed appraisal

of O will show the situation, O’s condition, her behavior, and most importantly her attitude toward her oppressor as a logical scenario incorporating Judeo-Christian values of service and self-sacrifice and universal notions of womanhood, a logical scenario demonstrating the psychology of submission and self-hatred found in all oppressed peoples. O is a book of astounding political significance.

This is, then, the story of O: O is taken by her lover

Rene to Roissy and cloistered there; she is fucked,

sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a

regular and continuing basis —she is programmed to

be an erotic slave, Rene’s personal whore; after being

properly trained she is sent home with her lover; her

lover gives her to Sir Stephen, his half-brother; she is

fucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a regular and continuing basis; she is ordered to become the lover of Jacqueline and to recruit her for

Roissy, which she does; she is sent to Anne-Marie to be

branded with Sir Stephen’s mark and to have rings with

his insignia inserted in her cunt; she serves as an erotic

model for Jacqueline’s younger sister Natalie who is

infatuated with her; she is taken to a party masked as

an owl, led on a leash by Natalie, and there plundered,

despoiled, raped, gangbanged; realizing that there is

nothing else left for Sir Stephen to do with her or to her,

fearing that he will abandon her, she asks his permis-

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sion to kill herself and receives it. Q . E. D., pornography

is never big on plot.

O f course, like most summaries, the above is somewhat sketchy. I have not mentioned the quantities o f cock that O sucks, or the anal assaults that she sustains,

or the various rapes and tortures perpetrated on her by

minor characters in the book, or the varieties o f whips

used, or described her clothing or the different kinds o f

nipple rouge, or the many ways in which she is chained,

or the shapes and colors o f the welts on her body.

From the course o f O ’s story emerges a clear mythological figure: she is woman, and to name her O, zero, emptiness, says it all. Her ideal state is one o f complete

passivity, nothingness, a submission so absolute that

she transcends human form (in becoming an owl). Only

the hole between her legs is left to define her, and the

symbol o f that hole must surely be O. Much, however,

even in the rarefied environs o f pornography, necessarily interferes with the attainment o f utter passivity.

Given a body which takes up space, has needs, makes

demands, is connected, even symbolically, to a personal

history which is a sequence o f likes, dislikes, skills,

opinions, one is formed, shaped—one exists at the very

least as positive space. And since in addition as a woman

one is born guilty and carnal, personifying the sins o f

Eve and Pandora, the wickedness o f Jezebel and Lucre-

tia Borgia, O ’s transcendence o f the species is truly

phenomenal.

T h e thesis o f O is simple. Woman is cunt, lustful,

wanton. She must be punished, tamed, debased. She

gives the gift o f herself, her body, her well-being,

her life, to her lover. This is as it should be —natural

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and good. It ends necessarily in her annihilation, which

is also natural and good, as well as beautiful, because

she fulfills her destiny:

As long as I am beaten and ravished on your behalf, I

am naught but the thought of you, the desire of you,

the obsession of you. That, I believe, is what you

wanted. Well, I love you, and that is what I want too. 2

Then let him take her, if only to wound her! O hated

herself for her own desire, and loathed Sir Stephen

for the self-control he was displaying. She wanted him

to love her, there, the truth was out: she wanted him

to be chafing under the urge to touch her lips and

penetrate her body, to devastate her if need be. . . . 3

. . . Yet he was certain that she was guilty and, without

really wanting to, Rene was punishing her for a sin

he knew nothing about (since it remained completely

internal), although Sir Stephen had immediately detected it: her wantonness. 4

. . . no pleasure, no joy, no figment of her imagination

could ever compete with the happiness she felt at the

way he used her with such utter freedom, at the notion

that he could do anything with her, that there was no

limit, no restriction in the manner with which, on her

body, he might search for pleasure. 5

O is totally possessed. That means that she is an

object, with no control over her own mobility, capable

of no assertion of personality. Her body is a body, in

the same way that a pencil is a pencil, a bucket is a

bucket, or, as Gertrude Stein pointedly said, a rose is

a rose. It also means that O ’s energy, or power, as a

woman, as Woman, is absorbed. Possession here denotes a biological transference o f power which brings

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with it a commensurate spiritual strength to the possessor. O does more than offer herself; she is herself the offering. T o offer herself would be prosaic Christian