Andrea Dworkin - Woman Hating - A Radical Look at Sexuality

women, properly trained to their roles, did not listen.

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Woman Haling

Feminists, most often as individuals but sometimes in

small militant groups, fought the system which oppressed them, analyzed it, were jailed, were ostracized, but there was no general recognition among women

that they were oppressed.

In the last 5 or 6 years, that recognition has become

more widespread among women. We have begun to understand the extraordinary violence that has been done to us, that is being done to us: how our minds are

aborted in their development by sexist education; how

our bodies are violated by oppressive grooming imperatives; how the police function against us in cases of rape and assault; how the media, schools, and

churches conspire to deny us dignity and freedom; how

the nuclear family and ritualized sexual behavior imprison us in roles and forms which are degrading to us.

We developed consciousness-raising sessions to try to

fathom the extraordinary extent of our despair, to try

to search out the depth and boundaries of our internalized anger, to try to find strategies for freeing ourselves from oppressive relationships, from masochism and passivity, from our own lack of self-respect. There

was both pain and ecstasy in this process. Women

discovered each other, for truly no oppressed group

had ever been so divided and conquered. Women began to deal with concrete oppressions: to become part of the economic process, to erase discriminatory laws,

to gain control over our own lives and over our own

bodies, to develop the concrete ability to survive on our

own terms. Women also began to articulate structural

analyses o f sexist society — Millett did that with Sexual

Politics; in Vaginal Politics Ellen Frankfort demonstrated

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the complex and deadly antiwoman biases o f the medical establishment; in Women and Madness Dr. Phyllis Chesler showed that mental institutions are prisons for

women who rebel against society’s well-defined female

role.

We began to see ourselves clearly, and what we saw

was dreadful. We saw that we were, as Yoko O no wrote,

the niggers o f the world, slaves to the slave. We saw

that we were the ultimate house niggers, ass-licking,

bowing, scraping, shuffling fools. We recognized all o f

our social behavior as learned behavior that functioned

for survival in a sexist world: we painted ourselves,

smiled, exposed legs and ass, had children, kept

house, as our accommodations to the reality o f power

politics.

Most o f the women involved in articulating the oppression o f women were white and middle class. We spent, even if we did not earn or control, enormous

sums o f money. Because o f our participation in the mid-

dle-class lifestyle we were the oppressors o f other

people, our poor white sisters, our Black sisters, our

Chicana sisters —and the men who in turn oppressed

them. This closely interwoven fabric o f oppression,

which is the racist class structure o f Amerika today,

assured that wherever one stood, it was with at least one

foot heavy on the belly o f another human being.

As white, middle-class women, we lived in the house

o f the oppressor-of-us-all who supported us as he

abused us, dressed us as he exploited us, “treasured”

us in payment for the many functions we performed.

We were the best-fed, best-kept, best-dressed, most

willing concubines the world has ever known. We had

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Woman Hating

no dignity and no real freedom, but we did have good

health and long lives.

The women’s movement has not dealt with this

bread-and-butter issue, and that is its most awful

failure. There has been little recognition that the destruction of the middle-class lifestyle is crucial to the development of decent community forms in which all

people can be free and have dignity. T here is certainly

no program to deal with the realities of the class system

in Amerika. On the contrary, most of the women’s

movement has, with appalling blindness, refused to take

that kind o f responsibility. Only the day-care movement

has in any way reflected, or acted pragmatically on, the

concrete needs of all classes of women. The anger at

the Nixon administration for cutting day-care funds is

naive at best. Given the structure o f power politics and

capital in Amerika, it is ridiculous to expect the federal

government to act in the interests o f the people. The

money available to middle-class women who identify

as feminists must be channeled into the programs we

want to develop, and we must develop them. In general,

middle-class women have absolutely refused to take any

action, make any commitment which would interfere

with, threaten, or significantly alter a lifestyle, a living

standard, which is moneyed and privileged.

The analysis of sexism in this book articulates

clearly what the oppression o f women is, how it functions, how it is rooted in psyche and culture. But that analysis is useless unless it is tied to a political consciousness and commitment which will totally redefine community. One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an

unfree world, and in the course o f redefining family,

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church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. T o attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.

T h e nature o f women’s oppression is unique: women

are oppressed as women, regardless o f class or race;

some women have access to significant wealth, but that

wealth does not signify power; women are to be found

everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut o f the machinery and way o f life which is ruinous to us. And perhaps most importantly, most women have little sense o f dignity or self-

respect or strength, since those qualities are directly

related to a sense o f manhood. In Revolutionary Suicide,

Huey P. Newton tells us that the Black Panthers did not