Andrea Dworkin - Woman Hating - A Radical Look at Sexuality

hoarding power and wealth which characterizes them

to this very day.

Returning to yin and yang, what is crucial is the

realization that these concepts did not originally attach

to sex. In more concrete terms, the Great Original (first

being) o f the Chinese chronicles is the holy woman T ’ai

Yuan, who was an androgyne, a combined manifestation o f yin and yang. Primacy is given to the feminine principle here (the gender o f the noun is feminine) because o f woman’s generative function.

Am ong the Tibetan Buddhists, the so-called male-

female polarities are called yabyum; among the Indian

Hindus, they are called Shiva and Shakti. In the Tantric

sects o f both traditions, one finds a living religious cult

attached to the myth o f a primal androgyne, to the

union o f male and female. One also finds, not surprisingly, that Tantric cults are condemned by the parent culture with which they identify. T h e culminating religious rite o f the Tantrics is sacramental fucking, the ritual union o f man and woman which achieves, even if

only symbolically, the original androgynous energy.

This is the outstanding fact when one looks at yabyum

and Shiva-Shakti:

The Hindu assigned the male symbol apparatus to the

passive, the female to the active pole; the Buddhist did

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the opposite; the Hindu assigned the knowledge principle to the passive male pole, and the dynamic principle to the active female pole; the Vajrayana Buddhist did it the other way around. 5

The explanation for this major difference, this attachment in one case of the feminine to the passive and in the other of the feminine to the active, is that these

attachments were made arbitrarily . 6 Two convictions

vital to sexist ontology are undermined: that everywhere the feminine is synonymous with the passive, receptive, etc., and so it must be true; that the definition of the feminine as passive, receptive, etc., comes from the visible, incontrovertible fact of feminine passivity, receptivity, etc.

In Hindu mythology, as opposed to Judaic mythology, the phenomenological world is not created by god as something distinct from him. It is the godhead

in manifestation. As Campbell describes it: “. . . the

image of the androgynous ancestor is developed in

terms of an essentially psychological reading of the

problem of creation. ” 7 In a description of that androgynous being, we find: “He was just as large as a man and woman embracing. This Self then divided himself into

two parts; and with that there was a master and a

mistress. Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage

Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. ” 8

In Egypt one of the earliest forms of moon deity was

Isis-Net, an androgyne. The Greek Artemis was androgynous. So is Awonawilona, chief god of the Pueblo Zuni. The Greek god Eros was also androgynous.

Plato, repeating a corrupted version of a much

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

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older myth, describes in Symposium 3 types o f original human beings: male/male, male/female, female/

female. These original humans were so powerful that

the gods feared them and so Zeus, whose own androgynous ancestry did not stop him from becoming the Macho Kid, halved them.

T h e Aranda o f Australia know a supernatural being

called Numbakulla, “Eternal, ” who made androgynes

as the first beings, then split them apart, then tied them

back together with hemp to make couples. It is essentially this story that is repeated throughout the primitive world.

Certain African and Melanesian tribes have ancestral images o f one being with breasts, penis, and beard.

Hindu statues which show Shiva and Shakti united participate in the same devotional tradition —we perceive that they are united in sexual intercourse, but it is

also possible that they represent one literal androgynous body.

T here are still devotional religious practices which

harken back to the mythology o f the primal androgyne

— Tantra, for instance, in both its Tibetan and Indian

manifestations, clearly participates in that tradition.

Possibly the rite o f subincision, practiced in Australia,

is similarly rooted in androgyne myth. Subincision is the

ritual slitting open o f the underside o f the penis to form

a permanent cleft into the urethra. T h e opening is

called the “ penis womb. ” Campbell notes that “T h e

subincision produces artificially a hypospadias resembling that o f a certain class o f hermaphrodites. ” 9

T he drive back to androgyny, where it is manifest, is

sacral, strong, compelling. It is interesting here to

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speculate on the incest taboo. The Freudian articulation

o f what the Oedipal complex is and means serves the

imperatives of a patriarchal culture, of Judeo-Chris-

tian morality, and remains largely unchallenged. But

the earliest devotional mother-son configurations are

those of a Mother/Goddess and her Son/Lover. The

son is lover to the mother and is ritually sacrificed at a

predetermined time (mothers don’t have to be possessive). This sacrifice is not related to guilt or punishment—it is holy sacrifice which sanctifies the tribe, does honor to the offering, and is premised on cyclic fertility patterns of life, death, and regeneration. These rites, associated with the worship of the Great Mother

(the first corruption of the Great Original, or primal

androgyne) involved ritual intercourse between mother

and son, with the subsequent sacrifice of the son. At

one time both a son and a daughter were sacrificed, but

as the daughter became a mother-surrogate, the son

was sacrificed alone. This sacralized set, Mother/God-

dess-Son/Lover, and the rituals associated with it, are

postandrogyne developments: that is, men and women

experienced separateness (not duality) and attempted

to recreate symbolically the androgynous state of mind

and body through what we now call incest. If it is true

that the implications of the androgyny myths in terms

of behavior run counter to every Judeo-Christian, or

more generally sexist, notion of morality, it would follow that incest is the primary taboo of this and similar cultures because it has its roots in the sexually dynamic

androgynous mentality. Indeed, it is not surprising

to discover that early versions of the Oedipus story do

not end with Oedipus putting his eyes out. Sophocles