Andrea Dworkin: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

use guns because they were symbols o f manhood, but

found the courage to act as they did because they were

men. When we women find the courage to defend ourselves, to take a stand against brutality and abuse, we are violating every notion o f womanhood we have ever

been taught. T h e way to freedom for women is bound

to be torturous for that reason alone.

T h e analysis in this book applies to the life situations o f all women, but all women are not necessarily in a state o f primary emergency as women. What I mean

by this is simple. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, I would be

oppressed as a woman, but hunted, slaughtered, as a

Jew. As a Native American, I would be oppressed as

a squaw, but hunted, slaughtered, as a Native Am erican. That first identity, the one which brings with it as

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part of its definition death, is the identity of primary

emergency. This is an important recognition because it

relieves us of a serious confusion. The fact, for instance,

that many Black women (by no means all) experience

primary emergency as Blacks in no way lessens the responsibility of the Black community to assimilate this and other analyses of sexism and to apply it in their own

revolutionary work.

As a writer with a revolutionary commitment, I am

particularly pained by the kinds of books writers are

writing, and the reasons why. I want writers to write

books because they are committed to the content of

those books. I want writers to write books as actions. I

want writers to write books that can make a difference

in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to

write books that are worth being jailed for, worth

fighting for, and should it come to that in this country,

worth dying for.

Books are for the most part in Amerika commercial

ventures. People write them to make money, to become

famous, to build or augment other careers. Most Amerikans do not read books—they prefer television. Academics lock books in a tangled web of mindfuck and abstraction. The notion is that there are ideas, then art,

then somewhere else, unrelated, life. The notion is that

to have a decent or moral idea is to be a decent or moral

person. Because o f this strange schizophrenia, books

and the writing o f them have become embroidery on a

dying way o f life. Because there is contempt for the

process o f writing, for writing as a way o f discovering

meaning and truth, and for reading as a piece of that

same process, we destroy with regularity the few serious

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writers we have. We turn them into comic-book figures,

bleed them o f all privacy and courage and common

sense, exorcise their vision from them as sport, demand

that they entertain or be ignored into oblivion. And it

is a great tragedy, for the work o f the writer has never

been more important than it is now in Amerika.

Many see that in this nightmared land, language has

no meaning and the work o f the writer is ruined. Many

see that the triumph o f authoritarian consciousness is

its ability to render the spoken and written word meaningless—so that we cannot talk or hear each other speak.

It is the work o f the writer to reclaim the language from

those who use it to justify murder, plunder, violation.

T h e writer can and must do the revolutionary work o f

using words to communicate, as community.

Those o f us who love reading and writing believe

that being a writer is a sacred trust. It means telling the

truth. It means being incorruptible. It means not being

afraid, and never lying. Those o f us who love reading

and writing feel great pain because so many people

who write books have become cowards, clowns, and

liars. Those o f us who love reading and writing begin

to feel a deadly contempt for books, because we see

writers being bought and sold in the market place — we

see them vending their tarnished wares on every street

corner. T oo many writers, in keeping with the Am erikan way o f life, would sell their mothers for a dime.

T o keep the sacred trust o f the writer is simply to

respect the people and to love the community. T o violate that trust is to abuse oneself and do damage to others. I believe that the writer has a vital function in

the community, and an absolute responsibility to the

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people. I ask that this book be judged in that context.

Specifically Woman Hating is about women and

men, the roles they play, the violence between them.

We begin with fairy tales, the first scenarios of women

and men which mold our psyches, taught to us before we can know differently. We go on to pornography, where we find the same scenarios, explicitly sexual and now more recognizable, ourselves, carnal

women and heroic men. We go on to herstory —the

binding of feet in China, the burning o f witches in

Europe and Amerika. There we see the fairy-tale and

pornographic definitions of women functioning in

reality, the real annihilation of real women —the crushing into nothingness o f their freedom, their will, their lives —how they were forced to live, and how they were

forced to die. We see the dimensions of the crime, the

dimensions of the oppression, the anguish and misery

that are a direct consequence of polar role definition,

of women defined as carnal, evil, and Other. We recognize that it is the structure of the culture which engineers the deaths, violations, violence, and we look for alternatives, ways of destroying culture as we know it,

rebuilding it as we can imagine it.

I write however with a broken tool, a language which

is sexist and discriminatory to its core. I try to make the

distinctions, not “history” as the whole human story, not

“man” as the generic term for the species, not “manhood” as the synonym for courage, dignity, and strength. But I have not been successful in reinventing

the language.

This work was not done in isolation. It owes much to

others. I thank my sisters who everywhere are standing

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up, for themselves, against oppression. I thank my sisters, the women who are searching into our common past, writing it so that we can know it and be proud. I