Andrea Dworkin - Woman Hating - A Radical Look at Sexuality

survival on his/her own terms. That means that every

transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation,

and it should be provided by the community as one of

its functions. This is an emergency measure for an

emergency condition. Two, by changing our premises

about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the

social situation of transsexuals will be transformed,

and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no

longer persecuted and despised. Three, community

built on androgynous identity will mean the end of

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transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will

be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon o f transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes o f sexual identity and behavior.

Transvestism

T h e first time I put on the black silk

panties I got a hardon right away.

Julian Beck

Transvestism is costuming which violates gender

imperatives. Transvestism is generally a sexually

charged act: the visible, public violation o f sex role is

erotic, exciting, dangerous. It is a kind o f erotic civil

disobedience, and that is precisely its value. Costuming

is part o f the strategy and process o f role destruction.

We see, for instance, that as women reject the female

role, they adopt “male” clothing. As sex roles dissolve,

the particular erotic content o f transvestism dissolves.

Bestiality

[In the Middle Ages] copulation with a

Jew was regarded as a form o f bestiality,

and incurred the same penances.

G. Rattray-Taylor, Sex in History

Primary bestiality (fucking between people and

other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies.

Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationships

between people and other animals) is found everywhere

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on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town.

Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly places

people in nature, not above it.

The relationship between people and other animals,

when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substance

is nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticism

in its pure form is life-affirming and life-enriching was

sufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime in

the Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficient reason for the English in the Dark Ages to confuse sheep and Jews.

In contemporary society relationships between

people and other animals often reflect the sadomasochistic complexion o f human relationship. Animals in our culture are often badly abused, the objects of

violence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and therefore

very dangerous human sexuality. Some animals, like

horses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbols

of ideal macho virility.

Needless to say, in androgynous community, human

and other-animal relationships would become more

explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe and, with us, respected, loved, and free. They always

share our fate, whatever it is.

Incest

I was cold —later revolted a little, not

much — seemed perhaps a good idea to try

— know the Monster of the Beginning

Womb—Perhaps —that way. Would she

care? She needs a lover.

Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish

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T h e parent-child relationship is primarily erotic

because all human relationships are primarily erotic.

T h e incest taboo is a particularized form o f repression,

one which functions as the bulwark o f all the other repressions. T h e incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. T h e incest

taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the

parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces

us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them,

or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and hearts

o f other humans who are not our parents and never

will be.

T he incest taboo does the worst work o f the culture:

it teaches us the mechanisms o f repressing and internalizing erotic feeling—it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual “object” ; it demands that we

place the nuclear family above the human family. T h e

destruction o f the incest taboo is essential to the development o f cooperative human community based on the free-flow o f natural androgynous eroticism.

Th e Family

For if we grant that the sexual drive is at

birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the

total personality (Freud’s “ polymorphous

perversity”) and. . . becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo;

and that. . . the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family;

then if we did away with the family we

would in effect be doing away with the

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repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.

Shulamith Firestone,

The Dialectic o f Sex

The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a

sexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what one

must know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriate

to male-female polarity and the internalized mechanisms of sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclear family at the moment is the extended family, or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process of

destroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity.

As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they

will also develop the forms of community appropriate

to it. We cannot really imagine what those forms will

be.

Children

The special tie women have with children

is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature o f this bond is no

more than shared oppression. And that

moreover this oppression is intertwined

and mutually reinforcing in such complex

ways that we will be unable to speak of