Andrea Dworkin - Woman Hating - A Radical Look at Sexuality

the liberation o f women without also discussing the liberation o f children.

Shulamith Firestone,

The Dialectic o f Sex

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T w o developments are occurring simultaneously:

women are rejecting the female role, and life is being

created in the laboratory. Unless the structure is totally

transformed, we can expect that when women no longer

function as biological breeders we will be expendable.

As men learn more and more to control reproduction,

as cloning becomes a reality, and as the technology o f

computers and robots develop, there is every reason

to think that men as we know them will use that control and technology to create the sex objects that will gratify them. Men, after all, nave throughout history

resorted to gynocide as a stratagem o f social control,

as a tactical way o f attaining/maintaining power. That

is the simple, compelling reality. T here are only two

other options: women must seize power, or we must

accomplish the transformation into androgyny.

T h e freedom o f those who are capable o f biological

reproduction from that work (which is simply a form

o f physical labor) is entirely congruent with androgynous community. Only in the concentration-camp world o f polarity must one expect that development to lead to

gynocide. T h e social processes here stand naked: if

women must seize power in order to survive, and somehow manage to do that, power will most probably shift without being transformed; if we can create androgynous community, we can abandon power altogether as a social reality —that is the final, and most important,

implication o f androgyny.

As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer

to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable o f participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic im­

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pulses. In androgynous community, those impulses

would retain a high degree of nonspecificity and would

no doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual self-

realization. The distinctions between “children” and

“adults, ” and the social institutions which enforce those

distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.

Conclusion

Nothing short of everything will really do.

Aldous Huxley, Island

The object is cultural transformation. The object is

the development of a new kind of human being and a

new kind of human community. All of us who have ever

tried to right a wrong recognize that truly nothing short

of everything will really do.

The way from here to there will not be easy. We

must make a total commitment —no longer to take

refuge in the scenarios of man-woman violence which

are society’s regulators, no longer to play the male-

female roles we have been taught, no longer to refuse

to know who we are and what we desire so that we need

not take responsibility for our own lives. We must

refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist —marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil. We must refuse to

submit to the fears engendered by sexual taboos. We

must refuse to submit to all forms of behavior and relationship which reinforce male-female polarity, which nourish basic patterns of male dominance and female

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submission. We must instead build communities where

violence is not the main dynamic o f human relationship,

where natural desire is the fundament o f community,

where androgyny is the operative premise, where tribe

based on androgyny and the social forms which would

develop from it are the bases o f the collective cultural

structure —noncoercive, nonsexist. As Julian Beck

wrote, the journey to love is not romantic. As many have

written, the journey to freedom is not romantic either —

nor is the way known precisely and for all time. We

begin here and now, inch by inch.

You do not teach someone to count only

up to eight. You do not say nine and ten

and beyond do not exist. You give people

everything or they are not able to count at

all. There is a real revolution or none at

all.

Pericles Korovessis, in an interview

in Liberation, June 1973

The Revolution is not an event that takes

two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out

process in which new people are created,

capable of renovating society so that the

revolution does not replace one elite with

another, but so that the revolution creates

a new anti-authoritarian structure with

anti-authoritarian people who in their

turn re-organize the society so that it becomes a non-alienated human society, free

from war, hunger, and exploitation.

Rudi Dutschke, March 7, 1968

There is a misery of the body and a misery

of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we

looked at them, poured nectar into our

mouths, and the grass became bread, we

would still be sad. We live in a system that

manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its

mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,

and we drown down, dead, too soon.

. . . uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre