Andrea Dworkin: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

thank my sisters, these particular women whose work

has contributed so much to my own consciousness and

resolve — Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone, Judith Malina, and Jill Johnston.

I also thank those others who have, through their

books and lives, taught me so much —in particular,

Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Daniel Berrigan, Jean

Genet, Huey P. Newton, Julian Beck, and Tim othy

Leary.

I thank my friends in Amsterdam who were family

for the writing o f much o f this book and who helped

me in very hard times.

I thank Mel Clay who believed in this book from its

most obscure beginnings, the editors o f Suck and in

particular Susan Janssen, Deborah Rogers, Martin

Duberman, and Elaine Markson who has been wonderful to me. I thank Marian Skedgell for her help and kindness. I thank Brian Murphy who tried to tell me a

long time ago that O was an oppressed person. Chapter

3 is dedicated to Brian.

I thank Karen Malpede and Garland Harris for their

support and help. I thank Joan Schenkar for pushing

me a little further than I was willing, or able, to go.

I thank Grace Paley, Karl Bissinger, Kathleen

Norris, and Muriel Rukeyser. Without their love and

friendship this work would never have been done.

Without their examples o f strength and commitment,

I do not know who I would be, or how.

I thank my brother Mark and my sister-in-law Carol

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Woman Hating

for their friendship, warmth, and trust. And I thank

my parents, Sylvia and Harry Dworkin, for their devotion and support through all these years, which must have seemed to them interminable, when their daughter was learning her craft. I thank them for raising me with real caring and tenderness, for believing in me so

that I could learn to believe in myself.

Andrea Dworkin

New York City , July 1973

Part One

THE FAIRY TALES

You cannot be free if you are contained

within a fiction.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her

name was

Lilith

Eve

Hagar

Jezebel

Delilah

Pandora

Jahi

Tam ar

and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

goddess and her name was

Kali

Fatima

Artemis

Hera

Isis

Mary

Ishtar

and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

queen and her name was

Bathsheba

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Woman Hating

Vashti

Cleopatra

Helen

Salome

Elizabeth

Clytemnestra

Medea

and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

witch and her name was

Joan

Circe

Morgan le Fay

Tiamat

Maria Leonza

Medusa

and they had this in common: that they were feared,

hated, desired, and worshiped.

When one enters the world of fairy tale one seeks

with difficulty for the actual place where legend and

history part. One wants to locate the precise moment

when fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, and

history begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Women

live in fairy tale as magical figures, as beauty, danger,

innocence, malice, and gr eed.In the personae of the

fairy tale —the wicked witch, the beautiful princess,

the heroic prince —we find what the culture would have

us know about who we are.

The point is that we have not formed that ancient

world —it has formed us. We ingested it as children

whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on

our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in

fact men and women. We have taken the fairy tales of

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childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying

in the stomach, as real identity. Between Snow-white

and her heroic prince, our two great fictions, we never

did have much o f a chance. A t some point, the Great

Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed o f mounting

the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the

dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object o f

every necrophiliac’s lust —the innocent, victimized Sleeping Beauty, beauteous lump o f ultimate, sleeping good.

Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowing, sometimes

knowing, unwilling, unable to do otherwise, we act out

the roles we were taught.

Here is the beginning, where we learn who we must

be, as well as the moral o f the story.

C H A P T E R 1

Onceuponatime: The Roles

Death is that remedy all singers dream of

Allen Ginsberg

The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave,

what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.

We are bom into a sex role which is determined by

visible sex, or gender.

We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth

into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die.

In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a direct

consequence o f the imperatives of those roles, we commit homicide, suicide, and genocide.

Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven.

There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sex

there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there.

We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that

death will release us from suffering—from guilt, sex,

the body. We recognize the body as the source of our

suffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished—either men or women,

bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role