Andrea Dworkin - Woman Hating - A Radical Look at Sexuality

which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any

real self-becoming or self-realization.

Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture. They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood

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Onceuponatime: The Roles

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models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes

us into submission — if we do not become good, then evil

will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending,

then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, we

forget the terror—the wicked witches and their smothering malice. We remember romantic paradigms: the heroic prince kisses Sleeping Beauty; the heroic prince

searches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroic

prince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains as

the substratum o f male-female relation — the terror

remains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease to

be motivated by it. Grown men are terrified o f the

wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts o f memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be actively

evil.

Terror, then, is our real theme.

The Mother as a Figure of Terror

Whether “instinctive” or not, the maternal role in the sexual constitution originates in the fact that only the woman is necessarily present at birth. Only the

woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child —a tie on

which society can rely. This maternal feeling is the root of human community.

George Gilder, Sexual Suicide

Snow-white’s biological mother was a passive, good

queen who sat at her window and did embroidery.

She pricked her finger one day —no doubt an event in

her life —and 3 drops o f blood fell from it onto the

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Woman Hating

snow. Somehow that led her to wish for a child “as white

as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the

embroidery frame.” 1 Soon after, she had a daughter

with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and

hair as black as ebony. ” 2 Then, she died.

A year later, the king married again. His new wife

was beautiful, greedy, and proud. She was, in fact,

ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in the

male realm, that beauty translated directly into power

because it meant male admiration, male alliance, male

devotion.

The new queen had a magic mirror and she would

ask it: “Looking-glass upon the wall, Who is fairest

of us all? ” 3 And inevitably, the queen was the fairest

(had there been anyone fairer we can presume that the

king would have married her).

One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairest

was, and the mirror answered: “Queen, you are full

fair, *tis true, But Snow-white fairer is than you. ” 4

Snow-white was 7 years old.

The queen became “yellow and green with envy,

and from that hour her heart turned against Snow-

white, and she hated her. And envy and pride like ill

weeds grew in her heart higher every day, until she had

no peace.. . . ” 5

Now, we all know what nations will do to achieve

peace, and the queen was no less resourceful (she would

have made an excellent head o f state). She ordered a

huntsman to take Snow-white to the forest, kill her, and

bring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspired

good guy, could not kill the sweet young thing, so he

turned her loose in the forest, killed a boar, and took its

Onceuponatime: The Roles

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heart back to the queen. T h e heart was “salted and

cooked, and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking that

there was an end o f Snow-white. ” 6

Snow-white found her way to the home o f the 7

dwarfs, who told her that she could stay with them “if

you will keep our house for us, and cook, and wash, and

make the beds, and sew and knit, and keep everything

tidy and clean. ” 7 T hey simply adored her.

T h e queen, who can now be called with conviction

the wicked queen, found out from her mirror that Snow-

white was still alive and fairer than she. She tried several

times to kill Snow-white, who fell into numerous deep

sleeps but never quite died. Finally the wicked queen

made a poisoned apple and induced the ever vigilant

Snow-white to bite into it. Snow-white did die, or became more dead than usual, because the wicked queen’s mirror then verified that she was the fairest in the land.

T h e dwarfs, who loved Snow-white, could not bear

to bury her under the ground, so they enclosed her in a

glass coffin and put the coffin on a mountaintop. T h e

heroic prince was just passing that way, immediately

fell in love with Snow-white-under-glass, and bought

her (it? ) from the dwarfs who loved her (it? ). As servants

carried the coffin along behind the prince’s horse, the

piece o f poisoned apple that Snow-white had swallowed

“flew out o f her throat. ” 8 She soon revived fully, that

is to say, not much. T he prince placed her squarely in

the “it” category, and marriage in its proper perspective

too, when he proposed wedded bliss —“ I would rather

have you than anything in the world. ” 9 T he wicked

queen was invited to the wedding, which she attended

because her mirror told her that the bride was fairer

Woman Haling

than she. At the wedding “they had ready red-hot iron

shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down

dead. ” 10

Cinderella’s mother-situation was the same. Her

biological mother was good, pious, passive, and soon

dead. Her stepmother was greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. Her ambition dictated that her own daughters make good marriages. Cinderella meanwhile was forced

to do heavy domestic work, and when her work was

done, her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashes

of the stove and make Cinderella separate the lentils

from the ashes. The stepmother’s malice toward Cinderella was not free-floating and irrational. On the contrary, her own social validation was contingent on

the marriages she made for her own daughters. Cinderella was a real threat to her. Like Snow-white’s stepmother, for whom beauty was power and to be the most beautiful was to be the most powerful, Cinderella’s