Andrea Dworkin: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

stepmother knew how the social structure operated,

and she was determined to succeed on its terms.

Cinderella’s stepmother was presumably motivated

by maternal love for her own biological offspring. Maternal love is known to be transcendent, holy, noble, and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament of

human (male-dominated) civilization and it is the real

basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality:

[When the prince began to search for the woman whose

foot would fit the golden slipper] the two sisters were

very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest

went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother

stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it,

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39

for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed

her a knife, and said,

“Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will

never have to go on foot. ” So the girl cut her toe off,

and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the

pain, and went down to the prince. Then he took her

with him on his horse as his bride. . . .

Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the

blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and

took the false bride home again, saying that she was

not the right one, and that the other sister must try

on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and

got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large.

Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, “Cut

a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will

never have to go on foot. ”

So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust her

foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down

to the prince, who took his bride. . . .

Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how

the blood was flowing. . . . 11

Cinderella’s stepmother understood correctly that her

only real work in life was to marry off her daughters.

Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness was

consonant with the values o f the market place.* She

loved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom o f

the Indochinese, and with much the same result. Love

in a male-dominated society certainly is a many-splen-

dored thing.

Rapunzel’s mother wasn’t exactly a winner either.

*

This depiction o f women as flesh on an open market, of crippling and

mutilation for the sake of making a good marriage, is not fiction; cf. C hapter

6, “Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding. ”

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Woman Hating

She had a maternal instinct all right—she had “long

wished for a child, but in vain. ” 12 Sometime during her

wishing, she developed a craving for rampion, a vegetable which grew in the garden of her neighbor and peer, the witch. She persuaded her husband to steal

rampion from the witch’s garden, and each day she

craved more. When the witch discovered the theft, she

made this offer:

. . . you may have as much rampion as you like, on

one condition — the child that will come into the world

must be given to me. It shall go well with the child, and

I will care for it like a mother. 13

Mama didn’t think twice —she traded Rapunzel for a

vegetable. Rapunzel’s surrogate mother, the witch, did

not do much better by her:

When she was twelve years old the witch shut her up

in a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neither

steps nor door, only a small window above. When the

witch wished to be let in, she would stand below and

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel! let down your hair!” 14

The heroic prince, having finished with Snow-white

and Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. When

the witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel,

cut off her hair, and cloistered her “in a waste and

desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery. ” 15

The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from the

tower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recovered

when he found Rapunzel, and they then lived happily

ever after. )

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41

Hansel and Grethel had a mother too. She simply

abandoned them:

I will tell you what, husband.. . . We will take the

children early in the morning into the forest, where

it is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will give

each of them a piece of bread, then we will go to our

work and leave them alone; they will never find the

way home again, and we shall be quit of them. 16

Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candy

house which belongs to an old lady who is kind to them,

feeds them, houses them. She greets them as her children, and proves her maternal commitment by preparing to cannibalize them.

These fairy-tale mothers are mythological female

figures. T hey define for us the female character and

delineate its existential possibilities. When she is good,

she is soon dead. In fact, when she is good, she is so passive in life that death must be only more o f the same.

Here we discover the cardinal principle o f sexist ontology—the only good woman is a dead woman. When she is bad she lives, or when she lives she is bad. She

has one real function, motherhood. In that function,

because it is active, she is characterized by overwhelming malice, devouring greed, uncontainable avarice.

She is ruthless, brutal, ambitious, a danger to children

and other living things. W hether called mother, queen,

stepmother, or wicked witch, she is the wicked witch,

the content o f nightmare, the source o f terror.

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Woman Haling

The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good

What can it do? It grows,

It bleeds. It sleeps.

It walks. It talks,

Singing, “love’s got me, got me. ”

Kathleen Norris

For a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as

close to it as possible. Catatonia is the good woman’s

most winning quality.

Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after pricking

her finger on a spindle. The kiss of the heroic prince

woke her. He fell in love with her while she was asleep,

or was it because she was asleep?

Snow-white was already dead when the heroic prince

fell in love with her. “I beseech you, ” he pleaded with

the 7 dwarfs, “to give it to me, for I cannot live without