Andrea Dworkin: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

A slave’s trick, survival.

I remember thinking, our last time:

If you killed me, I would die.

Kathleen Norris

I cannot live without my life.

Emily Bronte

T h e lessons are simple, and we learn them well.

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

T h e heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he does at all, let alone better.

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

T he good father can never be confused with the bad

mother. T h eir qualities are different, polar.

W here he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake,

she is asleep. W here he is active, she is passive. Where

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she is erect, or awake, or active, she is evil and must be

destroyed.

It is, structurally at least, that simple.

She is desirable in her beauty, passivity, and victimization. She is desirable because she is beautiful, passive, and victimized.

Her other persona, the evil mother, is repulsive in

her cruelty. She is repulsive and she must be destroyed.

She is the female protagonist, the nonmale source of

power which must be defeated, obliterated, before male

power can fully flower. She is repulsive because she is

evil. She is evil because she acts.

She, the evil persona, is a cannibal. Cannibalism is

repulsive. She is devouring and magical. She is devouring and the male must not be devoured.

There are two definitions of woman. There is the

good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman.

She must be destroyed. The good woman must be

possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished.

Both must be nullified.

The bad woman must be punished, and if she is

punished enough, she will become good. To be punished enough is to be destroyed. There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse.

Women strive for passivity, because women want to

be good. The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces

women that they are bad. The bad need to be punished,

destroyed, so that they can become good.

Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity

Onceuponatlme: The Moral of the Story

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convinces her that she is bad. T h e bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good.

T h e moral o f the story should, one would think,

preclude a happy ending. It does not. T h e moral o f the

story is the happy ending. It tells us that happiness for

a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or

asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who

is good —inert, passive, victim ized—and that a good

woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.

Part Two

THE PORNOGRAPHY

Among my brethren are many who dream

with wet pleasure of the eight hundred

pains and humiliations, but I am the other

kind: I am a slave who dreams of escape

after escape, I dream only of escaping,

ascent, of a thousand possible ways to

make a hole in the wall, of melting the

bars, escape escape, of burning the whole

prison down if necessary.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

Bookshop shelves are lined with pornography. It is a

staple o f the market place, and where it is illegal it

flourishes and prices soar. From The Beautiful Flagellants of New York to Twelve Inches around the World , cheap-editioned, overpriced renditions o f fucking, sucking,

whipping, footlicking, gangbanging, etc., in all o f their

manifold varieties are available — whether in the supermarket or on the black market. Most literary pornography is easily describable: repetitious to the point o f inducing catatonia, ill-conceived, simple-minded, brutal, and very ugly. Why, then, do we spend our money on it? Why, then, is it erotically stimulating for masses

o f men and women?

Literary pornography is the cultural scenario o f

male/female. It is the collective scenario o f master/

slave. It contains cultural truth: men and women, grown

now out o f the fairy-tale landscape into the castles o f

erotic desire; woman, her carnality adult and explicit,

her role as victim adult and explicit, her guilt adult

and explicit, her punishment lived out on her flesh, her

end annihilation —death or complete submission.

Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It

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is the structure of male and female mind, the content

o f our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and

mile o f our oppression and despair. Here we move beyond childhood terror. Here the fear is clammy and real, and rightly so. Here we are compelled to ask the

real questions: why are we defined in these ways, and

how can we bear it?

C H A P T E R 3

Woman as Victim:

Story of O

T h e Story of O, by Pauline Reage, incorporates, along

with all literary pornography, principles and characters already isolated in my discussion o f children’s fairy tales. T h e female as a figure o f innocence and evil enters the adult w orld—the brutal world o f genitalia.

T h e female manifests in her adult fo rm —cunt. She

emerges defined by the hole between her legs. In addition, Story o f O is more than simple pornography. It claims to define epistemologically what a woman is,