Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

her intelligence does not have the same importance as the lay of

her ass.

Men are the world and women use intelligence to survive men:

their tricks, desires, demands, moods, hatreds, disappointments,

rages, greed, lust, authority, power, weaknesses. The ideas that

come to women come through men, in a field of cultural values

controlled by men, in a political and social system controlled by

men, in a sexual system in which women are used as things. (As

Catharine A. MacKinnon wrote in the one sentence that every

woman should risk her life to understand: “Man fucks woman; subject verb object. ”4) Men are the field of action in which female intelligence moves. But the world, the real world, is more than

men, certainly more than what men show of themselves and the

world to women; and women are deprived of that real world. The

male always intervenes between her and it.

Some w ill grant that women might have a particular kind of intelligence—essentially small, picky, good with details, bad with ideas. Some w ill grant— in fact, insist— that women know more of

“the Good, ” that women are more cognizant of decency or kindness: this keeps intelligence small and tamed. Some will grant that there have been women of genius: after the woman of genius is

dead. The greatest writers in the English language have been

women: George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf. T hey were

sublime; and they were, all of them, shadows of what they might

have been. But the fact that they existed does not change the categorical perception that women are basically stupid: not capable of intelligence without the exercise of which the world as a whole is

impoverished. Women are stupid and men are smart; men have a

right to the world and women do not. A lost man is a lost intelligence; a lost woman is a lost (name the function) mother, housekeeper, sexual thing. Classes of men have been lost, have been thrown aw ay; there have always been mourners and fighters who

refused to accept the loss. There is no mourning for the lost intel­

ligence of women because there is no conviction that such intelligence was real and was destroyed. Intelligence is, in fact, seen as a function of masculinity, and women are despised when they refuse

to be lost.

Women have stupid ideas that do not deserve to be called ideas.

Marabel Morgan writes an awful, silly, terrible book in which she

claims that women must exist for their husbands, do sex and be sex

for their husbands. * D. H. Lawrence writes vile and stupid essays

in which he says the same thing basically with many references to

the divine phallus; t but D. H. Lawrence is smart. Anita Bryant

* See The Total Woman or the quotations from it in chapter 1 of this book.

Or: “In the beginning, sex started in the garden. The first man was all

alone. The days were long, the nights were longer. He had no cook, no

nurse, no lover. God saw that man was lonely and in need of a partner, so

He gave him a woman, the best present any man could receive” (The Total

Woman , [New York: Pocket Books, 1975], p. 129). “Spiritually, for sexual

intercourse to be the ultimate satisfaction, both partners need a personal

relationship with their God. When this is so their union is sacred and

beautiful, and mysteriously the two blend perfectly into one” (Total

Woman , p. 128).

t For instance: “Christianity brought marriage into the world: marriage as

we know it.. . . Man and wife, a king and queen with one or two subjects, and a few square yards of territory of their own: this, really, is marriage. It is true freedom because it is a true fulfillment for man,

woman, and children” (Sex, Literature , and Censorship [New York: The Viking Press, 1959], p. 98). “It is the tragedy of modern woman.. . . She is cocksure, but she is a hen all the time. Frightened of her own henny self,

she rushes to mad lengths about votes, or welfare, or sports, or business:

she is marvellous, out-manning the man.. . . Suddenly it all falls out of

relation to her basic henny self, and she realises she has lost her life. The

lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of every

female, has been denied her: she never had it.. . . Nothingness! ” (Sex,

Literature , and Censorship , pp. 4 9 - 5 0 ) . . . marriage is no marriage that is not basically and permanently phallic, and that is not linked up with the

sun and the earth, the moon and the fixed stars and the planets, in the

rhythm of days, in the rhythm of months, in the rhythm of quarters, of

years, of decades, of centuries. Marriage is no marriage that is not a correspondence of blood.. . . The phallus is a column of blood that fills the valley of blood of a woman” (Sex, Literature , and Censorship , p. 101). “Into

says that cocksucking is a form of human cannibalism; she decries

the loss of the child who is the sperm . * Norman M ailer believes

that lost ejaculations are lost sons and on that basis disparages male

homosexuality, masturbation, and contraception. t But Anita B ryant is stupid and Norman M ailer is smart. Is the difference in the style with which these same ideas are delivered or in the penis?

M ailer says that a great w riter writes with his balls; novelist

Cynthia Ozick asks M ailer in which color ink he dips his balls.

Who is smart and who is stupid?

the womb of the primary darkness enters the ray o f ultimate light, and

time is begotten, conceived, there is the beginning o f the end. We are the

beginning of the end. And there, within the womb, we ripen upon the

beginning, till we become aware of the end” (Reflections on the Death of a

Porcupine [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963], p. 7).

*For instance: “W hy do you think the homosexuals are called fruits? It’s

because they eat the forbidden fruit of life.. . . That’s why homosexuality

is an abomination o f God, because life is so precious to God and it is such

a sacred thing when man and woman come together in one flesh and the

seed is fertilized— that’s the sealing of life, that’s the beginning o f life. To