Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

societies girls are not sent to school or taught to read and write. In

our society, such a generous one to women, girls are taught some

facts, but not inquiry or the passion of knowing. Girls are taught

in order to make them compliant: intellectual adventurousness is

drained, punished, ridiculed out of girls. We use schools first to

narrow the girl’s scope, her curiosity, then to teach her certain

skills, necessary to the abstract husband. Girls are taught to be

passive in relation to facts. Girls are not seen as the potential originators of ideas or the potential searchers into the human condition.

Good behavior is the intellectual goal of a girl. A girl with intellectual drive is a girl who has to be cut down to size. An intelligent girl is supposed to use that intelligence to find a smarter husband.

Simone de Beauvoir settled on Sartre when she determined that he

was smarter than she was. In a film made when both were old,

toward the end of his life, Sartre asks de Beauvoir, the woman

with whom he has shared an astonishing life of intellectual action

and accomplishment: how does it feel, to have been a literary lady?

Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary: “Everyone has an

ideal in life. Mine is to be able to read. ” 5 She is ambitious, but it is

a strange ambition for a woman. She wants learning. She wants

the pleasure of reading and writing. Men ask her to marry but she

suspects that they will interfere with her reading and writing.

They will resent the time she takes alone. They will resent the

focus of her attention elsewhere. They will resent her concentration and they will resent her self-respect. They will resent her pride in herself and her pride in her unmediated relationship to a

larger world of ideas, descriptions, facts. Her neighbors see her

poring over books, or with pen and paper in hand, amidst the garbage and hunger of the fa vela . Her ideal makes her a pariah: her desire to read makes her more an outcast than if she sat in the

street putting fistfuls of nails into her mouth. Where did she get

her ideal? No one offered it to her. Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. To be fucked, to birth children, one need not know how to read. Women are for sex and reproduction, not for

literature. But women have stories to tell. Women want to know.

Women have questions, ideas, arguments, answers. Women have

dreams of being in the world, not m erely passing blood and heaving wet infants out of laboring wombs. "Women dream , ” Florence N ightingale wrote in Cassandra , “till they have no longer the

strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so

honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet

which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those

dreams go at last.. . . Later in life, they neither desire nor dream,

neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. ”6

V irginia Woolf, the most splendid modern writer, told us over

and over how awful it was to be a woman of creative intelligence.

She told us when she loaded a large stone into her pocket and

walked into the river; and she told us each time a book was published and she went mad—don’t hurt me for what I have done, I will hurt m yself first, I w ill be incapacitated and I w ill suffer and I

will be punished and then perhaps you need not destroy me, perhaps you w ill pity me, there is such contempt in pity and I am so proud, won’t that be enough? She told us over and over in her

prose too: in her fiction she showed us, ever so delicately so that

we would not take offense; and in her essays she piled on the

charm, being polite to keep us polite. But she did write it straight

out too, though it was not published in her lifetime, and she

was right:

A certain attitude is required—what I call the pouring-out-

tea attitude— the clubwoman, Sunday afternoon attitude. I

don’t know. I think that the angle is almost as important as the

thing. W hat I value is the naked contact of a mind. Often one

cannot say anything valuable about a w riter—except what one

thinks. Now I found my angle incessantly obscured, quite unconsciously no doubt, by the desire of the editor and of the public that a woman should see things from the chary feminine

angle. M y article, written from that oblique point of view, alw ays went dow n. 7

To value “the naked contact of a mind” is to have a virile intelligence, one not shrouded in dresses and pretty gestures. Her work did always go down, with the weight of what being female demanded. She became a master of exquisite indirection. She hid her meanings and her messages in a feminine style. She labored under

that style and hid behind that mask: and she was less than she

could have been. She died not only from what she did dare, but

also from what she did not dare.

These three things are indissolubly linked: literacy, intellect, and

creative intelligence. They distinguish, as the cliche goes, man from

the animals. He who is denied these three is denied a fully human

life and has been robbed of a right to human dignity. Now change

the gender. Literacy, intellect, and creative intelligence distinguish

woman from the animals: no. Woman is not distinguishable from the

animals because she has been condemned by virtue of her sex class to

a life of animal functions: being fucked, reproducing. For her, the

animal functions are her meaning, her so-called humanity, as human

as she gets, the highest human capacities in her because she is

female. To the orthodox of male culture, she is animal, the antithesis

of soul; to the liberals of male culture, she is nature. In discussing

the so-called biological origins of male dominance, the boys can

afford to compare themselves to baboons and insects: they are writing books or teaching in universities when they do it. A Harvard professor does not refuse tenure because a baboon has never been

granted it. The biology of power is a game boys play. It is the male

way of saying: she is more like the female baboon than she is like me;

she cannot be an eminence grise at Harvard because she bleeds, we

fuck her, she bears our young, we beat her up, we rape her; she is an

animal, her function is to breed. I want to see the baboon, the ant,

the wasp, the goose, the cichlid, that has written War and Peace.

Even more I want to see the animal or insect or fish or fowl that has

written Middlemarch.

Literacy is a tool, like fire. It is a more advanced tool than fire,

and it has done as much or more to change the complexion of the