Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

life. At the time it was the best I knew. Nor am I ashamed of any

desire that has been gratified, nor of any passion alluded to. Every

one of them are a part of m y own soul’s life, for which, thank God,

I am not accountable to yo u . ” 15 Few feminists appreciated her

(Elizabeth C ady Stanton was an exception, as usual) because she

confronted women with her own sexual vitality, the political meaning of sex, the sexual and economic appropriation of women’s bodies by men, the usurpation of female desire by men for the

purposes of their own illegitim ate power. She was direct and impassioned and she made women remember: that they had been raped. In focusing on the apparent and actual sexual worth of

wives and whores, she made the basic claim of radical feminism: all

freedom, including sexual freedom, begins with an absolute right

to one’s own body— physical self-possession. She knew too, in

practical as well as political terms, that forced sex in marriage led

to forced pregnancy in marriage: “I protest against this form of

slavery, I protest against the custom which compels women to give

the control of their maternal functions over to anybody. ” 16

Victoria Woodhull exercised sexual intelligence in public discourse, ideas, and activism. She is one of the few women to have done so. T his effort required all the other kinds of intelligence that

distinguish humans from animals: literacy, intellect, creative intelligence, moral intelligence. Some consequences of sexual intelligence become clear in Woodhull’s exercise of it: she made the women she addressed in person and in print face the sexual and

economic system built on their bodies. She was one of the great

philosophers of and agitators for sexual freedom—but not as men

understand it, because she abhorred rape and prostitution, knew

them when she saw them inside marriage or outside it, would not

accept or condone the violence against women implicit in them.

“I make the claim boldly, ” she dared to say, “that from the very

moment woman is emancipated from the necessity of yielding the

control of her sexual organs to man to insure a home, food and

clothing, the doom of sexual demoralization will be sealed. ” 17

Since women experienced sexual demoralization most abjectly in

sexual intercourse, Woodhull did not shy away from the inevitable

conclusion: “From that moment there will be no intercourse except

such as is desired by women. It will be a complete revolution in

sexual matters. . . ” 18 Intercourse not willed and initiated by the

woman was rape, in Woodhull’s analysis. She anticipated current

feminist critiques of intercourse—modest and rare as they are—by

a century. As if to celebrate the centennial of Woodhull’s repudiation of male-supremacist sexual intercourse, Robin Morgan in 1974

transformed Woodhull’s insight into a firm principle: “/ claim that

rape exists any tim e sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated

by the w om an , out o f her own genuine affection and d e s ir e ” 19 This

shocks, bewilders—who can imagine it, what can it mean? Now as

then, there is one woman speaking, not a movement. *

Woodhull was not taken seriously as a thinker, writer, publisher,

journalist, activist, pioneer, by those who followed her—not by

the historians, teachers, intellectuals, revolutionaries, reformers;

not by the lovers or rapists; not by the women. Had she been part

of the cultural dialogue on sexual issues, the whole subsequent development of movements for sexual freedom would have been different in character: because she hated rape and prostitution and

*In a recent essay, novelist Alice Walker wrote:. . I submit that any

sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or

controls is rape. ” (See “Embracing the Dark and the Light, ” Essence , July

1982, p. 117. ) This definition has the advantage of articulating the power

that is the context for as well as the substance of the act.

understood them as violations of sexual freedom, which male liber-

ationists did not. But then, this was w hy she was excluded: the

men wanted the rape and prostitution. She threatened not only

those sacred institutions but the male hallucinations that prettify

those institutions: those happy visions of happy women, caged, domesticated or wanton, numb to rape, numb to being bought and sold. Her sexual intelligence was despised, then ignored, because

of what it revealed: he who hates the truth hates the intelligence

that brings it.

Sexual intelligence in women, that rarest intelligence in a male-

supremacist world, is necessarily a revolutionary intelligence, the

opposite of the pornographic (which sim ply reiterates the world as

it is for women), the opposite of the w ill to be used, the opposite of

masochism and self-hatred, the opposite of “good woman” and

“bad woman” both. It is not in being a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man’s world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her

separateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not

his. Prostitution m ay be against the written law, but no prostitute

has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through

prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female

sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men

who enjoy them. The prostitute is no honest woman. She manipulates as the wife manipulates. So too no honest woman can live in marriage: no woman honest in her will to be free. Marriage delivers

her body to another to use: and there is no basis for self-respect in

this carnal arrangement, however sanctified it may be by church

and state.

Wife or whore: she is defined by what men want; sexual intelligence is stopped dead. Wife or whore: to paraphrase Thackeray, her heart is dead (“Her heart was dead long before her body. She

had sold it to become Sir Pitt C raw ley’s wife. Mothers and daugh­

ters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair” 20).

Wife or whore: both are fucked, bear children, resent, suffer, grow

numb, want more. Wife or whore: both are denied a human life,

forced to live a female one. Wife or whore: intelligence denied,