Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

her own behalf as if she had a right to the disposition of her own

body. The point is that the law sets the standard for the disposition

of her body: it belongs to her husband, not to her.

The good wife submits; the bad wife can be forced to submit.

All women are supposed to submit.

One of the consequences of submission, whether conforming or

forced, is pregnancy.

Women are required to submit to intercourse, and women may

then be required to submit to the pregnancy.

Women are required to submit to the man, and women may

then be required to submit to the fetus.

Since the law sets the standard for the control, use of, function

of, purpose of, the wife’s body, and since the law supports the

right of the man to use force against his wife in order to have sex,

women live in a context of forced sex. This is true outside the

realm of subjective interpretation. If it were not true, the law

would not be formulated to sanction the husband’s forced penetra­

*The American Civil Liberties Union has a handbook on women’s rights.

In that handbook, laws against prostitution are discussed in terms of the

right o f women to have sex: “the central focus of all these laws is to punish

sexual activity ” (The Rights of Women , Susan C. Ross [New York: Avon, 1973], p. 176); equal right to sexual activity is seen to be the civil liberties

issue of paramount importance and laws against prostitution are simply a

cover for denying women the right to sexual activity. This is not a narrow

discussion o f laws on prostitution and their sex-discriminatory language or

enforcement. It is a position on what rights are for women, what freedom

is. There is no mention o f marital rape or o f the marital rape exemption as

violations of civil liberties and no discussion whatsoever of sexual coercion

in marriage sanctioned by law in letter and in practice as a violation o f civil

liberties. The discussion o f rape also makes no reference to marital rape or

the role o f law in upholding it.

tion of his wife. Marriage is the common state of adult women;

women live in a system in which sex is forced on them; and the sex

is intercourse. Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex.

Women, it is not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment

against forced sex and a longing for freedom, which is often expressed as an aversion to sex. It is a fact for women that they must come to terms with forced sex over and over in the course of a

normal life.

Forced sex, usually intercourse, is a central issue in any woman’s

life. She must like it or control it or manipulate it or resist it or

avoid it; she must develop a relationship to it, to the male insistence on intercourse, to the male insistence on her sexual function in relation to him. She will be measured and judged by the nature

and quality of her relationship to intercourse. Her character will be

assessed in terms of her relationship to intercourse, as men evaluate

that relationship. All the possibilities of her body will be reduced

to expressing her relationship to intercourse. Every sign on her

body, every symbol—clothes, posture, hair, ornament—will have

to signal her acceptance of his sex act and the nature of her relationship to it. His sex art, intercourse, explicitly announces his power over her: his possession of her interior; his right to violate

her boundaries. His state promotes and protects his sex act. If she

were not a woman, this intrusion by the state would be recognized

as state coercion, or force. The act itself and the state that protects

it call on force to exercise illegitimate power; and intercourse cannot be analyzed outside this system of force. But the force is hidden and denied by a barrage of propaganda, from pornography to so-called women’s magazines, that seek to persuade that accommodation is pleasure, or that accommodation is femininity, or that accommodation is freedom, or that accommodation is a strategic

means to some degree of self-determination.

The propaganda for femininity (femininity being the apparent

acceptance of sex on male terms with goodwill and demonstrable

good faith, in the form of ritualized obsequiousness) is produced

according to the felt need of men to have intercourse. In a time of

feminist resistance, such propaganda increases in bulk geometrically. The propaganda stresses that intercourse can give a woman pleasure if she does it right: especially if she has the right attitude

toward it and toward the man. The right attitude is to want it. The

right attitude is to desire men because they engage in phallic penetration. The right attitude is to want intercourse because men want it. The right attitude is not to be selfish: especially about

orgasm. This prohibits a sexuality for women outside the boundaries of male dominance. This makes any woman-centered sexuality impossible. What it does make possible is a woman’s continued existence within a system in which men control the valuation of her existence as an individual. This valuation is based on her sexual conformity within a sexual system based on his right to

possess her. Women are brought up to conform: all the rules of

fem ininity— dress, behavior, attitude—essentially break the spirit.

Women are trained to need men, not sexually but m etaphysically.

Women are brought up to be the void that needs filling, the absence that needs presence. Women are brought up to fear men and to know that they must please men and to understand that they

cannot survive without the help of men richer and stronger than

they can be themselves, on their own. Women are brought up to

submit to intercourse— and here the strategy is shrewd— by being

kept ignorant of it. The rules are taught, but the act is hidden.

Girls are taught “love, ” not “fuck. ” Little girls look between their

legs to see if “the hole” is there, get scared thinking about what

“the hole” is for; no one tells them either. Women use their bodies

to attract men; and most women, like the little girls they were, are

astonished by the brutality of the fuck. The importance of this

ignorance about intercourse cannot be overstated: it is as if no girl

would grow up, or accept the hundred million lessons on how to

be a girl, or want boys to like her, if she knew what she was for.

The propaganda for fem ininity assumes that the girl still lives inside the woman; that the lessons of femininity must be taught and