Andrea Dworkin: Right-wing Women

harasses her humble, hardworking, ever patient husband with

petty tirades of insult that no gentle rebuke can mellow. The Lady,

the Aristocrat, is a polished, empty shell, good only for spitting at,

because spit shows up on her clean exterior, which gives immediate

gratification to the spitter, whatever his technique. The Jewish

mother is a monster who wants to cut the phallus of her precious

son into a million pieces and put it in the chicken soup. The black

woman, also a castrator, is a grotesque matriarch whose sheer endurance desolates men. The lesbian is half monster, half moron: having no man to nag, she imagines herself Napoleon.

And the derision of female lives does not stop with these toxic,

ugly, insidious slanders because there is always, in every circumstance, the derision in its skeletal form, all bone, the meat stripped clean: she is pussy, cunt. Every other part of the body is cut away,

severed, and there is left a thing, not human, an it, which is the

funniest joke of all, an unending source of raucous humor to those

who have done the cutting. The very butchers who cut up the

meat and throw away the useless parts are the comedians. The

paring down of a whole person to vagina and womb and then to a

dismembered obscenity is their best and favorite joke.

Every woman, no matter what her social, economic, or sexual

situation, fights this paring down with every resource at her command. Because her resources are so astonishingly meager and because she has been deprived of the means to organize and expand them, these attempts are simultaneously heroic and pathetic. The

whore, in defending the pimp, finds her own worth in the light

reflected from his gaudy baubles. The wife, in defending the husband, screams or stammers that her life is not a wasteland of mur­

dered possibilities. The woman, in defending the ideologies of men

who rise by clim bing over her prone body in m ilitary formation,

w ill not publicly mourn the loss of what those men have taken

from her: she w ill not scream out as their heels dig into her

flesh because to do so would mean the end of meaning itself; all

the ideals that motivated her to deny herself would be indelibly

stained with blood that she would have to acknowledge, at last, as

her own.

So the woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine,

but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons,

institutions, and values that demean her, degrade her, glorify her

powerlessness, insist upon constraining and paralyzing the most

honest expressions of her w ill and being. She becomes a lackey,

serving those who ruthlessly and effectively aggress against her and

her kind. This singularly self-hating loyalty to those committed to

her own destruction is the very essence of womanhood as men of

all ideological persuasions define it.

*

M arilyn Monroe, shortly before she died, wrote in her notebook on

the set of Let's Make Love: “What am I afraid of? W hy am I so

afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I

am afraid and I should not be and I must not be. ” 1

The actress is the only female culturally empowered to act.

When she acts w ell, that is, when she convinces the male controllers of images and wealth that she is reducible to current sexual fashion, available to the male on his own terms, she is paid and

honored. Her acting must be imitative, not creative; rigidly conforming, not self-generated and self-renewing. The actress is the puppet of flesh, blood, and paint who acts as if she is the female

acting. Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act

but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however

inspired, can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is

not a dreadful form of dying. She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time.

Death, one imagines, numbs pain that barbiturates and alcohol

cannot touch.

Monroe’s premature death raised one haunting question for the

men who were, in their own fantasy, her lovers, for the men who

had masturbated over those pictures of exquisite female compliance: was it possible, could it be, that she hadn’t liked It all along— It—the It they had been doing to her, how many millions

of times? Had those smiles been masks covering despair or rage? If

so, how endangered they had been to be deceived, so fragile and

exposed in their masturbatory delight, as if she could leap out from

those photos of what was now a corpse and take the revenge they

knew she deserved. There arose the male imperative that Monroe

must not be a suicide. Norman Mailer, savior of masculine privilege and pride on many fronts, took up the challenge by theorizing that Monroe may have been killed by the FBI, or CIA, or whoever

killed the Kennedys, because she had been mistress to one or both.

Conspiracy was a cheerful and comforting thought to those who

had wanted to slam into her until she expired, female death and

female ecstasy being synonymous in the world of male metaphor.

But they did not want her dead yet, not really dead, not while the

illusion of her open invitation was so absolutely compelling. In

fact, her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death,

and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer:

no, M arilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.

People—as we are always reminded by counterfeit egalitarians—

have always died too young, too soon, too isolated, too full of insupportable anguish. But only women die one by one, whether famous or obscure, rich or poor, isolated, choked to death by the

lies tangled in their throats. Only women die one by one, attempt­

ing until the last minute to embody an ideal imposed upon them by

men who want to use them up. O nly women die one by one, smiling up to the last minute, smile of the siren, smile of the coy girl, smile of the madwoman. O nly women die one by one, polished

to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately

ashamed to cry out. O nly women die one by one, still believing

that if only they had been perfect— perfect wife, mother, or

whore— they would not have come to hate life so much, to find it

so strangely difficult and em pty, themselves so hopelessly confused

and despairing. Women die, mourning not the loss of their own