Andrea Dworkin: Right-wing Women

lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as

men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-

defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal,

by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any

individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the

male in his scheme of things. This monstrous female quest for

male-defined perfection, so intrinsically hostile to freedom and integrity, leads inevitably to bitterness, paralysis, or death, but like the mirage in the desert, the life-giving oasis that is not there, survival is promised in this conformity and nowhere else.

Like the chameleon, the woman must blend into her environment, never calling attention to the qualities that distinguish her, because to do so would be to attract the predator’s deadly attention. She is, in fact, hunted meat— all the male auteurs , scientists, and homespun philosophers on street corners will say so proudly.

Attempting to strike a bargain, the woman says: I come to you on

your own terms. Her hope is that his murderous attention will

focus on a female who conforms less artfully, less w illingly. In

effect, she ransoms the remains of a life— what is left over after she

has renounced willful individuality— by promising indifference to

the fate of other women. This sexual, sociological, and spiritual

adaptation, which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is

the prim ary imperative of survival for women who live under male-

supremacist rule.

*

. . . I gradually came to see that I would have to

stay within the survivor’s own perspective. This will

perhaps bother the historian, with his distrust of

personal evidence; but radical suffering transcends

relativity, and when one survivor’s account of an

event or circumstance is repeated in exactly the same

way by dozens of other survivors, men and women

in different camps, from different nations and cultures, then one comes to trust the validity of suchreports and even to question rare departures from

the general view . 2

Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor:

An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical

butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical

mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the

mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No

matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or

eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been

whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they

were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed,

threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of

female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt. Because women’s testimony is not and cannot be validated by the witness of men who have experienced the same events and given

them the same value, the very reality of abuse sustained by

women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is

negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is

negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those

who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.

The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the exis-

tence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her

suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of

women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real

the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim

to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some

thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual

woman m ultiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete

existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own

suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life,

whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing w ill ever make up for it.

No one can bear to live a meaningless life. Women fight for

meaning just as women fight for survival: by attaching themselves

to men and the values honored by men. By committing themselves

to male values, women seek to acquire value. By advocating male

meaning, women seek to acquire meaning. Subservient to male

w ill, women believe that subservience itself is the meaning of a

female life. In this w ay, women, whatever they suffer, do not suffer the anguish of a conscious recognition that, because they are women, they have been robbed of volition and choice, without

which no life can have meaning.

*

The political Right in the United States today makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears. These fears originate in the

perception that male violence against women is uncontrollable and

unpredictable. Dependent on and subservient to men, women are

always subject to this violence. The Right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus sim plifying survival for women— to make the world slightly more habitable, in other

words— by offering the following:

Form. Women experience the world as mystery. Kept ignorant

of technology, economics, most of the practical skills required to

function autonomously, kept ignorant of the real social and sexual

demands made on women, deprived of physical strength, excluded

from forums for the development of intellectual acuity and public

self-confidence, women are lost and mystified by the savage momentum of an ordinary life. Sounds, signs, promises, threats, w ildly crisscross, but what do they mean? The Right offers women

a simple, fixed, predetermined social, biological, and sexual order.

Form conquers chaos. Form banishes confusion. Form gives ignorance a shape, makes it look like something instead of nothing.

Shelter. Women are brought up to maintain a husband’s home

and to believe that women without men are homeless. Women

have a deep fear of being homeless—at the mercy of the elements

and of strange men. The Right claims to protect the home and the