Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

under stomping boots, Jew s loyal in their right-wing values are

being lifted up onto a pedestal— where the footing is always precarious, as women know. Believing they can fit in— assimilate

—these Jew s are turning to the one group of people— the fundamentalists— who w ill never forget that “the Jew s killed C hrist. ”

Anything not to be that castrate, that homosexual; there is more

dignity in the killing of Christ than in the concentration camps

when the measure is masculinity.

In the contemporary world, Jew s have an extra burden as creators of culture: Freud and Marx were Jew s. The ideas of both are repugnant to the Christian Right. Freud, right or wrong, made sex

a central social issue. Marx brought half the world to revolution. It

is Marx that the United States government and the Christian Right

are fighting; armies are raised and missiles are built to do it. It is

Freud who asked w hy the family works the w ay it does and suggested that the fam ily was a sexual unit. The intellectual Jew Freud had ideas that undermined what the Christian Right regards

as the cornerstone of Amerikan life: the family. The real question,

of course, was not about the family as such but about the paterfamilias: who is daddy having sex with and why? Freud refused to ask that question finally; but perhaps it would not have ever been

asked, or no one would be asking it now, if Freud had not dissected the sexual underbelly of the family with his formidable intellect.

Right-wing Jew s have a special stake in repudiating the ideas of

both Freud and Marx. Ideas are sissifying, and Jew s need masculinity. The ideas of these two Jewish intellectuals are dangerous: dangerous because right-wing Christianity hates them, therefore

dangerous to Jew s who do not want to be hated. Jew s are cultural

radicals and political revolutionaries by contamination. It’s the

damn Jews, a Klan member will say; and even he will mean Freud

and M arx. * Ideas, however potent, do not serve to masculinize

Jews. Ideas only make Jews more Jewish: more effeminate as

intellectuals.

In the end, Jewish men join up with the Christian Right because

they want domination over women and children, which is the social program of the Right; and because they want to be the opposite of homosexual, whatever that is.

*

Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in

woman hath one solution— it is called pregnancy.

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Within the frame of male domination, there is good reason for

women to adhere to conservative or right-wing or orthodox Judaism or conservative or right-wing or fundamentalist or orthodox Christianity; and within the frame of male domination, there is

good reason for women to hate homosexuality, both male and

female.

* Charles Darwin, whose ideas are as radical and as central to the contemporary epoch as are Freud’s and Marx’s, was not a Jew, but never mind.

Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a neo-Nazi movement that is getting

powerful in the United States, claims that “the Zionist evil” is one of the

“key arms of the British intelligence body which is behind the operation to

destroy America” and that the Anti-Defamation League is “literally the

Gestapo of the British secret intelligence” in the United States. In the

propaganda of Lyndon LaRouche, who has been behind such diverse

groups as the U . S. Labor Party, the Fusion Energy Foundation, the

National Democratic Policy Committee, and the National Anti-Drug

Coalition, “British” is virtually a synonym for “Jewish. ” (See “Lyndon

LaRouche’s Goon Squads, ” Alan Crawford, Inquiry , February 15, 1982,

pp. 8 - 1 0 . ) “Creationism” (God created the world in seven days, there was

no evolution) is a main tenet of the orthodox (not neo-Nazi) Right; the

ideas of Darwin are as despised as the ideas of Freud and Marx.

Women are interchangeable as sex objects; women are slightly

less disposable as mothers. The only dignity and value women get

is as mothers: it is a compromised dignity and a low value, but it is

all that is offered to women as women. Having children is the best

thing women can do to get respect and be assured a place. The fact

that having children does not get women respect or a place is almost beside the point: poor women don’t get respect and live in dung heaps; black women don’t get respect and are jailed in decimated ghettos; just plain pregnant women don’t get respect and the place they have is a dangerous one— pregnancy is now considered

a cause of battery (stress on the male, don’t you know): in perhaps

25 percent of families in which battery occurs, it is a pregnant

woman who has been battered. In fact, having children may mean

both increased violence and increased dependence; it may significantly worsen the economic circumstances of a woman or a fam ily; it may hurt a woman’s health or jeopardize her in a host of other

ways; but having children is the one social contribution credited to

women— it is the bedrock of women’s social worth. Despite all the

happy smiling public mommies, the private mommies have grim

private recognitions. One perception is particularly chilling: without the children, I am not worth much. The recognition is actually more dramatic than that, much more chilling: without the children, I am not. Right-wing Judaism and right-wing Christianity both guarantee that women will continue to have a place outside

history but inside the home: through childbearing. Without that,

women know they have nothing. Homosexuality for women means

having nothing; it means extinction. Well, who’s going to have the

babies? men ask when faced with women surgeons and politicians— as if the question had an intrinsic logic; or as if ending war were not logically a part of having “enough” people. “All this talk,

for and against and about babies, ” wrote Charlotte Perkins G ilman, “is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.. . . The women bear and

rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: ‘We are run­

ning short of children—make some more. ’” 14 The extinction

women fear is not this extinction men conjure up: who will make

the babies so that we can fight our wars? It is the extinction of