Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

women: women’s function and with it women’s worth. Men have

one reason for keeping women alive: to bear babies. The sex of

domination leads to death: it is the killing of body and w ill—conquest, possession, annihilation; sex, violence, death—that is pure sex; and it is the slow annihilation of the woman’s will that is eros,

and the slow annihilation of her body that is eros; her violation is

sex, whether it ends in her aesthetic disappearance into oblivion or

her body bludgeoned in a newspaper photograph or the living husk

used and discarded as sexual garbage. Annihilation is sexy, and sex

tends toward it; women are the preferred victims of record. Only

having children moderates men’s sexual usage of women: use them

up and throw them away, fuck them to death, killing them softly.

If women are not needed to run the country or write the books or

make the music or to farm or engineer or dig coal or fix plumbing

or cure the sick or plav basketball, what are women needed for? If

the absence of women from all these areas, from all areas, is not

perceived as loss, emptiness, poverty, what are women for? Right-

wing women have faced the answer. Women are for fucking and

having children. Fucking gets you dead, unless you have children

too. Homosexuality—its rise in public visibility, attempts to socially legitimize or protect it, a sense that it is attractive and on the move and winning not only acceptance but practitioners—makes

women expendable: the one thing women can do and be valued for

will no longer be valued, cannot be counted on to be that bedrock

of women’s worth. This is true of both lesbianism and male homosexuality, in that both negate women’s reproductive value to men; but male homosexuality is especially terrifying because it suggests

a world without women altogether—a world in which women are

extinct. “[I]n sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, ” God cursed

Adam’s woman (Genesis 3: 16)— she is referred to as “the woman”

until she and Adam are expelled from Eden and Adam names her

Eve “because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3: 20). On

expulsion from Eden man knew sex leading to death; and woman

knew childbearing in sorrow and pain, on which her well-being,

such as it is, still depends. The sorrow was apparently avoided

altogether by Phyllis Schlafly, who waxes euphoric on having children: “None of those measures of career success [traveling to “exciting faraway places, ” having authority over others, winning, or earning a fortune] can compare with the thrill, the satisfaction, and

the fun of having and caring for babies, and watching them respond and grow under a mother’s loving care. More babies m ultiply a woman’s jo y . ” 15 The thrill, the endlessly m ultiplying joy, was not in God’s original intention; and indeed, it is unlikely that

Schlafly has outwilled him. In the sorrow of having children there

is the recognition that one’s humanity is reduced to this, and on

this one’s survival depends. Being a woman is this, or it is unspeakably worse than this. Homosexuality brings up for women the barrenness of not even having this. A woman has committed

her life to bringing forth children in order to have a life of dignity

and worth; she has found the one w ay in which she is absolutely

necessary; and then, that is gone as an absolute. It must be an

absolute, because there are women who stake their lives on it as an

absolute; it is certainly what women have had to count on. Everything that women have to gain from homosexuality— and women have a great deal to gain from it: less forced penetration of themselves, for instance— is obliterated by the fear of losing what value women have, a fear conjured up by homosexuality in women

whose own right to life is in having children. Despite all the happy

talk of the total women, there is a fierce anxiety there: if men did

not need babies, and women to have them, these bright wives

would be shivering on street corners like the other fast fucks. Her

womb is her wealth; her use in childbearing is his strongest tie to

her; she holds his [sic] children, actual and potential, hostage, for

her own sake. It is not rational to hate homosexuals because they

force one to experience a terror of extinction: the cold chill of being

useless, unnecessary, expendable. But passions are distinguished

by their illogic: one can describe them and find an interior logic in

them up to a point—then there is a sensational leap into hate, dazzling, crazed, obsessional. Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, is not an idea; it is a passion. For women, hatred of homosexuals—

despised because they are associated with women—is more than

self-defeating; it is almost breathtakingly suicidal, encouraging as it

does the continuing hatred of anything or anyone associated with

women. But the perception that having children is the only edge

women have on survival at the hands of men is right; it is an acute

perception, grounded in an accurate reading of what women are for

and how women are used by men in this sexual system. Without

reproduction, women as a class have nothing. In sorrow or not,

bearing babies is what women can do that men need—really need,

no handjob can substitute here; and homosexuality makes women

afraid, irrationally, passionately afraid, of extinction: of being unnecessary as a class, as women, to men who destroy whatever they do not need and whose impulses toward women are murderous

anyway.

5

The Coming Gynocide

Rich as you are

Death will finish

you: afterwards no

one will remember

or want you;. . .

Sappho

In A Room o f One's O w n , first read as a paper in 1928, the prescient

Virginia Woolf called the attention of the women in her audience

to a statement by a popular British journalist of the time who

warned “that when children cease to be altogether desirable,

women cease to be altogether necessary. ” 1 The woman who is deviant because she has no children, as Woolf was even in her avant-garde set, is often aware of how tenuous her existence is: it is a

courtesy extended to her— letting her go on—despite the fact that

she is not earning her womanly keep in the womanly w ay. She

knows how little the world at large needs her or values her for

anything else she does even when she is exceptional; and if she

understands how systematic and relentless the valuation of her