Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

that 69 percent of women over the age of thirty-four who were not

employed outside the home and who were members in good standing of the Mormon Church use minor tranquilizers. ”6 Such women are considered a high-risk group for addiction by the time

they are forty-five or fifty.

The dimensions of female drug addiction and dependency are

staggering. In 1977, 36 million women used tranquilizers; 16 million, sleeping pills; 12 million, amphetamines; and nearly 12 mil­

lion women got prescriptions for these drugs from doctors for the

first time. As N ellis, who cites these figures, * makes clear:

Those numbers do not include whole classes of prescribed pain

killers, all of which are mood altering and addictive. Nor do

they include the billions of doses dispensed to patients directly, without a prescription, in doctors’ offices, in m ilitary, public, or private hospitals, and in clinics or nursing homes. 7

According to the Food and Drug Administration, between 1977

and 1980 Valium was the most prescribed drug in the United

States.

At best it can be said that the woman’s lot in life, the female

role, necessitates a lot of medical intervention in the form of mood-

altering drugs. At worst it must be said that these drugs are prescribed to women because they are women— and because the doctors are largely men. The male doctor’s perception of the

female patient, conditioned by his belief in his own difference from

her and superiority to her, is that she is very emotional, very upset, irrational, has no sense of proportion, cannot discern what is trivial and what is important. She has no credibility as an observer

of her own condition or even as one who can report subjective

sensations or feelings with any integrity or acuity. She is overwrought not because of any objective condition in her life but because she is a woman and women get emotional and overwrought simply because that is how women are. Doctors have prescribed

tranquilizers to women for menstrual cramps, which have a physiological cause; for battery— the battered woman is handed a prescription and sent home to the batterer; for pregnancy—a woman is chem ically helped to accept an unwanted pregnancy; for many

* Testimony in 1978 by the acting director o f the National Institute on

Drug Abuse before the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and

Control.

physiologically rooted diseases that the doctor does not care to investigate (but he would examine a man carefully, not give a tranquilizer); and for physiological and psychological conditions that result from stress caused by environmental, political, social, or

economic factors. When a man and a woman go to doctors complaining of the same symptoms, she is dismissed or handed a tranquilizer and he is examined and given tests. Hysteria means suffering of the womb. Since antiquity it has denoted biological

womanhood. Freud is credited by some sentimentalists as a feminist because he insisted that men could be genuinely hysterical too.

He was the first to assert that hysteria could manifest in someone

without a womb. This was very liberal and rebellious, and Freud’s

was a lone voice. Medical opinion was that hysteria as a pathology

was exclusively limited to women because women had wombs and

because women were obviously hysterical. Despite Freud’s apostasy and its subsequent acceptance in psychoanalytic theory, hysteria is still associated with the female. She does not have reason or intellect; she has emotion. She starts with a lot of emotion by virtue of being female; when she gets more emotion than is socially acceptable, or when emotion begins to interfere with the exercise

of her female functions or the performance of her female duties,

then she is sedated or tranquilized. Female complaints to male doctors are perceived as emotional excrescences; and indeed, women learn as girls that either they convince through emotional display

or they do not convince at all, so that women do tend to persuade

by force of feeling and do learn early to compensate for the almost

certain knowledge that they will not be believed because they are

not credible no matter how accurate, restrained, or logical they are.

The solution to female emotional excess, whether expressed by the

woman—appropriately by her lights—or hallucinated by the male

doctor, is keeping women calm or numb or asleep with drugs. The

dulling of the female mind is neither feared nor noticed; nor is the

loss of vitality or independence. The female is valued for how she

looks—sometimes droopy eyelids are quite in fashion—and for do­

mestic, sex, and reproductive work, none of which requires that

she be alert. She is given drugs because nothing is lost when she is

drugged, except what is regarded as the too thick edge of her emotional life. She is given drugs because she is not much valued; she takes the drugs because she is not much valued; she stays on the

drugs because she is not much valued; the doctors keep prescribing

the drugs because she is not much valued; the effects of addiction

or dependency on her are not much noted because she is not much

valued. These are prescription drugs, regarded as appropriate medications for women. The junkie, for the most part, is left to the violent life of the streets; the woman addicted to prescribed drugs

has already been tamed and is kept tamed by the drugs. The drugs

are prescribed to these huge numbers of women each and every

year because their usage not only supports but significantly upholds social policy with respect to women: their effects reinforce women in traditional female roles, postures, and passivity; they

dull women’s perceptions of and responses to an environment and

predetermined social status that are demeaning, aggravating, and

enraging; they quiet women down. The use of these drugs to

numb these masses of women shows only how little women are

worth— to the doctors who do the prescribing, to the women

themselves, to the society that depends on this mass drugging of

women to help in keeping women as a class quiescent and women

as individuals invisible or aberrant. Thirty-six million women can

be tranquilized in a year and the nation does not notice it, does not

miss their energy, creativity, wit, intellect, passion, commitment—

so much are these women worth, so important is their contribution, so indelible is their individuality, so essential is their vigor.

In addition to being too emotional, women can be too fat. In

fact, it is hard not to be; and it is sometimes pointed out that