Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

Amerikan standards of beauty dictate a leanness closer to the skeletal depravity of concentration camp victims than to any other socially recognized physiognomy. Most amphetamines are prescribed as diet pills, although women use them to propel themselves

through the normal routine of a day. Depression is commonplace

among women because housework is boring, sex is boring, cooking

is boring, children are boring, and the woman resents being bored

but cannot change it. Depression is commonplace among women

because women are often angry at the conditions of their lives, at

what they must do because they are women, at the way they are

treated because they are women; and depression truly is anger

turned inward. Depression is commonplace among women because

a woman’s life is often a series of dead ends, joy in which is the

measure of femininity. A decade or two ago, doctors prescribed

amphetamines with a reckless abandon. Now they are more cautious, and not only because amphetamines wreak havoc on the human body: amphetamines lead women away from femininity toward aggression, social dysphoria, and a paranoia that threatens

the women’s compliance as a sexual partner; tranquilizers and

sleeping pills interfere much less with the female life as it should be

lived, no matter how serious the addiction. Doctors justify the use

of amphetamines—by those 12 million women users in one year,

for instance—in terms of getting women thinner. Women get the

drug by saying they want or need to be thinner no matter how thin

they are; or doctors prescribe the drug without explanation as to its

qualities and effects—especially they make no reference to its addictive nature and to the high it produces. The woman knows her value is in becoming what the man wants to have; she has no sense

of self outside his evaluation of what she should be. Male doctors

essentially share the same male values; and women accept their

authority as men, not just as doctors. The woman’s body is evaluated according to a sexual aesthetic, not according to a medical ethic. Amphetamines prescribed by a doctor reinforce the misogynist rule that a woman’s only wealth is her body as an object; and that any act of self-destruction—like taking amphetamines— is

both justified and sexually enhancing if it makes her what men

want. Doctors accept and sometimes encourage this logic; doctors

often subscribe to it and pass it on to women. If women are not

thin, what are they? This is not a standard that can be applied to a

respected or self-respecting individual or to a respected or self-

respecting group; it is applied ruthlessly to women and it is not

applied to men.

But the doctors know that women use amphetamines not just to

get thinner but also to stay awake in the course of brutally soporific

days; to push aw ay paralyzing bouts of depression that come from

the quality of the woman’s life— her accurate perception of it; to

get the energy to put one foot in front of another in a life she hates

but feels powerless to change. So that even the use of amphetamines— with effects that are apparently opposite to those of tranquilizers and sedatives— keeps the woman in her life as it is and as a male-dominated society wants it to be; it keeps her functioning in

the domestic sphere, whether exclusively or not; it keeps her going

through the habits of being female; it keeps her executing the routines of a life that dissatisfies her profoundly. And the social imperative is to keep her there, no matter what the cost to her as an individual. So the doctors write the prescriptions. Prescribed

amphetamines keep the woman conforming when she was ready to

stop dead in her tracks, keep her female when she would rather be

genuinely inert and inanimate, keep her doing what she could not

bring herself to do without them.

These drugs— amphetamines,

tranquilizers,

sedatives— are

agents of social control; an elite male group does the controlling;

women are the class controlled. The willingness of the doctors—

male medical professionals—to use these drugs on women systematically and the perceptions of women that lead them to do so are evidence of the expendability of women, the essential worthlessness of women when measured against a human standard as opposed to a standard of female function. One does not dump drugs on society’s best and brightest; nor is a drug habit encouraged in

those who have work to do, a future with some promise, and a

right to dignity and self-esteem. Through the use of drugs, the

doctors are doing their part in the social control of women. T hey

have shown themselves willing—even eager sometimes—to go further. Decades ago clitoridectomies were all the rage as doctors did their surgical bit to control sexual delinquency in women. Now,

after being out of fashion for a few short years, the doctors are

trying to bring psychosurgery back into style. In a violent society,

they say, it is more than useful; it is necessary. The ideal patient

for lobotomy is considered to be a black female. Her violence, apparently, is simply in being a black female. She is ideal for the operation because afterward she can still perform the functions for

which she is best suited: she can be female in all the conventional

ways, and she can still clean other people’s houses.

Surgeons, however, need step in only where welfare programs

have already failed to provide a pool of cheap black female labor.

In R egulating the Poor: The Functions o f Public W elfare , * Frances Fox

Piven and Richard A. Cloward show that black women have been

given less money than white women in welfare payments and as a

result have had to do menial work to achieve the barest subsistence;

or have been kept off the welfare rolls altogether by administrators

who have manipulated regulations to exclude blacks, in keeping

with the racist policies of local or state governments. This pattern

of discrimination was particularly evident in the South, but it was

also found in other regions of the country:

There are many mechanisms by which Southern welfare departments deny or reduce payments to blacks, thus keeping them in the marginal labor market. The “employable mother”

rule [that a mother must work if the welfare agency determines

*A n important book that analyzes the economic value of racism under

capitalism but sadly fails to address the exploitation of women as such; as a

result, the social and sexual controls on the welfare population are understood superficially; the ubiquitous and almost self-renewing nature of the controls is not taken seriously enough— it is not recognized that as long as