Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

the course of women’s lives, and therefore from a woman-based

perspective, the two conditions overlap and intersect, each reinforcing the efficacy of the other. Any woman can be both a prostitute and a mother, a prostitute and a wife (a potential mother), or one then the other in either order; and any woman can be subject

to the imperatives of both the brothel and the farming models of

female usage. On a grand scale, more women become mothers,

fewer prostitutes.

In general, the euphemisms of religion and romantic love keep

women from ever recognizing the farming model as having to do

directly and personally with them. Modern women do not think of

themselves as cows, nor as land that the man seeds; but maleheaded marriage incorporates both these vivid traditions of female definition; and the laws have been built on these same images and

ideas of what women are for; and the real history of women has

had as its center the actual use of women as cows and as land. The

w ay women are treated, valued, and used has remarkably little in

common with how women perceive themselves. The legend says

that vampires cannot see themselves in mirrors, but in this case the

vampires’ victims cannot see themselves: what would stare back—

the cow, the land, the uterus, the crop, the plowing, the planting,

the harvest, being put out to pasture, going d ry — would annihilate

the delusion of individuality that keeps most women going. The

laws that made women chattel derived from an analogy between

women and cows that hundreds of centuries of men found apt, and

the sexual slur was apparently a neutral observation infused with

the spleen of the moment— she’s a cow. The idea that the male

plants and the woman is planted in originates in antiquity, and

Marcuse among others has reiterated the idea that woman is the

land in more modern times. The farming model is not discussed as

such, even among feminists. It too clearly reveals the hopeless impersonality, degradation, and futility implicit in women’s subordinate position.

The brothel model is more familiar, partly because the situation

of prostitutes is held up to all women as warning, threat, inevitable

doom and damnation, the hellish punishment of girls gone wrong:

punishment for being women involved in sex without the protection of marriage and the purpose of reproduction; punishment for being bad or rebellious or sexually precocious; punishment for

being female without the cleansing sacraments.

In the brothel model, the woman is acknowledged to be for sex

without reference to reproduction. She will still have babies perhaps, but no one owes her anything: not the father, not the state, not the pimp, not the john, no one. Some women on the Left

accept the male leftist view that this is a giant step for womankind:

that this separation of sex and reproduction is in fact a form of

freedom—freedom from domestic constraint and domestic submission, freedom from an intrinsically totalitarian association of sex with reproduction. They do not recognize that in the brothel

model sex is dissociated from reproduction so that the sex can be

sold, so that sex (not babies) is what is produced, so that an intrinsically totalitarian association is forged between sex and money expressed lucidly in the selling of the woman as a sexual commodity.

In the brothel model, the woman is considered to be sexually free

even by those who think prostitution is bad or wrong; sexual freedom is when women do the things men think are sexy; the more women do these things, the more sexually free they are. Whatever

the conditions of the woman’s life, there is no perception that prostitution is by its nature antithetical to freedom. Sometimes the prostitute is construed to be economically liberated. In selling sex,

money passes through her hands: more money than the housewife

or the secretary will have in hand on any given night. The brothel

model particularly fosters these obfuscations of the female condition because the women are entirely interchangeable; perceived in terms of function they are entirely interchangeable; even among

themselves, any one could step out of her own life into the life of

the next woman and not notice the difference. Nothing that happens in the brothel is seen or has to be seen or recognized or re­

membered or reckoned with: these women live outside of history

and what happens to them happens behind closed doors and in a

place constructed to control the kind of women in it. T hey live

entirely on male terms. Whatever happens to them is appropriate

on those male terms because of what they do and what they are, all

of which is expressed in where they are. The impersonality of the

brothel as a working place is precisely congruent with the impersonality of their sexual function; men romanticize the place and the function for themselves, to themselves, for their own sakes, men

among men; but even men are not so dense as to try to romanticize

prostitution to the prostitute.

In the brothel model, the women are held to a strictly sexual

standard of behavior and accountability: they sell themselves for

sex, not to make babies. T hey do what men want them to do for

money that men pay them and that then they usually turn over to a

man. Women are defined strictly with reference to sex and they are

defined unfailingly without reference to personality or individuality or human potential; they are used without reference to anything but sex orifices and sex class and sex scenes. In the brothel model, several women belong to one man or in some cases are supervised by an older woman who is herself accountable to a rich man or men. The job of the women is to bring in— to a man or to a

house— a certain amount of money by servicing a certain number

of men. T hey sell parts of their bodies— vagina, rectum, mouth;

and they also sell acts— what they say and what they do. In

sex, they absorb, endure, or get indifferent toward an enormous

amount of male aggression, hostility, and contempt. Men have few

restraints in expressing to prostitutes—during sex or in any sexual

scenario— their real attitudes toward women as a class; they have

no reason to feel constrained, since the woman is there to be a

woman, period— to be inferior, subservient, and used. She is there

because the man wants a woman, someone exactly of her class,

someone who is her sex function, not human but an it, a cunt: she

is there for that reason, not for anything human in her. Her func­

tion is limited, specialized, sex-specific, and intensely and intrinsically dehumanizing.