Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

of the brothel model. T his change-over— applying the brothel

model to reproduction— is just beginning. It is beyond the scope of

this book to explore or explain all the new technological intrusions

into conception, gestation, and birth, * except to say that reproduction w ill become the kind of commodity that sex is now. Artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, sex selection, genetic engineering, fetal monitoring, artificial wombs that keep the fetus alive outside the mother’s body, fetal surgery, embryo transplants, and eventual cloning (some experts predict that human cloning w ill be

accomplished within twenty-five years; however long it takes, it

will be done)— all these reproductive intrusions make the womb

the province of the doctor, not the woman; all make the womb

extractable from the woman as a whole person in the same w ay the

vagina (or sex) is now; some make the womb extraneous altogether

or eventually extraneous; all make reproduction controllable by

men on a scale heretofore unimaginable. The issue is not the particular innovation itself—whether it is intrinsically good or bad; the issue is how it w ill be used in a system in which women are

sexual and reproductive commodities already, exploited, with lives

that are worthless when not serving a specific sexual or reproduc­

*See Gena Corea, The Mother Machine (forthcoming, 1984). This book will

explain the reproductive technologies, the experiments being done on

women and animals to develop the technologies, and the view of women

central to both the experimentation and the technologies.

tive purpose. For instance, cesarean sections saved women’s lives

when used in orthodox medical emergencies; but now doctors use

them because they give doctors dominion over labor, because they

involve cutting into the female body—a male pleasure—and so

that the natural process of birth can be circumvented for the social

convenience of the doctor. Cesarean sections are now used to express endemic male contempt for women. So it will be with reproductive technology or other medically sophisticated intrusions into reproduction. The ideology of male control of reproduction

will stay what it is; the hatred of women will stay what it is; what

will change will be the means of expressing both the ideology and

the hatred. The means will give conception, gestation, and birth

over to men—eventually, the whole process of the creation of life

will be in their hands. The new means will enable men—at last—

really to have women for sex and women for reproduction, both

controlled with sadistic precision by men.

And there will be a new kind of holocaust, as unimaginable now

as the Nazi one was before it happened: something no one believes

“mankind” capable of. Using now available or soon to be available

reproductive technology in conjunction with racist programs of

forced sterilization, men finally will have the means to create and

control the kind of women they want: the kind of women they

have always wanted. To paraphrase Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka

when she is defending Stalin’s purges, there will be fewer but better women. There will be domestics, sex prostitutes, and reproductive prostitutes. Is there any reason to think that this projected future does not reflect the commonly accepted devaluation of

women with which we live with relative complacency? Look again

at what we have done—are doing now—to the old, those in nursing homes, the drugged, the prostituted, those on welfare, and to those bastions of female worth, wives and mothers, whose rape the

law protects, whose battery the society invites, whose uteruses the

state wants.

*

We come after. We know now that a man can read

Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play

Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at

Auschwitz in the morning.

George Steiner, Language and Silence

Yet the enigma of woman’s nature (if she has, that is,

a nature, and is not merely a person altogether

equal, hoof to human hoof, with man), the enigma,

if it exists, is that women respond to him, of course

they do, it is the simple knowledge of the street that

murderers are even sexier than athletes. Something

in a woman wishes to be killed went the old wisdom

before Women’s Liberation wiped that out, something in a woman wishes to be killed, and it is obvious what does—she would like to lose the weakest part of herself, have it ploughed under, ground under, kneaded, tortured, squashed, sliced, banished, and finally immolated.

Norman Mailer, Genius and Lust

Not wanting to die, and knowing the sadism of men, knowing

what men can do in the name of sex, in the fuck, for the sake of

pleasure, for the sake of power, knowing torture, having been able

to predict all the prisons from her place in the bedroom and the

brothel, knowing how callous men are to those less than themselves, knowing the fist, bondage, the farming fuck and the brothel fuck, seeing the indifference of men to human freedom, seeing the

enthusiasm of men for diminishing others through physical domination, seeing the invisibility of women to men, seeing the absolute disregard of humanity in women by men, seeing the disdain of

men for women’s lives, and not wanting to die — and not wanting to

die —women propose two very different solutions for themselves in

relation to men and this man’s world.

The first honors the sexual and reproductive imperatives of men.

This is the right-wing solution, though those who pursue it are—

in terms of male-defined politics—all along the political spectrum

from far Right to far Left. In this solution, women accept the definition of their sex class, and within the terms of that definition fight for crumbs of self-respect and social, economic, and creative

worth. Socialist movements and revolutions are predicated on an

acceptance of this sex-class definition, as are right-wing movements

and counterinsurgencies. The far-Right expression of this solution

is usually highly religious, and it is the religious idiom that makes

it distinguishable from other expressions of what is essentially the

same accommodation to male power. Specifically, the sex-class accommodation is seen as a function of religious orthodoxy: in accommodating, women are faithful to a divine father; women accept traditional religious descriptions of women, female sexuality, and