Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

him, and is w illing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful

to him . ”9 Or, more aphoristically, “A Total Woman caters to her

man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or sports. ” 10

Citing God as the authority and submission to Jesus as the model,

Morgan defines love as “unconditional acceptance of [a man] and

his feelings. ” 11

Morgan’s achievement in The Total Woman was to isolate the

basic sexual scenarios of male dominance and female submission

and to formulate a simple set of lessons, a pedagogy, that teaches

women how to act out those scenarios within the context of a

Christian value system: in other words, how to cater to male pornographic fantasies in the name of Jesus Christ. As Morgan explains in her own extraordinary prose style: “That great source

book, the Bible, states, ‘Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed

undefiled. . . ’ In other words, sex is for the marriage relationship

only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and

pure as eating cottage cheese. ” 12 Morgan’s detailed instructions on

how to eat cottage cheese, the most famous of which involves

Saran Wrap, make clear that female submission is a delicately balanced commingling of resourcefulness and lack of self-respect. Too little resourcefulness or too much self-respect will doom a woman

to failure as a Total Woman. A submissive nature is the miracle for

which religious women pray.

No one has prayed harder, longer, and with less apparent success than Anita Bryant. She has spent a good part of her life on her knees begging Jesus to forgive her for the sin of existing. In Mine

Eyes Have Seen the G lory , an autobiography first published in 1970,

Bryant described herself as an aggressive, stubborn, bad-tempered

child. Her early childhood was spent in brutal poverty. Through

singing she began earning money when still a child. When she was

very young, her parents divorced, then later remarried. When she

was thirteen, her father abandoned her mother, younger sister, and

herself, her parents were again divorced, and shortly thereafter her

father remarried. At thirteen, “[w]hat stands out most of all in my

memory are my feelings of intense ambition and a relentless drive

to succeed at doing well the thing I loved [singing]. ” 13 She blamed

herself, especially her driving ambition, for the loss of her father.

She did not want to marry. In particular, she did not want to

marry Bob Green. He “won” her through a war of attrition. Every

“No” on her part was taken as a “Yes” by him. When, on several

occasions, she told him that she did not want to see him again, he

simply ignored what she said. Once, when she was making a trip

to see a close male friend whom she described to Green as her

fiance, he booked passage on the same plane and went along. He

hounded her.

Having got his hooks into her, especially knowing how to hit on

her rawest nerve—guilt over the abnormality of her ambition, by

definition unwom anly and potentially satanic— Green manipulated

Bryant w ith a cruelty nearly unmatched in modem love stories.

From both of Bryant’s early books, a picture emerges. One sees a

woman hemmed in, desperately trying to please a husband who

manipulates and harasses her and whose control of her life on every

level is virtually absolute. Bryant described the degree of Green’s

control in M ine Eyes: “T hat’s how good a manager m y husband is.

He w illingly handles all the business in m y life— even to including

the Lord’s business. Despite our sometimes violent scraps, I love

him for it. ” 14 Bryant never specifies how violent the violent scraps

were, though Green insists they were not violent. Green himself,

in Bless This House , is very proud of spanking the children, especially the oldest son, who is adopted: “I’m a father to my children, not a pal. I assert m y authority. I spank them at times, and they respect me for it. Sometimes I take Bobby into the music

room, and it’s not so I can play him a piece on the piano. We play

a piece on the seat of his pants! ” 15 Some degree of physical violence, then, was adm ittedly an accepted part of domestic life.

Bryant’s unselfconscious narrative makes clear that over a period of

years, long before her antihomosexual crusade was a glint in Bob

Green’s eye, she was badgered into giving public religious testimonies that deeply distressed her: Bob has a w ay of getting my dander up and backing me up

against a wall. He gets me so terrifically mad at him that I hate

him for pushing me into a corner. He did that now.

“You’re a hypocrite, ” Bob said. “You profess to have Christ

in your life, but you won’t profess Him in public, which

Christ tells you to do. ”

Because I know he’s right, and hate him for making me feel

so bad about it, I end up doing what I’m so scared to d o . 16

Conforming to the will of her husband was clearly a difficult

struggle for Bryant. She writes candidly of her near constant re­

bellion. Green’s demands—from increasing her public presence as

religious witness to doing all the child care for four children without help while pursuing the career she genuinely loves—were endurable only because Bryant, like Stapleton and Morgan, took Jesus as her real husband:

Only as I practice yielding to Jesus can I learn to submit, as

the Bible instructs me, to the loving leadership of my husband.

Only the power of Christ can enable a woman like me to become submissive in the Lord. 17

In Bryant’s case, the “loving leadership” of her husband, this

time in league with her pastor, enshrined her as the token spokeswoman of antihomosexual bigotry. Once again Bryant was reluctant to testify, this time before Dade County’s Metropolitan Commission in hearings on a homosexual-rights ordinance. Bryant

spent several nights in tears and prayer, presumably because, as

she told Newsweek , “I was scared and I didn’t want to do it. ” 18

Once again, a desire to do Christ’s will brought her into conformity with the expressed will of her husband. One could speculate that some of the compensation in this conformity came from having the burdens of domestic work and child care lessened in the

interest of serving the greater cause. Conformity to the will of

Christ and Green, synonymous in this instance as so often before,

also offered an answer to the haunting question of her life: how to

be a public leader of significance— in her terminology, a “star”—