Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

it too late: they will stay mesmerized by the small tributes men pay

to the idea—not the reality—of women as mothers. The power the

Right to Life women are fighting so hard to put into the hands of

the state will eventually and inevitably be used (1) to redefine when

life begins and what life is so that the male becomes its sole creator

and (2) to determine and enforce which women reproduce, when,

and how. The women not needed will have no claim to civil dignity or civil protection. The reason for female submission finally will be very simple and overwhelmingly clear: for women submission will be a matter of life or death, with the right of appeal to the sacredness of women as mothers no longer in the vocabulary of

male supremacy.

When women cease to be altogether necessary, politically dissident women become altogether unnecessary. Once women are biologically expendable on a grand scale, political women need no longer be tolerated on any scale. Politically dissident women are

considered unnecessary now: this is the mood toward feminists and

other women who rebel; someday it will be policy, not a mood.

The criteria for politically dissident women—troublemakers—will

be extended to include any women not domestics, sex prostitutes,

or reproductive prostitutes. The religiously orthodox women will

find themselves characterized as politically dissident women one

day too: there they will be, advocating and upholding old laws,

customs, and ideas that are no longer in the best interests of men.

They will be demanding more than men want them to have and

there will be no concessions from men: because men will be able to

control reproduction without the mass complicity of women. Reduced to its simplest elements, the old misogyny was expressed by the ancient Greek Hipponax of Ephesus: “The two days in a

woman’s life a man can best enjoy are when he marries her and

when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” 15 In the misogyny of

the future—in the coming gynocide—he will have one day he can

best enjoy: “when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” We come

after, as George Steiner wrote; and we are women. We know what

men can do.

6

Antifeminism

some men

would rather see us dead than imagine

what we think of them/

if we measure our silence by our pain

how could the words

any word

ever catch up

what is it we could call equal

Ntozake Shange, “Slow Drag, ” from

Some Men

Feminism is a much-hated political philosophy. T his is true all

along the male-defined, recognizable political spectrum from far

Right to far Left. Feminism is hated because women are hated.

Antifeminism is a direct expression of m isogyny; it is the political

defense of woman hating. This is because feminism is the liberation movement of women. Antifeminism, in any of its political colorations, holds that the social and sexual condition of women essentially (one w ay or another) embodies the nature of women,

that the w ay women are treated in sex and in society is congruent

with what women are, that the fundamental relationship between

men and women— in sex, in reproduction, in social hierarchy— is

both necessary and inevitable. Antifeminism defends the conviction that the male abuse of women, especially in sex, has an im­

plicit logic, one that no program of social justice can or should

eliminate; that because the male use of women originates in the

distinct and opposite natures of each which converge in what is

called “sex, ” women are not abused when used as women—but

merely used for what they are by men as men. It is admitted that

there are excesses of male sadism—committed by deranged individuals, for instance—but in general the massive degradation of women is not seen to violate the nature of women as such. For

instance, a man’s nature would be violated if anyone forcibly penetrated his body. A woman’s nature is not violated by the same event, even though she may have been hurt. A man’s nature would

not provoke anyone to forcibly penetrate his body. A woman’s nature does provoke such penetration—and even injury is no proof that she did not want the penetration or even the injury itself, since

it is her nature as a woman to desire being forcibly penetrated and

forcibly hurt. Conservatively estimated, in the United States a

woman is raped every three minutes, and in each and every rape

the woman’s nature is at issue first and foremost, not the man’s act.

Certainly there is no social or legal recognition that rape is an act of

political terrorism.

Antifeminism can accommodate reform: a recognition that some

forms of discrimination against women are unfair to women or that

some kinds of injustice to women are not warranted (or entirely

warranted) by the nature of women. But underneath the apparent

civility, there are facile, arrogant assumptions: that the remedies

are easy, the problems frivolous; that the harm done to women is

not substantial nor is it significant in any real way; and that the

subordination of women to men is not in and of itself an egregious

wrong. This assessment is maintained in the face of proved atrocities and the obvious intractability of the oppression.

Antifeminism is always an expression of hating women: it is way

past time to say so, to make the equation, to insist on its truth.

Antifeminism throws women to the wolves; it says “later” or

“never” to those suffering cruel and system atic deprivations of liberty; it tells women that when their lives are at stake, there is no urgency toward either justice or decency; it scolds women for

wanting freedom. It is right to see woman hating, sex hatred, passionate contempt, in every effort to subvert or stop an improvement in the status of women on any front, whether radical or reform. It is right to see contempt for women in any effort to subvert or stop any move on the part of women toward economic or sexual independence, toward civil or legal equality, toward self-determination. Antifeminism is the politics of contempt for women

as a class. T his is true when the antifeminism is expressed in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment or to the right to abortion on demand or to procedures against sexual harassment or to shelters for battered women or to reforms in rape laws. T his is true whether the opposition is from the H eritage Foundation, the Moral