Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

M ajority, the Eagle Forum, the American Civil Liberties Union,

the Communist Party, the Democrats, or the Republicans. The

same antifeminist contempt for women is expressed in resistance to

affirmative action or in defenses of pornography or in the acceptance of prostitution as an institution of female sex labor. If one sees that women are being system atically exploited and abused,

then the defense of anything, the acceptance of anything, that promotes or continues that exploitation or abuse expresses a hatred of women, a contempt for their freedom and dignity; and an effort to

impede legislative, social, or economic initiatives that would improve the status of women, however radical or reformist those measures are, is an expression of that same contempt. One sim ply cannot be both for and against the exploitation of women: for it

when it brings pleasure, against it in the abstract; for it when it

brings profit, against it in principle; for it when no one is looking,

against it when someone who might notice is around. If one sees

how exploited women are— the systematic nature of the exploitation, the sexual base of the exploitation— then there is no political

or ethical justification for doing one whit less than everything—

using every resource—to stop that exploitation. Antifeminism has

been the cover for outright bigotry and it has been the vehicle of

outright bigotry. Antifeminism has been a credible cover and an

effective vehicle because the hatred of women is not politically

anathema on either the Right or the Left. Antifeminism is manifest

wherever the subordination of women is actively perpetuated or

enhanced or defended or passively accepted, because the devaluation of women is implicit in all these stances. Woman hating and antifeminism, however aggressive or restrained the expression, are

empirical synonyms, inseparable, often indistinguishable, often interchangeable; and any acceptance of the exploitation of women in any area, for any reason, in any style, is both, means both, and

promotes both.

Antifeminism breaks down into contempt for particular kinds of

women—as men envision the kinds of women there are. There is a

spectrum of insult. Lesbians, intellectuals, and uppity women are

hated for their presumption, their arrogance, their masculine ambition. Prudes, spinsters, and celibates may not want to be like men but they seem able to live without them; so they are treated with

contempt and disdain. Sluts, “nymphos, ” and tarts are hated because they are cheap, not expensive, and because they are their sex raw or sex itself. These epithets (often in ruder form) directed

against a woman are intended to malign her own relationship to her

own gender or to sexuality as men define and enforce it. The epithets are situational: chosen and applied not to show what she is in her essential self but to intimidate her in a particular situation. For

instance, if she does not want sex, she may be called a prude or a

dyke, and after she has had sex, she may be called—by the very

same observer—a slut. Expressing ideas a man does not like, she

may be a slut or a dyke or a prude—depending on how any given

man assesses her vulnerability to insult or depending on the man’s

own obsessional interest in prudes or sluts or dykes. Antifeminism

is in the reduction of a woman to perceptions of her sexuality or

relation to men or male sexuality; and antifeminism is in the ascribing of a specific masculine integrity to acts usually reserved for men— acts like making love with women or w riting books or w alking down the street without apology or speaking with authority.

Ideas and acts uphold the potency and cultural vigor of these epithets, which reflect real values— how women are disdained, w h y, what women do wrong and get punished for. The breaking down

of women into the insults used to describe women, the use of these

insults to describe or intim idate or discredit, granting validity to

these critiques of a female’s posture, pose, stance, attitude, or act,

are all expressions of both antifeminism and woman hating. When

a woman expresses an opinion— about anything— and the response

is to undermine perceptions of or question her sexuality, sexual

identity, fem ininity, relations with men, the response can be identified without further analysis as im plicitly antifeminist and woman-hating. It can and should be exposed as such. Antifeminism as a strategy for subverting what credibility women can muster runs the gam ut from subtle innuendoes to overt hostility, all of which is designed to remind the woman herself and those listening

to her that she is, after all, only a woman— and a defective one at

that. The woman hating im plicit in the antifeminism is designed to

humiliate the woman so that she feels the humiliation and so that

those listening can see her being humiliated and feeling it. Raising

and m anipulating antagonistic feelings toward a woman because

she is a woman, using her sex and sexuality, reminding her and

those around her of what she is and what she is f o r , are the same as

raising and m anipulating racist antagonisms against a black in a

white-supremacist context. The response to the underlining of her

sex so as to impugn her credibility should not rest on whether or

not one agrees with the woman about whatever issue; the response

should be a response to the antifeminism and misogyny being used

against her. It is w ay past time to recognize, to say, to confront,

the fact that women are isolated and destroyed by the ways in

which epithets discredit them. The epithets are symbolic reminders of what she is reduced to, not human, woman, that lower thing; the epithets are accusations that remind the accused of her

place as a woman and some alleged violation of its boundaries.

Women fear epithets because they are warnings, threats, proof that

a woman has made a wrong step in her relationship to the world

around her, proof that a man or men have noticed her and are

angry with her. Women fear these epithets because women fear the

anger of men. That anger is the substance of both antifeminism

and misogyny. The epithet is a weapon, whether hurled or delivered in a sulky or measured tone. The epithet is inevitably an act of hostility used in a spirit of vengeance. Calling a woman a name

temporarily brands her; it molds social perceptions of her in a way

that upholds her social inferiority; it frequently comes before the

fist or before the fuck, and so women learn to associate it with uses

of themselves that they abhor, hostile uses of themselves; and it