Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

keep women down, not up, in the crude world of actual human

interchange. To stay worshiped, the woman must stay a symbol

and she must stay good. She cannot become merely a human in the

muck of life, morally flawed and morally struggling, committing

acts that have complex, difficult, unpredictable consequences. She

must not walk the same streets men do or do the same things or

have the same responsibilities. Precisely because she is good, she

is unfit to do the same things, unfit to make the same decisions, unfit to resolve the same dilemmas, unfit to undertake the same responsibilities, unfit to exercise the same rights. Her nature is

different— this time better but still absolutely different— and

therefore her role must be different. The worshiping attitude, the

spiritual elevation of women that men invoke whenever they suggest that women are finer than they, proposes that women are what men can never be: chaste, good. In fact men are what women can

never be: real moral agents, the bearers of real moral authority and

responsibility. Women are not kept from this moral agency by biology, but by a male social system that puts women above or below simple human choice in m orally demanding situations. The spiritual superiority of women in this model of ludicrous homage

isolates women from the human acts that create meaning, the human choices that create both ethics and history. It separates women out from the chaos and triumph of human responsibility by

giving women a two-dimensional m orality, a stagnant m orality,

one in which what is right and good is predetermined, sex-deter-

mined, biologically determined. The worship of women, devotion

to that in woman which raises man, respect for some moral sensibility allegedly inborn only in women, is the seductive antifeminism, the one that entrances women who have seen through the other kinds. Being worshiped (for most women) is preferable to

being defiled, and being looked up to is better than being walked

on. It is hard for women to refuse the worship of what otherwise is

despised: being female. Woman’s special moral nature has sometimes been used to plead her case: being moral, she w ill be able to upgrade the m orality of the nation if she has the rights of citizenship, the tone of the marketplace if she is employed, the quality of the church if she officiates, the humanism of government if she is

in it; being moral, she w ill be on the side of good. It has also been

argued, more loudly and more often, that her moral nature must

not be contaminated by vulgar responsibilities; that she has a special moral role to play in making the nation and the world good—

she must be in her person the example of good that w ill civilize and

educate men and make the nation moral. One cannot do what men

do—not in government, not in the family, not even in religion, not

anywhere—and be an example of good. “It is the task of the Positive Woman, ” wrote Phyllis Schlafly, “to keep America good. ” 1

Women keep Amerika good by being good. Many women who

hate Schlafly’s politics would agree that women have a special

moral responsibility “to keep America good. ” They have a different political program of good in mind and a different conception of women’s rights, but their conception of a biologically determined morality in which women are better than men is not different. Antifeminism allows for this sentimentality, encourages and exploits this self-indulgence; liberation does not. As Frederick

Douglass wrote over a century ago: “We advocate women’s rights,

not because she is an angel, but because she is a woman, having the

same wants, and being exposed to the same evils as man. ” 2

The woman-superior model of antifeminism also takes a sexual

form, one that is purely pornographic. The central conceit of

woman-hating sex, sex as conquest and possession, dominance and

submission, is that the woman has real power: she is only the apparent victim; she is only seemingly powerless. Her power is in her capacity to provoke erection or lust. Men suffer arousal passively—

against their will or regardless of their will. They then act on what

a woman, or any sex object, has provoked. She provokes what she

wants. When a man has an erection and commits a sexual act because of it or in response to it, he is acting in response to a provocation by a woman, whose nature and intent are well met by his act.

In pornography, the male sexual values that inform and permeate

rape and other forced sex acts are articulated without apology. The

genre insists that sex is conquest, that the woman who resists

wants to be forced, hurt, brutalized; that the woman who wants

sex gets pleasure from being used like a thing, from pain and humiliation. The genre insists that rape, battery, physical torture, bondage, capture, and imprisonment are things done to women

because women provoke them the same way that women provoke

erection: by being there, by being female. Provoking these acts is

the power women have over men; women get men to do these

things, to perform these sex acts. In the world men seem to exercise power, but all of that comes to nothing in the face of the lust provoked by a woman. W hatever he does to her, she is still more

powerful than he is because he wants her, he needs her, he is being

driven by a desire for her. In the sexual woman-superior model,

power is articulated as being intrinsically female because power is

redefined beyond reason, beyond coherence: as if power is in the

corpse that draws the vultures. This pornographic conception of

female power is fundamental to the antifeminism of sexual-libera-

tion movements in which unlim ited sexual use of women by men is

defined as freedom for both: she wants it; he responds; vo ili! the

revolution. It is also fundamental to the antifeminism of the legal

system with respect to sexual crimes like rape, battery, and sexual

abuse of children, especially girls. The female is still seen as the

provocation for what might be a legitimate sex act, depending on

just how provocative she was. Her w ill is regarded as probably

implicit in the use the male made of her. The female is seen to have

power over the man— and responsibility for what he has done to

her— because he wanted her so bad: she has provoked whatever

desire motivated him to act. His desire is what gives her power.

Her power is in her sexual nature, her existence as a woman to

which he responds— not in her behavior. For this reason, rape inquiries search her behavior to find the truth about her nature. If her nature is finally seen to warrant his act, he is not responsible