Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

names, and were personally filthy. She told me that she would vote

against the sexual-preference resolution* because otherwise she

would not be able to return home. But she also said that she would

tell the white women that the lesbians had been polite and clean.

She said that she knew it was wrong to deprive anyone of a job and

had had no idea before coming to Houston that lesbian mothers

lost their children. T his, she felt, was genuinely terrible. I asked

her if she thought a time would come when she would have to

stand up for lesbian rights in her hometown. She nodded yes

gravely, then explained with careful, evocative emphasis that the

next-closest town to where she lived was 160 miles away. The history of blacks in the South was palpable.

* “Congress, State, and local legislatures should enact legislation to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sexual and affectional preference in areas including, but not limited to, employment, housing, public accommodations, credit, public facilities, government funding, and the military.

“State legislatures should reform their penal codes or repeal State laws

that restrict private sexual behavior between consenting adults.

“State legislatures should enact legislation that would prohibit consideration o f sexual or affectional orientation as a factor in any judicial determination of child custody or visitation rights. Rather, child custody cases should be evaluated solely on the merits of which party is the better parent, without regard to that person’s sexual and affectional orientation. ”

Right-wing women consistently spoke to me about lesbians as if

lesbians were rapists, certified committers of sexual assault against

women and girls. No facts could intrude on this psychosexual fantasy. No facts or figures on male sexual violence against women and children could change the focus of their fear. They admitted

that they knew of many cases of male assault against females, including within families, and did not know of any assaults by lesbians against females. The men, they acknowledged when pressed, were sinners, and they hated sin, but there was clearly something

comforting in the normalcy of heterosexual rape. To them, the

lesbian was inherently monstrous, experienced almost as a demonic sexual force hovering closer and closer. She was the dangerous intruder, encroaching, threatening by her very presence a sexual order that cannot bear scrutiny or withstand challenge.

Right-wing women regard abortion as the callous murder of infants. Female selflessness expresses itself in the conviction that a fertilized egg surpasses an adult female in the authenticity of its

existence. The grief of these women for fetuses is real, and their

contempt for women who become pregnant out of wedlock is awesome to behold. The fact that most illegal abortions in the bad old days were performed on married women with children, and that

thousands of those women died each year, is utterly meaningless to

them. They see abortion as a criminal act committed by godless

whores, women absolutely unlike themselves.

Right-wing women argue that passage of the Equal Rights

Amendment will legalize abortion irrevocably. No matter how

often I heard this argument (and I heard it constantly), I simply

could not understand it. Fool that I was, I had thought that the

Equal Rights Amendment was abhorrent because of toilets. Since

toilets figured prominently in the resistance to civil rights legislation that would protect blacks, the argument that centered on toilets—while irrational—was as Amerikan as apple pie. No one mentioned toilets. I brought them up, but no one cared to discuss

them. The passionate, repeated cause-and-effect arguments linking

the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion presented a new m ystery. I resigned m yself to hopeless confusion. H appily, after the conference, I read The P ow er o f the P ositive W oman , in which

Schlafly explains: “Since the mandate of ERA is for sex equality,

abortion is essential to relieve women of their unequal burden of

being forced to bear an unwanted b ab y. ” 19 Forcing women to bear

unwanted babies is crucial to the social program of women who

have been forced to bear unwanted babies and who cannot bear the

grief and bitterness of such a recognition. The Equal Rights

Amendment has now become the symbol of this devastating recognition. This largely accounts for the new wave of intransigent opposition to it.

Right-wing women, as represented in Houston, especially from

the South, white and black, also do not like Jew s. T hey live in a

Christian country. A fragile but growing coalition between white

and black women in the New South is based on a shared Christian

fundamentalism, which translates into a shared anti-Semitism. The

stubborn refusal of Jew s to embrace Christ and the barely masked

fundamentalist perception of Jew s as Christ killers, communists

and usurers both, queers, and, worst of all, urban intellectuals,

mark Jew s as foreign, sinister, and an obvious source of the many

satanic conspiracies sweeping the nation.

The most insidious expression of this rife anti-Semitism was

conveyed by a fixed stare, a self-conscious smile and the delightful

words “Ah just love tha Jew ish people. ” The slime variety of anti-

Semite, very much in evidence, was typified by a Right to Life

leader who called doctors who perform abortions “Jew ish baby killers. ” I was asked a hundred times: “Am Ah speakin with a Jewish g irl? ” Despite m y clear presence as a lesbian-feminist with press

credentials plastered all over me from the notorious Ms. magazine,

it was as a Jew that I was consistently challenged and, on several

occasions, im plicitly threatened. Conversation after conversation

stopped abruptly when I answered that yes, I was a Jew .

*

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt

they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to

them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites,