Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no

matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to

ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other

than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own. Women cling to irrational hatreds, focused particularly on the unfamiliar, so that they will not murder

their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, the men with whom

they are intimate, those who do hurt them and cause them grief.

Fear of a greater evil and a need to be protected from it intensify

the loyalty of women to men who are, even when dangerous, at

least known quantities. Because women so displace their rage, they

are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason

to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of

danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols

of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as

sources of danger. The identities of the dangerous outsiders can

change over time to meet changing social circumstances—for ex­

ample, racism can be encouraged or contained; anti-Semitism can

be provoked or kept dormant; homophobia can be aggravated or

kept under the surface— but the existence of the dangerous outsider alw ays functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, pain-killer, and threat.

The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide. The danger is that self-sacrificing women are perfect foot soldiers who obey orders, no

matter how criminal those orders are. The hope is that these

women, upset by internal conflicts that cannot be stilled by manipulation, challenged by the clarifying drama of public confrontation and dialogue, w ill be forced to articulate the realities of their own

experiences as women subject to the w ill of men. In doing so, the

anger that necessarily arises from a true perception of how t hey

have been debased may move them beyond the fear that transfixes

them to a meaningful rebellion against the men who in fact dim inish, despise, and terrorize them. This is the common struggle of all women, whatever their male-defined ideological origins; and this

struggle alone has the power to transform women who are enemies

against one another into allies fighting for individual and collective

survival that is not based on self-loathing, fear, and humiliation,

but instead on self-determination, dignity, and authentic integrity.

2

The Politics of Intelligence

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.. . . It’s a

feeling of impotence: of cutting no ice.

Virginia Woolf, her diary,

October 25, 1920

Men hate intelligence in women. It cannot flame; it cannot burn; it

cannot burn out and end up in ashes, having been consumed in

adventure. It cannot be cold, rational, ice; no warm womb would

tolerate a cold, icy, splendid mind. It cannot be ebullient and it

cannot be morbid; it cannot be anything that does not end in reproduction or whoring. It cannot be what intelligence is: a vitality of mind that acts directly in and on the world, without mediation.

“Indeed, ” wrote Norman M ailer, “I doubt if there w ill be a really

exciting woman w riter until the first whore becomes a call girl and

tells her tale. ” 1 And M ailer was being generous, because he endowed the whore with a capacity to know, if not to tell: she knows something firsthand, something worth knowing. “G enius, ” wrote

Edith Wharton more realistically, “is of small use to a woman who

does not know how to do her hair. ” 2

Intelligence is a form of energy, a force that pushes out into the

world. It makes its mark, not once but continuously. It is curious,

penetrating. Without the light of public life, discourse, and action,

it dies. It must have a field of action beyond embroidery or scrubbing toilets or wearing fine clothes. It needs response, challenge, consequences that matter. Intelligence cannot be passive and private through a lifetime. Kept secret, kept inside, it withers and dies. The outside can be brought to it; it can live on bread and

water locked up in a cell—but barely. Florence Nightingale, in her

feminist tract Cassandra , said that intellect died last in women; desire, dreams, activity, and love all died before it. Intelligence does hang on, because it can live on almost nothing: fragments of the

world brought to it by husbands or sons or strangers or, in our

time, television or the occasional film. Imprisoned, intelligence

turns into self-haunting and dread. Isolated, intelligence becomes a

burden and a curse. Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the

bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the

body can use. It swells, like the starved stomach, as the skeleton

shrivels and the bones collapse; it will pick up anything to fill the

hunger, stick anything in, chew anything, swallow anything. “Jose

Carlos came home with a bag of crackers he found in the garbage, ”

wrote Carolina Maria de Jesus, a woman of the Brazilian underclass, in her diary. “When I saw him eating things out of the trash I thought: and if it’s been poisoned? Children can’t stand hunger.

The crackers were delicious. I ate them thinking of that proverb:

He who enters the dance must dance. And as I also was hungry, I

ate. ” 3 The intelligence of women is traditionally starved, isolated,

imprisoned.

Traditionally and practically, the world is brought to women by

men; they are the outside on which female intelligence must feed.

The food is poor, orphan’s gruel. This is because men bring home

half-truths, ego-laden lies, and use them to demand solace or sex or

housekeeping. The intelligence of women is not out in the world,

acting on its own behalf; it is kept small, inside the home, acting on

behalf of another. This is true even when the woman works outside the home, because she is segregated into women’s work, and