with, threaten, or significantly alter a lifestyle, a living
standard, which is moneyed and privileged.
The analysis of sexism in this book articulates
clearly what the oppression o f women is, how it functions, how it is rooted in psyche and culture. But that analysis is useless unless it is tied to a political consciousness and commitment which will totally redefine community. One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an
unfree world, and in the course o f redefining family,
Introduction
23
church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. T o attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.
T h e nature o f women’s oppression is unique: women
are oppressed as women, regardless o f class or race;
some women have access to significant wealth, but that
wealth does not signify power; women are to be found
everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut o f the machinery and way o f life which is ruinous to us. And perhaps most importantly, most women have little sense o f dignity or self-
respect or strength, since those qualities are directly
related to a sense o f manhood. In Revolutionary Suicide,
Huey P. Newton tells us that the Black Panthers did not
use guns because they were symbols o f manhood, but
found the courage to act as they did because they were
men. When we women find the courage to defend ourselves, to take a stand against brutality and abuse, we are violating every notion o f womanhood we have ever
been taught. T h e way to freedom for women is bound
to be torturous for that reason alone.
T h e analysis in this book applies to the life situations o f all women, but all women are not necessarily in a state o f primary emergency as women. What I mean
by this is simple. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, I would be
oppressed as a woman, but hunted, slaughtered, as a
Jew. As a Native American, I would be oppressed as
a squaw, but hunted, slaughtered, as a Native Am erican. That first identity, the one which brings with it as
24
Woman Hating
part of its definition death, is the identity of primary
emergency. This is an important recognition because it
relieves us of a serious confusion. The fact, for instance,
that many Black women (by no means all) experience
primary emergency as Blacks in no way lessens the responsibility of the Black community to assimilate this and other analyses of sexism and to apply it in their own
revolutionary work.
As a writer with a revolutionary commitment, I am
particularly pained by the kinds of books writers are
writing, and the reasons why. I want writers to write
books because they are committed to the content of
those books. I want writers to write books as actions. I
want writers to write books that can make a difference
in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to
write books that are worth being jailed for, worth
fighting for, and should it come to that in this country,
worth dying for.
Books are for the most part in Amerika commercial
ventures. People write them to make money, to become
famous, to build or augment other careers. Most Amerikans do not read books—they prefer television. Academics lock books in a tangled web of mindfuck and abstraction. The notion is that there are ideas, then art,
then somewhere else, unrelated, life. The notion is that
to have a decent or moral idea is to be a decent or moral
person. Because o f this strange schizophrenia, books
and the writing o f them have become embroidery on a
dying way o f life. Because there is contempt for the
process o f writing, for writing as a way o f discovering
meaning and truth, and for reading as a piece of that
same process, we destroy with regularity the few serious
Introduction
25
writers we have. We turn them into comic-book figures,
bleed them o f all privacy and courage and common
sense, exorcise their vision from them as sport, demand
that they entertain or be ignored into oblivion. And it
is a great tragedy, for the work o f the writer has never
been more important than it is now in Amerika.
Many see that in this nightmared land, language has
no meaning and the work o f the writer is ruined. Many
see that the triumph o f authoritarian consciousness is
its ability to render the spoken and written word meaningless—so that we cannot talk or hear each other speak.
It is the work o f the writer to reclaim the language from
those who use it to justify murder, plunder, violation.
T h e writer can and must do the revolutionary work o f
using words to communicate, as community.
Those o f us who love reading and writing believe
that being a writer is a sacred trust. It means telling the
truth. It means being incorruptible. It means not being
afraid, and never lying. Those o f us who love reading
and writing feel great pain because so many people
who write books have become cowards, clowns, and
liars. Those o f us who love reading and writing begin
to feel a deadly contempt for books, because we see
writers being bought and sold in the market place — we
see them vending their tarnished wares on every street
corner. T oo many writers, in keeping with the Am erikan way o f life, would sell their mothers for a dime.
T o keep the sacred trust o f the writer is simply to
respect the people and to love the community. T o violate that trust is to abuse oneself and do damage to others. I believe that the writer has a vital function in
the community, and an absolute responsibility to the
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Woman Hating
people. I ask that this book be judged in that context.
Specifically Woman Hating is about women and
men, the roles they play, the violence between them.
We begin with fairy tales, the first scenarios of women
and men which mold our psyches, taught to us before we can know differently. We go on to pornography, where we find the same scenarios, explicitly sexual and now more recognizable, ourselves, carnal
women and heroic men. We go on to herstory —the
binding of feet in China, the burning o f witches in
Europe and Amerika. There we see the fairy-tale and
pornographic definitions of women functioning in
reality, the real annihilation of real women —the crushing into nothingness o f their freedom, their will, their lives —how they were forced to live, and how they were
forced to die. We see the dimensions of the crime, the
dimensions of the oppression, the anguish and misery
that are a direct consequence of polar role definition,
of women defined as carnal, evil, and Other. We recognize that it is the structure of the culture which engineers the deaths, violations, violence, and we look for alternatives, ways of destroying culture as we know it,
rebuilding it as we can imagine it.
I write however with a broken tool, a language which
is sexist and discriminatory to its core. I try to make the
distinctions, not “history” as the whole
human story, not
“man” as the generic term for the species, not “manhood” as the synonym for courage, dignity, and strength. But I have not been successful in reinventing
the language.
This work was not done in isolation. It owes much to
others. I thank my sisters who everywhere are standing
Introduction
27
up, for themselves, against oppression. I thank my sisters, the women who are searching into our common past, writing it so that we can know it and be proud. I
thank my sisters, these particular women whose work
has contributed so much to my own consciousness and
resolve — Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone, Judith Malina, and Jill Johnston.
I also thank those others who have, through their
books and lives, taught me so much —in particular,
Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Daniel Berrigan, Jean
Genet, Huey P. Newton, Julian Beck, and Tim othy
Leary.
I thank my friends in Amsterdam who were family
for the writing o f much o f this book and who helped
me in very hard times.
I thank Mel Clay who believed in this book from its
most obscure beginnings, the editors o f Suck and in
particular Susan Janssen, Deborah Rogers, Martin
Duberman, and Elaine Markson who has been wonderful to me. I thank Marian Skedgell for her help and kindness. I thank Brian Murphy who tried to tell me a
long time ago that O was an oppressed person. Chapter
3 is dedicated to Brian.
I thank Karen Malpede and Garland Harris for their
support and help. I thank Joan Schenkar for pushing
me a little further than I was willing, or able, to go.
I thank Grace Paley, Karl Bissinger, Kathleen
Norris, and Muriel Rukeyser. Without their love and
friendship this work would never have been done.
Without their examples o f strength and commitment,
I do not know who I would be, or how.
I thank my brother Mark and my sister-in-law Carol
28
Woman Hating
for their friendship, warmth, and trust. And I thank
my parents, Sylvia and Harry Dworkin, for their devotion and support through all these years, which must have seemed to them interminable, when their daughter was learning her craft. I thank them for raising me with real caring and tenderness, for believing in me so
that I could learn to believe in myself.
Andrea Dworkin
New York City, July 1973
Part One
THE FAIRY TALES
You cannot be free if you are contained
within a fiction.
Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre
Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her
name was
Lilith
Eve
Hagar
Jezebel
Delilah
Pandora
Jahi
Tam ar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called
goddess and her name was
Kali
Fatima
Artemis
Hera
Isis
Mary
Ishtar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called
queen and her name was
Bathsheba
31
32
Woman Hating
Vashti
Cleopatra
Helen
Salome
Elizabeth
Clytemnestra
Medea
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called
witch and her name was
Joan
Circe
Morgan le Fay
Tiamat
Maria Leonza
Medusa
and they had this in common: that they were feared,
hated, desired, and worshiped.
When one enters the world of fairy tale one seeks
with difficulty for the actual place where legend and
history part. One wants to locate the precise moment
when fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, and
history begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Women
live in fairy tale as magical figures, as beauty, danger,
innocence, malice, and gr eed. In the personae of the
fairy tale —the wicked witch, the beautiful princess,
the heroic prince —we find what the culture would have
us know about who we are.
The point is that we have not formed that ancient
world —it has formed us. We ingested it as children
whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on
our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in
fact men and women. We have taken the fairy tales of
Woman Hating
33
childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying
in the stomach, as real identity. Between Snow-white
and her heroic prince, our two great fictions, we never
did have much o f a chance. A t some point, the Great
Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed o f mounting
the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the
dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object o f
every necrophiliac’s lust —the innocent, victimized Sleeping Beauty, beauteous lump o f ultimate, sleeping good.
Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowing, sometimes
knowing, unwilling, unable to do otherwise, we act out
the roles we were taught.
be, as well as the moral o f the story.
C H A P T E R 1
Onceuponatime: The Roles
Death is that remedy all singers dream of
Allen Ginsberg
The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave,
what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.
We are bom into a sex role which is determined by
visible sex, or gender.
We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth
into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die.
In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a direct
consequence o f the imperatives of those roles, we commit homicide, suicide, and genocide.
Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven.
There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sex
there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there.
We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that
death will release us from suffering—from guilt, sex,
the body. We recognize the body as the source of our
suffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished—either men or women,
bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role
which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any
real self-becoming or self-realization.
Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture. They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood
34
Onceuponatime: The Roles
35
models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes
us into submission — if we do not become good, then evil
will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending,
then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, we
forget the terror—the wicked witches and their smothering malice. We remember romantic paradigms: the heroic prince kisses Sle
eping Beauty; the heroic prince
searches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroic
prince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains as
the substratum o f male-female relation — the terror
remains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease to
be motivated by it. Grown men are terrified o f the
wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts o f memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be actively
evil.
Terror, then, is our real theme.
The Mother as a Figure of Terror
Whether “instinctive” or not, the maternal role in the sexual constitution originates in the fact that only the woman is necessarily present at birth. Only the
woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child —a tie on
which society can rely. This maternal feeling is the root of human community.
George Gilder, Sexual Suicide
Snow-white’s biological mother was a passive, good
queen who sat at her window and did embroidery.
She pricked her finger one day —no doubt an event in
her life —and 3 drops o f blood fell from it onto the
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Woman Hating
snow. Somehow that led her to wish for a child “as white
as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the
embroidery frame.” 1 Soon after, she had a daughter
with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and
hair as black as ebony. ” 2 Then, she died.
A year later, the king married again. His new wife
was beautiful, greedy, and proud. She was, in fact,
ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in the
male realm, that beauty translated directly into power
because it meant male admiration, male alliance, male
devotion.
The new queen had a magic mirror and she would
ask it: “Looking-glass upon the wall, Who is fairest
of us all? ” 3 And inevitably, the queen was the fairest
(had there been anyone fairer we can presume that the
king would have married her).
One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairest
was, and the mirror answered: “Queen, you are full
fair, *tis true, But Snow-white fairer is than you. ” 4