Right-wing Womenby Andrea Dworkin
A Tech Mogul Extols the Virtues of “Male Energy”; At United States Senator Writes a Book Called “Manhood”; A President Found Listable for Sexual Abuse Choses A Defense Secretary accused of Sexual Assault (an allegation he has denied). Given Aggressive assertions of male supremacy on the right, the politics of right-wing women might see something of an enigma.
But for the Radical Feminist Andrea Dworkin, who Died in 2005 at the age of 58, the insistent antifemism of some conservative Was Never Perplexing at all. Her Book “Right-Wing Women”-Originally Published in 1983 and Just Reissued after Decades Out of Print-is a surprising work, Even for DWorkin, who was known (and often caricatured) for her militant arguments and incendiary turns of phrase.
She compared sexual intercourse to territorial occupation, and pornography to dachau. She Merged a Swaggering, IncantaTatory Style With Her Own Experiences of Painful Vulnerability. As a child, she was molested by a stranger; As a Young Woman, She was battered by Her Husband, “The Flower Child I Am Still Too afraid to name.” She treated the feminist Movement as a Matter of Life and Death. Her warnings often verged on apocalyptic. A Chapter in “Right-wing women” is Called “The Coming Gynocide.”
You might Expect that Dworkin Would Have Been Wholly Unsympathetical To The Right-Wing Women in Her Book. But no: she credits them with seeing a stifling, male-dominated world as it really is. She suggests that the optimistic Liberal Woman, Who Holds Out Hope that Patriarchy can be reforming through incredent tinkering, is the Delusional One, Clinging to Faith That Feminist Demands Could Be Anything Short of Revolutionary. The right-wing woman, by contrast, is a realist to a fault. She notices How Men Oppress Women, and She doesn’t Believe in the possibility of transformative change. And so she nods to male authority as a matter of survival: “she complies, in order to be as safe as she can be.”
By way of Example, Dworkin Offers the Christian Self-Help of Ruth Carter Stapleton and Marabel Morgan, As Well As the Conservative Activism of Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly, who Campaignerd Against Abortion, Gay Rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. DWORKIN SHARES Their Assessments of the World as a Menacing Place, Even if she objects to their fatalism about Changing it. She gives an un Unexpected respectful hearing to Bryant, who Called homosexuality “An abomination,” Explaining How Bryant Grew Up “In Brotal Poverty” and Married A Domineering Man Who Made Her Feel “Guilt Over the Abnomality of Her Ambition.” “Bryant, like all the rest of us, is trying to be a ‘goodman,” dworkin writes, in a startling bit of identification. “Bryant, like all the rest of us, is having one hell of a hard time.”
The feminist Writer MEIRA DONEGAN, in A new Foreword to “Right-wing women,” FIND SUCH charitableness hard to take, poing out that dwork, a lesbian, “dues not grapple with the sincere sadism of Bryant’s homophobia.” DONEGAN ALSO Critics DWORKIN’s Penchant for Comparing the Plight of 20th-Century American Women to the Atrocities of Chattel Slavery and the Holocaust. “It is not Enough to say that such choices are the product of dworkin’s time,” Donegan notes. “They are Careless Choices.”
Donegan is right. But part of What Makes DWorkin So Bracing to Read is How Relentlessly She Defied the Prevailing Expectation That Women Stay Perched On A Tightrope, Gingerly Maintenance Their Balance by Treading Ever So Carefully. “A Woman Must Keep Her Intelligence Small and Timid to Survive,” She Writes in the Chapter “The Politics of Intelligence,” An Unsparing Analysis of Why Intellectual Women Were Barely Fathomable To Intellectual Men: “No Warm Womb Would Tolerate A Cold, Icy Icy , Splendid Mind. ” Conservative Women, She Says, in A Typically Hyperbolic Formulation, Recognize That Women Are Valued “Only” as Sex Partners and Mothers. “This means that right-wing women are correct when they say that they are Worth More in the Home Than Outside It.”
Norman Mailer, Who Could Always be counted on for a noxious quote, keeps turning up in dworkin’s book like a bad penny. She compares His homophobia to Bryant’s, Specing out the marked similarities, Though only one of these figures was lauded as a genius. “Anita Bryant is Stupid and Norman Mailer is Smart,” DWorkin Acidly NOIKS. “Is the different in the style with that these ideas are delivered or in the penis?”
What Mailer Offered DWorkin was a misogyny that announced itself, openly celebracting a contempt for women, instead of performing the more socially palatable ritual of keeping it hidden. DWORKIN HAD LITTLE PATIENCE FOR ANYONE WHO PRETEDED THAT THE WORLD WAS KINDER THAN IT WAS. In “Heartbreak,” A 2002 Memoir, She Recalls How A “Pedophilic Teacher” in High School Exposed Her to the Cruel Reality Other Grown-Ups Tried to obscure: “Becaus Most Adults Lie To Children Most of the Time, the Pedophilic Adult Seems to be a truth-steller, the One Adult Ready and Willing To Know the World and Not To Lie About It. ”
It’s a Strange and Terrible Assessment: The Predator as “Truth-déller.” It also Happens to overlap Considerably with Her Portrayal of Right-Wing Women, who “See the System of Sex Oppression-About Which they are not stupid-as closed and unalterable. DWORKIN, TOO, SEES THE SYSTEM AS CLOSED, UNALTERAIVE but not. She suggests that feminism (“The Simplest Revolutionary Idea Ever Conceivéd, and also the Most Despised”) COULD BE What Breaks that system apart.
“Right-wing women,” like the Rest of Her Work, is sufficiently with Dworkin’s Uncanny Mix of Hard-Nosed Realism and Wild-Eyed Idealism. For All Her Radical Commitments, She Still contained Multitudes, and she expected the Same of the Women’s Movement. The Solidarity Shen Envisioned was expansive, as well as difficult: “Every woman’s fate is tied to the fate of women whom she political and morally abors.”
Right-wing Women | By Andrea Dworkin | Picador | 247 pp. | Paperback, $ 19
