Authors: Andrea Dworkin

Tags: #Philosophy, #General

Woman Hating (19 page)

BOOK: Woman Hating

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Julian Beck

Transvestism is costuming which violates gender imperatives. Transvestism is generally a sexually charged act: the visible, public violation of sex role is erotic, exciting, dangerous. It is a kind of erotic civil disobedience, and that is precisely its value. Costuming is part of the strategy and process of role destruction. We see, for instance, that as women reject the female role, they adopt “male” clothing. As sex roles dissolve, the particular erotic content of transvestism dissolves.

Bestiality

[In the Middle Ages] copulation with a Jew was regarded as a form of bestiality, and incurred the same penances.

G. Rattray-Taylor,
Sex in History

Primary bestiality (fucking between people and other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies. Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationships between people and other animals) is found everywhere on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town. Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly places people in nature, not above it.

The relationship between people and other animals, when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substance is nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticism in its pure form is life-affirming and life-enriching was sufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime in the Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficient reason for the English in the Dark Ages to confuse sheep and Jews.

In contemporary society relationships between people and other animals often reflect the sadomasochistic complexion of human relationship. Animals in our culture are often badly abused, the objects of violence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and therefore very dangerous human sexuality. Some animals, like horses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbols of ideal macho virility.

Needless to say, in androgynous community, human and other-animal relationships would become more explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe and, with us, respected, loved, and free. They always share our fate, whatever it is.

Incest

I was cold —later revolted a little, not much — seemed perhaps a good idea to try— know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps —that way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

Allen Ginsberg,
Kaddish

The parent-child relationship is primarily erotic because all human relationships are primarily erotic. The incest taboo is a particularized form of repression, one which functions as the bulwark of all the other repressions. The incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. The incest taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them, or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and hearts of other humans who are not our parents and never will be.

The incest taboo does the worst work of the culture: it teaches us the mechanisms of repressing and internalizing erotic feeling—it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual “object”; it demands that we place the nuclear family above the human family. The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism.

The Family

For if we grant that the sexual drive is at birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the total personality (Freud’s “polymorphous perversity”) and... becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo; and that... the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family; then if we did away with the family we would in effect be doing away with the repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a sexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what one must know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriate to male-female polarity and the internalized mechanisms of sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclear family at the moment is the extended family, or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process of destroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity. As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they will also develop the forms of community appropriate to it. We cannot really imagine what those forms will be.

Children

The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that moreover this oppression is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children.

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

Two developments are occurring simultaneously: women are rejecting the female role, and life is being created in the laboratory. Unless the structure is totally transformed, we can expect that when women no longer function as biological breeders we will be expendable. As
men
learn more and more to control reproduction, as cloning becomes a reality, and as the technology of computers and robots develop, there is every reason to think that men as we know them will use that control and technology to create the sex objects that will gratify them. Men, after all, nave throughout history resorted to gynocide as a stratagem of social control, as a tactical way of attaining/maintaining power. That is the simple, compelling reality. There are only two other options: women must seize power, or we must accomplish the transformation into androgyny.

The freedom of those who are capable of biological reproduction from that work (which is simply a form of physical labor) is entirely congruent with androgynous community. Only in the concentration-camp world of polarity must one expect that development to lead to gynocide. The social processes here stand naked: if women must seize power in order to survive, and somehow manage to do that, power will most probably shift without being transformed; if we can create androgynous community, we can abandon power altogether as a social reality —that is the final, and most important, implication of androgyny.

As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable of participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic impulses. In androgynous community, those impulses would retain a high degree of nonspecificity and would no doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual self-realization. The distinctions between “children” and “adults, ” and the social institutions which enforce those distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.

Conclusion

Nothing short of everything will really do.

Aldous Huxley,
Island

The object is cultural transformation. The object is the development of a new kind of human being and a new kind of human community. All of us who have ever tried to right a wrong recognize that truly nothing short of everything will really do.

The way from here to there will not be easy. We must make a total commitment —no longer to take refuge in the scenarios of man-woman violence which are society’s regulators, no longer to play the male-female roles we have been taught, no longer to refuse to know who we are and what we desire so that we need not take responsibility for our own lives. We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist —marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil. We must refuse to submit to the fears engendered by sexual taboos. We must refuse to submit to all forms of behavior and relationship which reinforce male-female polarity, which nourish basic patterns of male dominance and female submission. We must instead build communities where violence is not the main dynamic of human relationship, where natural desire is the fundament of community, where androgyny is the operative premise, where tribe based on androgyny and the social forms which would develop from it are the bases of the collective cultural structure —noncoercive, nonsexist. As Julian Beck wrote, the journey to love is not romantic. As many have written, the journey to freedom is not romantic either — nor is the way known precisely and for all time. We begin here and now, inch by inch.

You do not teach someone to count only up to eight. You do not say nine and ten and beyond do not exist. You give people everything or they are not able to count at all. There is a real revolution or none at all.

Pericles Korovessis, in an interview
in Liberation, June 1973

The Revolution is not an event that takes two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out process in which new people are created, capable of renovating society so that the revolution does not replace one elite with another, but so that the revolution creates a new anti-authoritarian structure with anti-authoritarian people who in their turn re-organize the society so that it becomes a non-alienated human society, free from war, hunger, and exploitation.

Rudi Dutschke
March 7, 1968

There is a misery of the body and a misery of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we looked at them, poured nectar into our mouths, and the grass became bread, we would still be sad. We live in a system that manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm, and we drown down, dead, too soon.

... uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.

Julian Beck,
The Life of the Theatre

AFTERWORD

The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle

this text has been altered in one very serious way. I wanted it to be printed the way it was written —lower case letters, no apostrophes, contractions.

I like my text to be as empty as possible, only necessary punctuation is necessary, when one knows ones purposes one knows what is necessary.

my publisher, in his corporate wisdom, filled the pages with garbage: standard punctuation, he knew his purposes; he knew what was necessary, our purposes differed: mine, to achieve clarity; his, to sell books.

my publisher changed my punctuation because book reviewers (Mammon) do not like lower case letters, fuck (in the old sense) book reviewers (Mammon).

When I say god and mammon concerning the writer writing, I mean that any one can use words to say something. And in using these words to say what he has to say he may use those words directly or in-directly. If he uses these words indirectly he says what he intends to have heard by somebody who is to hear and in so doing inevitably he has to serve mammon.... Now serving god for a writer who is writing is writing anything directly, it makes no difference what it is but it must be direct, the relation between the thing done and the doer must be direct. In this way there is completion and the essence of the completed thing is completion.

Gertrude Stein

in a letter to me, Grace Paley wrote, “once everyone tells the truth artists will be unnecessary —meanwhile there’s work for us. ”

telling the truth, we know what it is when we do it and when we learn not to do it we forget what it is.

form, shape, structure, spatial relation, how the printed word appears on the page, where to breathe, where to rest, punctuation is marking time, indicating rhythms, even in my original text I used too much of it — I overorchestrated. I forced you to breathe where I do, instead of letting you discover your own natural breath.

I begin by presuming that I am free.

I begin with nothing, no form, no content, and I ask: what do I want to do and how do I want to do it.

I begin by presuming that what I write belongs to me.

I begin by presuming that I determine the form I use —in all its particulars. I work at my craft —in all its particulars.

in fact, everything is already determined, in fact, all the particulars have been determined and are enforced.

in fact, where I violate what has already been determined I will be stopped.

in fact, the enforcers will enforce.

“Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set beyond human judgment. In that case one dare not believe that the doorkeeper is subordinate to the man. Bound as he is by his service, even at the door of the Law, he is incomparably freer than anyone at large in the world. The man is only seeking the Law, the doorkeeper is already attached to it. It is the Law that has placed him at his post; to doubt his integrity is to doubt the Law itself. ”

“I don't agree with that point of view, ” said K., shaking his head, “for if one accepts it, one must accept as true everything the doorkeeper says. But you yourself have sufficiently proved how impossible it is to do that. ”