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
26
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