Without Apology

Andrea Dworkin's Art And Politics

Cindy Jenefsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367216511
• eBook ISBN: 9781000011067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first-ever book-length analysis of Dworkins feminist politics and the first critical analysis to examine her controversial political ideas in light of the literary dimensions of her prose. Cindy Jenefsky, with Ann Russo, looks at Dworkin's major nonfiction works including Woman Hating, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and Intercourse

Part One
The Artist as Revolutionary

It is the work of the writer to reclaim the language from those who use it to justify murder, plunder, violation. The writer can and must do the revolutionary work of using words to communicate, as community.¹

Woman Hating is Andrea Dworkin's first "serious" book as a writer.² It is with this book, she says, that she "learned something about what it takes to write. I learned how you have to be alone; and I learned how you have to rewrite; and I learned how extraordinary the process of writing is. ... I had written many times before and had wanted to be a writer for a long time, but I learned more about the creative process in writing that book than I had known before."³ Dworkin started to write Woman Hating in 1972, only one week after escaping her abusive husband of three years. The book was originally a joint endeavor between Dworkin and Ricki Abrams—the woman whom Dworkin says "really introduced me to feminism"—when the two were living in Amsterdam. After Abrams withdrew from the project, Dworkin continued working on her own, first in donated space in the basement of Paradiso in Amsterdam (she was homeless during this time), then in New York City.⁴

Woman Hating, she says, was not an attempt to prove a particular thesis about women or about male domination⁵; rather, it was an attempt "to find out what had happened to me in my marriage and in the thousand and one instances of daily life where it seemed I was being treated like a subhuman."⁶ At the time she wrote Woman Hating, Dworkin did not know other battered women existed: "I still thought that I was the only woman in the world to whom it had ever happened." Nonetheless, she says she experienced the torture and beatings as entirely impersonal—as having nothing to do with her as an individual or any kind of individual failings but solely because she was female:

when this individual who hit me hit me, he hit me only because I was a woman—there is simply no other way to describe it. I mean the reason may have been that the laundry wasn't done right or that the refrigerator wasn't cleaned, and I may have been confused by trying to understand how my whole life and all my aspirations had somehow come down to trying to figure out how to clean the refrigerator the right way, but the fact of the matter was that I was hit because I was a woman.⁷

Likewise, chose from whom she sought help—friends, family, neighbors, a doctor, law officials—ignored her personal pleas and protestations: "people sent me back because I was a woman, people didn't believe me because I was a woman, so that my own individuality or my own personality or my own intelligence or my own sensitivity had absolutely no meaning in the real world in which I was living."⁸ It was as if her identity as a woman eclipsed all other dimensions of her being, stripping her words of all credibility and power in the face of society's expectations of her as a female.

It was in this context of depersonalized violence and dehumanization in her marriage that Dworkin sought to understand what had happened to her. Since she was taught neither masochism nor misogyny in her home as a child, she turned to other societal influences that may have shaped her own and others' destructive views of women. By examining different cultural artifacts, including literary and nonliterary pornography which had significantly influenced her sexual identity, she attempted to locate sources of the internalized masochism and impersonal hatred which had circumscribed her life. She uncovered "a systematic despisal of women that permeated every institution of society, every cultural organ, every expression of human being. And I saw that I was a woman, a person who met that systematic despisal on every street corner, in every living room, in every human interchange,"⁹

Woman Hating documents this "systematic despisal of women." She illustrates in vivid, unrelenting detail the construction of women in popular cultural artifacts (fairy tales and pornography) as passive, subordinate, and masochistic. She then shows how these images are mirrored, in their most extreme incarnations, in the practices of foot-binding and witchburning. Underlying all of these images, events, and customs is a rigid gender system that polarizes males and females into masculine and feminine roles. Dworkin argues that the internalization of cultural prescriptions for masculinity and femininity, beginning in early childhood, molds gender identity—perceptions and expectations of self as male or female and in relation to other males and females— and thereby socializes men and women for roles of dominance and subordination, respectively. Dworkin thus locates the source of the "systematic despisal of women" in the hierarchical polarization of gender identities and gender roles.

For the most part, Dworkin communicates her ideas in Woman Hating through unconventional means. Violating traditional form is clearly a conscious strategic choice. It is both an artistic and political decision. In the afterword to Woman Hating—which recounts Dworkin's battle with her editor and publisher over her desire to retain the unconventional punctuation and capitalization of her original text ("The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle")—she explains the importance of undermining "standard form," both in society generally and in writing in particular. She writes: "reading a text which violates standard form forces one to change mental sets in order to read, there is no distance, the new form, which is in some ways unfamiliar, forces one to read differently—not to read about different things, but to read in different ways." Dworkin claims that, if permitted, writers could "develop forms which would teach people to think differently: not to think about different things, but to think in different ways."¹⁰ Thus her formal experimentation is considered to have the potential not only to persuade her audience of the fact and character of women's oppression, but to disrupt current thought patterns on the subject and provide her audience with new tools for thinking differently about gender dynamics.

In keeping with this political philosophy of writing, Dworkin's choice of alternative rhetorical strategies in Woman Hating is a deliberate break with conventional forms of political discourse. "I was very clear that I didn't want to make a linear argument," states Dworkin. "What I was trying to do was to engage the imagination, not to win an argument."¹¹ Instead of explicitly arguing for a causal link between misogynistic cultural artifacts and practices, she employs a variety of connective strategies within the structure of her discourse which link together ideas and practices from diverse parts of society. She uses a palimpsestic style—a layering of ideas on top of one another like oil paints on a painter's palette—that is itself a disruption of the bipolarity and dis-integration structuring gender relations. Dworkin's layering technique is based on principles of fluidity and connectiveness. This is evident in three dominant rhetorical strategies employed in the text.

First, she uses juxtaposition to layer ideas on top of one another in such a way that the impression of the first layer sheds meaning on the second layer, which then sheds meaning on the third layer, and so on. Each new layer achieves meaning in terms of its connection to the previous layer(s). Ideas thus slowly evolve as the text progresses, all the while retaining their connection to their earlier manifestation.

Second, Dworkin uses substitution to replace one idea with a new one connected to it. The romantic ethos of fairy tales, for instance, reappears in pornography and footbinding in new manifestations, just as "the wicked witch . . . the source of terror" in fairy tales reappears in new forms in pornography and witchburning.¹² The substitution enables Dworkin to carry over meaning from one phenomenon to the next in order to demonstrate the continuity of misogyny in seemingly disparate facets of society. The scenery changes, but the essential sadistic dynamic remains the same.

Finally, repetition is the primary basis of fluidity in Dworkin's text. In fact, juxtaposition and substitution usually function within the larger context of a repetition of ideas and forms. The notion of gender polarity and its consequent misogyny are repeated in a multitude of forms throughout Woman Hating, The active/passive, dominant/submissive dynamic of sadomasochism is found in fairy tales, pornography, Christianity, romance, marriage, footbinding, witchburning, and beauty standards. Her use of repetition is the basis of her generalization from fairy tales and pornography to the "cultural structure" generally, as the same essential elements which structure the two genres of fiction characterize witchburning and footbinding and structure human relations in society at large. Thus the central dynamic of gender polarity appears first in singular cultural artifacts, then in contemporary society, then in herstory, then in contemporary society again, then in herstory again, etc., until Dworkin has repeated the idea so many times that she has created the impression it is a general condition of human life.

The structure or her writing iconically recreates the broad, systemic pattern of phenomena that she claims create and enforce women's oppression. In many cases, the linkages are seemingly incongruous: fairy tales and pornography, Christianity and pornography, fairy tales and Chinese footbinding or witchburning, popular culture and individual psychic development, fiction and reality, violence and beauty, and romance and sexual violence. In general, she does not argue for the connections; instead, she juxtaposes the misogynistic commonalities in these disparate facets of men's and women's private and public lives. In a few, uncharacteristic instances, she offers explicit reasoning to make connections, but in most cases she merely aligns the phenomena and relies on the reader to complete the link; because of the omission of explicit causal reasoning in the book's content, the relationships between ideas are sometimes easy to miss, or to dismiss. Nonetheless, the result of such a network of connections is that the form of her writing mimics the structural character of society's hatred of women: each phenomenon is connected to the next until, by the end of the seventh chapter (of nine) in the book, Dworkin has recreated a web of women's oppression, woven together by the silk of misogyny, the title of her book.

Both the form and content of Woman Hating disrupt the polarized gender system animating male domination. On a theoretical level, Dworkin deconstructs the notions of "man" and "woman" as mythological constructs that perpetuate women's oppression, she refutes the biological basis of gender polarity, and she sketches an alternative paradigm—androgyny—to synthesize elements of masculinity and femininity into a coherent whole. On a formal level, the structure of Dworkin's text disrupts bipolarity by reproducing the fluidity and interconnectedness of her androgynous vision.

When asked about this unusual style of writing in Woman Hating, Dworkin replied that, as in all of her writing, she tried to be as audacious and powerful as she knew how to be. She wanted to "change the way that people saw certain things. . . . I thought of [writing] as circles," she said. "You know—you just keep going in circles and you make the circles wider and wider and wider, and then people experience something differently, which is still how I see writing."¹³ As she circles back to the same ideas over and over again, she disrupts bipolar thought patterns and encourages her reader to experience the fluidity and connectiveness that is the essence of her vision of social change. In this respect, the form of her writing is as integral to her political goals as is the theory of women's oppression she articulates in the content of the book.

Woman Hating initiates Dworkin's career-long pursuit to articulate the ways male power is organized. It lays the groundwork for all of her subsequent explorations, as each of her successive works is a refinement of this initial analysis, both in form and content. The following chapters on Woman Hating likewise lay the groundwork for her feminist analysis and serve as a basis of comparison for later chapters, which examine her rhetorical strategies in greater depth as her artistry plays a progressively more prominent and complicated role in her political analyses.

1
The Cultural Construction of Misogyny

In Woman Hating, Dworkin locates the root of women's oppression in the cultural gender scripts that teach females and males "who we are, how we behave, what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel."¹ Gender scripts are encoded in every facet of culture—from socialization within families to education, to religious practices, to the social institution of marriage, to laws, politics, publishing, sexual interactions, academic disciplines, popular culture, and fine art. Dworkin conceptualizes culture as a broad network of rules, rituals, artifacts, and codes governing human interactions in a society; while this network creates a common language and body of experience which makes it possible for us to interact, it also confines interactions to a particular, limited range of acceptable patterns of behaviors. Dworkin writes: "We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die" (34). These "scenarios of passage" are dictated largely by male and female mythological models:

These models are the substantive message of this culture—they define psychological sets and patterns of social interaction which, in our adult personae, we live out . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action . . . Take any aspect of behavior and one can find the source of the programmed response in the cultural structure. Western man's obsessive concern with metaphysical and political freedom is almost laughable in this context.² (155, Dworkin's italics)

Woman Hating uncovers "the cultural structure" responsible for the hierarchical polarization of male and female behaviors. She begins with fairy tales—"the first scenarios of men and women which mold our psyches, taught to us before we can know differently" (26)—then advances to pornography—the sequel to the childhood tales that provides adults explicit prescriptions for heterosexual interactions. Together, these two genres of cultural artifacts represent the mythological paradigms that en-gender human behaviors.

Fairy Tales

In contrast to the commonplace notion that fairy tales are fantasies that open up imaginative possibilities for children, Dworkin argues that they function to channel behaviors in predictable ways. "Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture," says Dworkin. "They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood models" that teach us how to act as males and females, including the rewards for adherence and the punishment for deviance from the prescribed behaviors (34-35).

Dworkin strips these childhood fantasies of their romantic hue and uses them as a synecdoche—a stylistic figure that substitutes a part for a whole or a whole for a part—to illuminate hegemonic gender roles and gender dynamics. In doing so, the fairy tale functions as, what Kenneth Burke calls, a representative anecdote that captures "the essence of human relations"—in this case, the essence of gender relations—as Dworkin perceives it.³ Dworkin thereby elevates the importance of these supposedly benign childhood stories.

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 ... 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 childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying in the stomach, as real identity. Between ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Introduction
• Part One The Artist as Revolutionary
• Part Two Battling Pornography
• Part Three "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity" in a Man-Made World
• Notes
• References
• Index