'The Root Cause' - Week III Women's Reading Group

[Erica Chan]

OUR BLOOD:
PROPHECIES AND DISCOURSES ON SEXUAL POLITICS
by Andrea Dworkin

Copyright © 1975, 1976 by Andrea Dworkin.
All rights reserved.

Found in full on The Andrea Dworkin Online Library Catalogue, Part I and Part II

Chapter 9

The Root Cause

[Delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, September 26, 1975.]

And the things best to know are first principles and causes. For through them and from them all other things may be known...
--Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I

I want to talk to you tonight about some realities and some possibilities. The realities are brutal and savage; the possibilities may seem to you, quite frankly, impossible. I want to remind you that there was a time when everyone believed that the earth was flat. All navigation was based on this belief. All maps were drawn to the specifications of this belief. I call it a belief, but then it was a reality, the only imaginable reality. It was a reality because everyone believed it to be true. Everyone believed it to be true because it appeared to be true. The earth looked flat; there was no circumstance in which it did not have, in the distances, edges off which one might fall; people assumed that, somewhere, there was the final edge beyond which there was nothing. Imagination was circumscribed, as it most often is, by inherently limited and culturally conditioned physical senses, and those senses determined that the earth was flat. This principle of reality was not only theoretical; it was acted on. Ships never sailed too far in any direction because no one wanted to sail off the edge of the earth; no one wanted to die the dreadful death that would result from such a reckless, stupid act. In societies in which navigation was a major activity, the fear of such a fate was vivid and terrifying.

Now, as the story goes, somehow a man named Christopher Columbus imagined that the earth was round. He imagined that one could reach the Far East by sailing west. How he conceived of this idea, we do not know; but he did imagine it, and once he had imagined it, he could not forget it. For a long time, until he met Queen Isabella, no one would listen to him or consider his idea because, clearly, he was a lunatic. If anything was certain, it was that the earth was flat. Now we look at pictures of the earth taken from outer space, and we do not remember that once there was a universal belief that the earth was flat.
This story has been repeated many times. Marie Curie got the peculiar idea that there was an undiscovered element which was active, ever-changing, alive. All scientific thought was based on the notion that all the elements were inactive, inert, stable. Ridiculed, denied a proper laboratory by the scientific establishment, condemned to poverty and obscurity, Marie Curie, with her husband, Pierre, worked relentlessly to isolate radium which was, in the first instance, a figment of her imagination. The discovery of radium entirely destroyed the basic premise on which both physics and chemistry were built. What had been real until its discovery was real no longer.

The known tried-and-true principles of reality, then, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, are often shaped out of profound ignorance. We do not know what or how much we do not know. Ignoring our ignorance, even though it has been revealed to us time and time again, we believe that reality is whatever we do know.
One basic principle of reality, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, is that there are two sexes, man and woman, and that these sexes are not only distinct from each other, but are opposite. The model often used to describe the nature of these two sexes is that of magnetic poles. The male sex is likened to the positive pole, and the female sex is likened to the negative pole. Brought into proximity with each other, the magnetic fields of these two sexes are supposed to interact, locking the two poles together into a perfect whole. Needless to say, two like poles brought into proximity are supposed to repel each other.

The male sex, in keeping with its positive designation, has positive qualities; and the female sex, in keeping with its negative designation, does not have any of the positive qualities attributed to the male sex. For instance, according to this model, men are active, strong, and courageous; and women are passive, weak, and fearful. In other words, whatever men are, women are not; whatever men can do, women cannot do; whatever capacities men have, women do not have. Man is the positive and woman is his negative.
Apologists for this model claim that it is moral because it is inherently egalitarian. Each pole is supposed to have the dignity of its own separate identity; each pole is necessary to a harmonious whole. This notion, of course, is rooted in the conviction that the claims made as to the character of each sex are true, that the essence of each sex is accurately described. In other words, to say that man is the positive and woman is the negative is like saying that sand is dry and water is wet--the characteristic which most describes the thing itself is named in a true way and no judgment on the worth of these differing characteristics is implied. Simone de Beauvoir exposes the fallacy of this "separate but equal" doctrine in the preface to THE SECOND SEX:

In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not . . . like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.... "The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities," said Aristotle; "we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness." And St. Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be "an imperfect man," all "incidental" being . . .
Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. 1
This diseased view of woman as the negative of man, "female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities," infects the whole of culture. It is the cancer in the gut of every political and economic system, of every social institution. It is the rot which spoils all human relationships, infests all human psychological reality, and destroys the very fiber of human identity.

This pathological view of female negativity has been enforced on our flesh for thousands of years. The savage mutilation of the female body, undertaken to distinguish us absolutely from men, has occurred on a massive scale. For instance, in China, for one thousand years, women's feet were reduced to stumps through footbinding. When a girl was seven or eight years old, her feet were washed in alum, a chemical that causes shrinkage. Then, all toes but the big toes were bent into the soles of her feet and bandaged as tightly as possible. This procedure was repeated over and over again for approximately three years. The girl, in agony, was forced to walk on her feet. Hard calluses formed; toenails grew into the skin; the feet were pus-filled and bloody; circulation was virtually stopped; often the big toes fell off. The ideal foot was three inches of smelly, rotting flesh. Men were positive and women were negative because men could walk and women could not. Men were strong and women were weak because men could walk and women could not. Men were independent and women were dependent because men could walk and women could not. Men were virile because women were crippled.

This atrocity committed against Chinese women is only one example of the systematic sadism acted out on the bodies of women to render us opposite to, and the negatives of, men. We have been, and arc, whipped, beaten, and assaulted; we have been, and are, encased in clothing designed to distort our bodies, to make movement and breathing painful and difficult; we have been, and are, turned into ornaments, so deprived of physical presence that we cannot run or jump or climb or even walk with a natural posture; we have been, and are, veiled, our faces covered by layers of suffocating cloth or by layers of make-up, so that even possession of our own faces is denied us; we have been, and are, forced to remove the hair from our armpits, legs, eyebrows, and often even from our pubic areas, so that men can assert, without contradiction, the positivity of their own hairy virility. We have been, and are, sterilized against our will; our wombs are removed for no medical reason; our clitorises are cut off; our breasts and the whole musculature of our chests are removed with enthusiastic abandon. This last procedure, radical mastectomy, is eighty years old. I ask you to consider the development of weaponry in the last eighty years, nuclear bombs, poisonous gases, laser beams, noise bombs, and the like, and to question the development of technology in relation to women. Why are women still being mutilated so promiscuously in breast surgery; why has this savage form of mutilation, radical mastectomy, thrived if not to enhance the negativity of women in relation to men? These forms of physical mutilation are brands which designate us as female by negating our very bodies, by destroying them.

In the bizarre world made by men, the primary physical emblem of female negativity is pregnancy. Women have the capacity to bear children; men do not. But since men are positive and women are negative, the inability to bear children is designated as a positive characteristic, and the ability to bear children is designated as a negative characteristic. Since women are most easily distinguished from men by virtue of this single capacity, and since the negativity of women is always established in opposition to the positivity of men, the childbearing capacity of the female is used first to fix, then to confirm, her negative or inferior status. Pregnancy becomes a physical brand, a sign designating the pregnant one as authentically female. Childbearing, peculiarly, becomes the form and substance of female negativity.

Again, consider technology in relation to women. As men walk on the moon and a man-made satellite approaches Mars for a landing, the technology of contraception remains criminally inadequate. The two most effective means of contraception are the pill and the I.U.D. The pill is poisonous and the I.U.D is sadistic. Should a woman want to prevent conception, she must either fail eventually because she uses an ineffective method of contraception, in which case she risks death through childbearing; or she must risk dreadful disease with the pill, or suffer agonizing pain with the I.U.D.--and, of course, with either of these methods, the risk of death is also very real. Now that abortion techniques have been developed which are safe and easy, women are resolutely denied free access to them. Men require that women continue to become pregnant so as to embody female negativity, thus confirming male positivity.

While the physical assaults against female life are staggering, the outrages committed against our intellectual and creative faculties have been no less sadistic. Consigned to a negative intellectual and creative life, so as to affirm these capacities in men, women are considered to be mindless; femininity is roughly synonymous with stupidity. We are feminine to the degree that our mental faculties are annihilated or repudiated. To enforce this dimension of female negativity, we are systematically denied access to formal education, and every assertion of natural intelligence is punished until we do not dare to trust our perceptions, until we do not dare to honor our creative impulses, until we do not dare to exercise our critical faculties, until we do not dare to cultivate our imaginations, until we do not dare to respect our own mental or moral acuity. Whatever creative or intellectual work we do manage to do is trivialized, ignored, or ridiculed, so that even those few whose minds could not be degraded are driven to suicide or insanity, or back into marriage and childbearing. There are very few exceptions to this inexorable rule.

The most vivid literary manifestation of this pathology of female negation is found in pornography. Literature is always the most eloquent expression of cultural values; and pornography articulates the purest distillation of those values. In literary pornography, where female blood can flow without the real restraint of biological endurance, the ethos of this murderous male-positive culture is revealed in its skeletal form: male sadism feeds on female masochism; male dominance is nourished by female submission.

In pornography, sadism is the means by which men establish their dominance. Sadism is the authentic exercise of power which confirms manhood; and the first characteristic of manhood is that its existence is based on the negation of the female --manhood can only be certified by abject female degradation, a degradation never abject enough until the victim's body and will have both been destroyed.

In literary pornography, the pulsating heart of darkness at the center of the male-positive system is exposed in all of its terrifying nakedness. That heart of darkness is this--that sexual sadism actualizes male identity. Women are tortured, whipped, and chained; women are bound and gagged, branded and burned, cut with knives and wires; women are pissed on and shit on; red-hot needles are driven into breasts, bones are broken, rectums are torn, mouths are ravaged, cunts are savagely bludgeoned by penis after penis, dildo after dildo--and all of this to establish in the male a viable sense of his own worth.
Typically in pornography, some of this gruesome cruelty takes place in a public context. A man has not thoroughly mastered a woman--he is not thoroughly a man--until her degradation is publicly witnessed and enjoyed. In other words, as a man establishes dominance he must also publicly establish ownership. Ownership is proven when a man can humiliate a woman in front of, and for the pleasure of, his fellows, and still she remains loyal to him. Ownership is further established when a man can loan a woman out as a carnal object, or give her as a gift to another man or to other men. These transactions make his ownership a matter of public record and increase his esteem in the eyes of other men. These transactions prove that he has not only claimed absolute authority over her body, but that he has also entirely mastered her will. What might have begun for the woman as submission to a particular man out of "love" for him--and what was in that sense congruent with her own integrity as she could recognize it--must end in the annihilation of even that claim to individuality. The individuality of ownership--"I am the one who owns"--is claimed by the man; but nothing must be left to the woman or in the woman on which she could base any claim to personal dignity, even the shabby dignity of believing, "I am the exclusive property of the man who degrades me." In the same way, and for the same reasons, she is forced to watch the man who possesses her exercising his sexual sadism against other women. This robs her of that internal grain of dignity that comes from believing, "I am the only one," or "I am perceived and my singular identity is verified when he degrades me," or "I am distinguished from other women because this man has chosen me."1

The pornography of male sadism almost always contains an idealized, or unreal, view of male fellowship. The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this--since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it. Each man, knowing his own deep-rooted impulse to savagery, presupposes this same impulse in other men and seeks to protect himself from it. The rituals of male sadism over and against the bodies of women are the means by which male aggression is socialized so that a man can associate with other men without the imminent danger of male aggression against his own person. The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.

This idealized view of male fellowship exposes the essentially homosexual character of male society. Men use women's bodies to form alliances or bonds with each other. Men use women's bodies to achieve recognizable power which will certify male identity in the eyes of other men. Men use women's bodies to enable them to engage in civil and peaceable social transactions with each other. We think that we live in a heterosexual society because most men are fixated on women as sexual objects; but, in fact, we live in a homosexual society because all credible transactions of power, authority, and authenticity take place among men; all transactions based on equity and individuality take place among men. Men are real; therefore, all real relationship is between men; all real communication is between men; all real reciprocity is between men; all real mutuality is between men. Heterosexuality, which can be defined as the sexual dominance of men over women, is like an acorn--from it grows the mighty oak of the male homosexual society, a society of men, by men, and for men, a society in which the positivity of male community is realized through the negation of the female, through the annihilation of women's flesh and will.

In literary pornography, which is a distillation of life as we know it, women are gaping holes, hot slits, fuck tubes, and the like. The female body is supposed to consist of three empty holes, all of which were expressly designed to be filled with erect male positivity.
The female life-force itself is characterized as a negative one: we are defined as inherently masochistic; that is, we are driven toward pain and abuse, toward self-destruction, toward annihilation--and this drive toward our own negation is precisely what identifies us as women. In other words, we are born so that we may be destroyed. Sexual masochism actualizes female negativity, just as sexual sadism actualizes male positivity. A woman's erotic femininity is measured by the degree to which she needs to be hurt, needs to be possessed, needs to be abused, needs to submit, needs to be beaten, needs to be humiliated, needs to be degraded. Any woman who resists acting out these so-called needs, or any woman who rebels against the values inherent in these needs, or any woman who refuses to sanction or participate in her own destruction is characterized as a deviant, one who denies her femininity, a shrew, a bitch, etc. Typically, such deviants are brought back into the female flock by rape, gang rape, or some form of bondage. The theory is that once such women have tasted the intoxicating sweetness of submission they will, like lemmings, rush to their own destruction.

Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. As the saying goes, women are made for love--that is, submission. Love, or submission, must be both the substance and purpose of a woman's life. For the female, the capacity to love is exactly synonymous with the capacity to sustain abuse and the appetite for it. For the woman, the proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.
In pornography, we see female love raw, its naked erotic skeleton; we can almost touch the bones of our dead. Love is the erotic masochistic drive; love is the frenzied passion which compels a woman to submit to a diminishing life in chains; love is the consuming sexual impulse toward degradation and abuse. The woman does literally give herself to the man; he does literally take and possess her.

The primary transaction which expresses this female submission and this male possession, in pornography as in life, is the act of fucking. Fucking is the basic physical expression of male positivity and female negativity. The relationship of sadist to masochist does not originate in the act of fucking; rather, it is expressed and renewed there.

For the male, fucking is a compulsive act, in pornography and in real life. But in real life, and not in pornography, it is an act fraught with danger, filled with dread. That sanctified organ of male positivity, the phallus, penetrates into the female void. During penetration, the male's whole being is his penis--it and his will to domination are entirely one; the erect penis is his identity; all sensation is localized in the penis and in effect the rest of his body is insensate, dead. During penetration, a male's very being is at once both risked and affirmed. Will the female void swallow him up, consume him, engulf and destroy his penis, his whole self? Will the female void pollute his virile positivity with its noxious negativity? Will the female void contaminate his tenuous maleness with the overwhelming toxicity of its femaleness? Or will he emerge from the terrifying emptiness of the female's anatomical gaping hole intact--his positivity reified because, even when inside her, he managed to maintain the polarity of male and female by maintaining the discreteness and integrity of his steel-like rod; his masculinity affirmed because he did not in fact merge with her and in so doing lose himself, he did not dissolve into her, he did not become her nor did he become like her, he was not subsumed by her.

This dangerous journey into the female void must be undertaken again and again, compulsively, because masculinity is nothing in and of itself; in and of itself it does not exist; it has reality only over and against, or in contrast to, female negativity. Masculinity can only be experienced, achieved, recognized, and embodied in opposition to femininity. When men posit sex, violence, and death as elemental erotic truths, they mean this--that sex, or fucking, is the act which enables them to experience their own reality, or identity, or masculinity most concretely; that violence, or sadism, is the means by which they actualize that reality, or identity, or masculinity; and that death, or negation, or nothingness, or contamination by the female is what they risk each time they penetrate into what they imagine to be the emptiness of the female hole.

What then is behind the claim that fucking is pleasurable for the male? How can an act so saturated with the dread of loss of self, of loss of penis, be pleasurable? How can an act so obsessive, so anxiety-ridden, be characterized as pleasurable?

First, it is necessary to understand that this is precisely the fantasy dimension of pornography. In the rarefied environs of male pornography, male dread is excised from the act of fucking, censored, edited out. The sexual sadism of males rendered so vividly in pornography is real; women experience it daily. Male domination over and against female flesh is real; women experience it daily. The brutal uses to which female bodies are put in pornography are real; women suffer these abuses on a global scale, day after day, year after year, generation after generation. What is not real, what is fantasy, is the male claim at the heart of pornography that fucking is for them an ecstatic experience, the ultimate pleasure, an unmixed blessing, a natural and easy act in which there is no terror, no dread, no fear. Nothing in reality documents this claim. Whether we examine the slaughter of the nine million witches in Europe which was fueled by the male dread of female carnality, or examine the phenomenon of rape which exposes fucking as an act of overt hostility against the female enemy, or investigate impotence which is the involuntary inability to enter the female void, or trace the myth of the vagina dentata (the vagina full of teeth) which is derived from a paralyzing fear of female genitalia, or isolate menstrual taboos as an expression of male terror, we find that in real life the male is obsessed with his fear of the female, and that this fear is most vivid to him in the act of fucking.

Second, it is necessary to understand that pornography is a kind of propaganda designed to convince the male that he need not be afraid, that he is not afraid; to shore him up so that he can fuck; to convince him that fucking is an unalloyed joy; to obscure for him the reality of his own terror by providing a pornographic fantasy of pleasure which he can learn as a creed and from which he can act to dominate women as a real man must. We might say that in pornography the whips, the chains, and the other paraphernalia of brutality are security blankets which give the lie to the pornographic claim that fucking issues from manhood like light from the sun. But in life, even the systematized abuse of women and the global subjugation of women to men is not sufficient to stem the terror inherent for the male in the act of fucking.

Third, it is necessary to understand that what is experienced by the male as authentic pleasure is the affirmation of his own identity as a male. Each time he survives the peril of entering the female void, his masculinity is reified. He has proven both that he is not her and that he is like other hims. No pleasure on earth matches the pleasure of having proven himself real, positive and not negative, a man and not a woman, a bona fide member of the group which holds dominion over all other living things.

Fourth, it is necessary to understand that under the sexual system of male positivity and female negativity, there is literally nothing in the act of fucking, except accidental clitoral friction, which recognizes or actualizes the real eroticism of the female, even as it has survived under slave conditions. Within the confines of the male-positive system, this eroticism does not exist. After all, a negative is a negative is a negative. Fucking is entirely a male act designed to affirm the reality and power of the phallus, of masculinity. For women, the pleasure in being fucked is the masochistic pleasure of experiencing self-negation. Under the male-positive system, the masochistic pleasure of self-negation is both mythicized and mystified in order to compel women to believe that we experience fulfillment in selflessness, pleasure in pain, validation in self-sacrifice, femininity in submission to masculinity. Trained from birth to conform to the requirements of this peculiar world view, punished severely when we do not learn masochistic submission well enough, entirely encapsulated inside the boundaries of the male-positive system, few women ever experience themselves as real in and of themselves. Instead, women are real to themselves to the degree that they identify with and attach themselves to the positivity of males. In being fucked, a woman attaches herself to one who is real to himself and vicariously experiences reality, such as it is, through him; in being fucked, a woman experiences the masochistic pleasure of her own negation which is perversely articulated as the fulfillment of her femininity.

Now, I want to make a crucial distinction--the distinction between truth and reality. For humans, reality is social; reality is whatever people at a given time believe it to be. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that reality is either whimsical or accidental. In my view, reality is always a function of politics in general and sexual politics in particular--that is, it serves the powerful by fortifying and justifying their right to domination over the powerless. Reality is whatever premises social and cultural institutions are built on. Reality is also the rape, the whip, the fuck, the hysterectomy, the clitoridectomy, the mastectomy, the bound foot, the high-heel shoe, the corset, the make-up, the veil, the assault and battery, the degradation and mutilation in their concrete manifestations. Reality is enforced by those whom it serves so that it appears to be self-evident. Reality is self-perpetuating, in that the cultural and social institutions built on its premises also embody and enforce those premises. Literature, religion, psychology, education, medicine, the science of biology as currently understood, the social sciences, the nuclear family, the nation-state, police, armies, and civil law--all embody the given reality and enforce it on us. The given reality is, of course, that there are two sexes, male and female; that these two sexes are opposite from each other, polar; that the male is inherently positive and the female inherently negative; and that the positive and negative poles of human existence unite naturally into a harmonious whole.

Truth, on the other hand, is not nearly so accessible as reality. In my view, truth is absolute in that it does exist and it can be found. Radium, for instance, always existed; it was always true that radium existed; but radium did not figure in the human notion of reality until Marie and Pierre Curie isolated it. When they did, the human notion of reality had to change in fundamental ways to accommodate the truth of radium. Similarly, the earth was always a sphere; this was always true; but until Columbus sailed west to find the East, it was not real. We might say that truth does exist, and that it is the human project to find it so that reality can be based on it.

I have made this distinction between truth and reality in order to enable me to say something very simple: that while the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, "by virtue of a certain lack of qualities." And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely real; but the model itself is not true. We are living imprisoned inside a pernicious delusion, a delusion on which all reality as we know it is predicated.

In my view, those of us who are women inside this system of reality will never be free until the delusion of sexual polarity is destroyed and until the system of reality based on it is eradicated entirely from human society and from human memory. This is the notion of cultural transformation at the heart of feminism. This is the revolutionary possibility inherent in the feminist struggle.

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic nonidentity in women--that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know them so that this division of human flesh into two camps--one an armed camp and the other a concentration camp--is no longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed. The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations--for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right--these institutions are real and they must be destroyed. If they are not, we will be consigned as women to perpetual inferiority and subjugation.

I believe that freedom for women must begin in the repudiation of our own masochism. I believe that we must destroy in ourselves the drive to masochism at its sexual roots. I believe that we must establish our own authenticity, individually and among ourselves--to experience it, to create from it, and also to deprive men of occasions for reifying the lie of manhood over and against us. I believe that ridding ourselves of our own deeply entrenched masochism, which takes so many tortured forms, is the first priority; it is the first deadly blow that we can strike against systematized male dominance. In effect, when we succeed in excising masochism from our own personalities and constitutions, we will be cutting the male life line to power over and against us, to male worth in contradistinction to female degradation, to male identity posited on brutally enforced female negativity--we will be cutting the male life line to manhood itself. Only when manhood is dead--and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it--only then will we know what it is to be free.