Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Andrea DworkinPornography: Men Possessing Women Quotes
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Women are reared, and often forced, to conform to the specific requirements of ideal beauty, whatever they are at any given time. From foot-binding to waist binding to breast binding, ideal beauty often requires deforming of the natural body. From clitoridectomy to breast enlargement or reduction to surgically altered noses, ideal beauty often requires mutilation of the natural body. From hair dyeing to face painting to necessary ornamentation (for instance, high-heeled shoes), ideal beauty often requires distortion or denial of the natural body. Ranging from idiocy to atrocity, any and all strategies are employed so that the natural female body will fit the male idea of ideal female beauty.
Force to exist as such requires violence. Violence inevitably means the infliction of pain. The norm of femininity as it manifests in normal women is masochism. Force actualizes femininity. Violence is sex. Pain is pleasure for the woman. The pornographic conceit is that the normal female demands the force, the violence, the pain.
Within this system, the only choice for the woman has been to embrace herself as whore, as sexual wanton or sexual commodity within phallic boundaries, or to disavow desire, disavow her body. The most cynical use of women has been on the Left—cynical because the word freedom is used to capture the loyalties of women who want, more than anything, to be free and who are then valued and used as left-wing whores: collectivized cunts. The most cynical use of women has been on the Right—cynical because the word good is used to capture the loyalties of women who want, more than anything, to be good and who are then valued and used as right- wing whores: wives, the whores who breed.
The function of beauty in the realm of the so-called erotic was further elucidated by Bataille when he wrote: “Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.” Beauty, then, consistently has meaning in the sphere of female death or violation. An object is always destroyed in the end by its use when it is used to the fullest and enough; and in the realm of female beauty, the final value of the object is precisely to be found in its cruel or deadly destruction.
With a disgust common to all feminists who have tried to be participants in the so-called humanism of men, only to discover through bitter experience that the culture of males does not allow honest female participation, Virginia Woolf wrote: “I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not to talk about themselves anymore.” Men have claimed the human point of view; they author it; they own it. Men are humanists, humans, human ism. Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it Her. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination. Men battle each other and Her; women battle to be let into the category “human” in imagination and reality. Men battle to keep the category “human” narrow, circumscribed by their own values and activities; women battle to change the meaning that men have given the word, to transform its meaning by suffusing it with female experience.
Will there be someone there to implore the audience to help her escape the pornography—law or no law, constitution or no constitution; will the audience understand that as long as the pornography of her exists she is a captive of it, a fugitive from it? Will the audience be willing to fight for her freedom by fighting against the pornography of her, because, as Linda Marchiano said of Deep Throat, “every time someone watches that film, they are watching me being raped”? Will the audience understand that she is standing in for those who didn’t get away; will the audience understand that those who didn’t get away were someone—each one was someone? Will the audience understand what stepping down from the page or out of the film cost her—what it took for her to survive, for her to escape, for her to dare to speak now about what happened to her then?