Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Andrea DworkinSözler ve Alıntılar
Society’s general willingness to do anything necessary to protect boys and men from male sexual aggression is testimony to the value of a male life. Society’s general refusal to do anything meaningful to protect women and girls from male sexual aggression is testimony to the worthlessness of a female life. A male life must be protected for its own sake. A female life warrants protection only when the female belongs to a male, as wife, daughter, mistress, whore; it is the owner who has a right to have his rights over his females protected from other men. A female’s bodily integrity or well-being is not protected because of the value of the woman as a human being in her own right.
We will know that we are free when the pornography no longer exists. As long as it does exist, we must understand that we are the women in it: used by the same power, subject to the same valuation, as the vile whores who beg for more.
The boys are betting on our compliance, our ignorance, our fear. We have always refused to face the worst that men have done to us. The boys count on it. The boys are betting that we cannot face the horror of their sexual system and survive. The boys are betting that their depictions of us as whores will beat us down and stop our hearts. The boys are betting that their penises and fists and knives and fucks and rapes will turn us into what they say we are—the compliant women of sex, the voracious cunts of pornography, the masochistic sluts who resist because we really want more. The boys are betting. The boys are wrong.
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.
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?
In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone shows that the boy has a choice: remain loyal to the mother who is in reality degraded, without authority against the father, unable to protect the child from the father’s violence or the violence of other adult men, or become a man, one who has the power and the right to hurt, to use force, to use his will and physical strength over and against women and children. Be the mother—do the housework—or be the father— carry a big stick. Be the mother— be fucked— or be the father— do the fucking. The boy has a choice. The boy chooses to become a man because it is better to be a man than a woman.
The ultimate impact of Whip Chick is to clarify the nature of male power and demonstrate how to hold onto it. In fantasy, the male can experiment with the consequences as he imagines them of loss of power over women. He can expect that what he has done to women will be done to him. He can view his own devastation in his imagination, experience it as a self-induced, self-contained, masturbatory sexual reality and, when the book is closed, as a result of having read it, be armed more thoroughly against any vulnerability that might imperil him. He will be convinced that male power can only be maintained by an absolutely cruel and ruthless subjugation of women.
The first object in a male’s personal history and in cultural importance is the mother. It is in properly internalizing her as an object that the male learns everything from heterosexuality to heterosexuality (homosexuality being generally regarded as a failure to learn), including: how to be a separate human being, that is, how to separate from