Pornography: Men
Possessing Women
By Andrea Dworkin
The Women’s Press, London, 1981
A summary:
Chapter One. Power
Lists seven tenets
of male supremacist ideology are:
- Men
have a “self” and “women must, by definition, lack it”. The conviction
is: ‘I want and I am entitled to have, therefore I am.’
- Physical
strength used against others.
- The
capacity to terrorize and to inculculate fear. Basically Dworkin
says this equates to terrorizing women through the fear of rape.
- The
power of naming, which allows men to define experience, and then
act on it. “The male doesn’t merely name women evil; he exterminates
nine million women as witches because he has named women evil.”
The power of naming in this context is that of naming the sex
act, and sexual organs.
- The
power of owning; as a man historically owned his wife and children.
- The
power of money; giving less money to women helps to keep them
powerless.
- The
power of sex. “In practice, fucking is an act of possession –
simultaneously an act of ownership, taking, force, it is conquering…”
Male society portrays women as having the power of sex – as inherently
carnal, however it is men who ultimately have this power.
Dworkin, having listed
these tenets, then says “The major theme of pornography as a genre
is male power, its nature, its magnitude, its meaning.” (p. 24)
She says that all the above aspects of male power appear in porn.
“Male power is the raison d’etre of pornography; the degradation
of the female is the means of achieving this power.” (p. 25)
Dworkin describes
a photograph from Hustler depicting a naked woman tied to the bonnet
of a jeep by two male hunters, who have supposedly captured her
and plan to take her home to “stuff and mount her”. The author uses
this photo as proof that all of the above tenets are the subject
of porn.
Chapter Two. Men
and Boys.
“Adult men are convinced
and sincere in their perception of adult women as objects… Becoming
a man requires that the boy learn to be indifferent to the fate
of women.” (p. 49)
In this chapter Dworkin
argues that boys grow up with a “strong loyalty to violence” because
of sports, and how they watch their parents behave. Essentially
she says that all men are intrinsically violent. She says “boys
become men to escape being victims by definition… Men are distinguished
from women by their commitment to do violence than to be victimised
by it.” (p. 51)
Dworkin goes on to
say that the penis becomes the representation of manhood, and that
“the penis must embody the violence of the male in order for him
to be male.” (p. 55)
“The reduction of
human erotic potential to ‘sex’, defined as the force of the penis
visited on an unwilling woman, is the governing sexual scenario
in male supremacist society.” (p. 55) Dworkin argues that the legendary
female dislike of sex has been a centuries-long rebellion against
this force – “In this way women have defied men and subverted male
power.” (p. 56)
Dworkin says that
all the atrocities of history are an expression of the essence of
male desire – the desire to hurt. Thus, “pornography reveals that
male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimising, hurting, exploiting;
that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination
are inseparable from the brutality of male history.” (p. 69)
Chapter Three.
The Marquis de Sade
In this chapter,
Dworkin outlines the various crimes of Sade, and then critiques
those who have been apologists for his violence on the basis that
he represented sexual freedom. She argues that the suffering of
various prostitutes and virgins at the hands of Sade is brushed
off simply because they were women. Her point is that being paid
for it does not mean that these women asked to be abused. “An exchange
of money, male to female, wipes away crime…” (p. 85) Dworkin also
uses the writings of Sade to make the point that male use of women
is an expected right.
Dworking discusses
Justine and Juliette. “One suffers and is provocative
in her suffering. The more she suffers, the more she provokes men
to make her suffer. Her suffering is arousing; the more she suffers,
the more aroused her torturers become. She, then, becomes responsible
for all her suffering, since she invites it by suffering. The other
revels in all that men do to her; she is the woman who likes it,
no matter what the ‘it’.” (p. 95) Essentially, these are two prototypes
of women in porn.
Chapter Four.
Objects
In this chapter Dworkin
states that men are trained to view women as objects – their whole
self, and also their parts – legs, feet, genitals… She says psychologists
describe this behaviour as normal. “The inevitable and intrinsic
cruelty involved in turning a person into an object should be apparent,
but since this constricting, this undermining, this devaluing is
normative, no particular cruelty is recognised in it.” (p. 109)
Dworkin says that
by seeing women as objects, men are able to define them: “…she is
cunt, formed by men, used by men, her sexual organs constituting
her whole being and her whole value… The object, the woman, goes
out into the world formed as men have formed her to be used as men
wish to use her. She is then a provocation. The object provokes
its use… When the object complains about the use to which she is
put, she is told, simply and firmly, not to provoke.” (p. 110-111)
Dworkin says that
the male obsession with beauty, and the alleged sexual power of
women, is an extension of this objectification, as is the need of
some men to be aroused through fetishization. “In the final analysis,
it must be recognised that the woman is the fetish, not just object,
but magical charm, charged with symbolic meaning; the made thing
that most consistently provokes erection.”(p. 127)
Chapter Five.
Force
Dworkin uses a photo
featuring two women, one trimming the pubic hair of another with
scissors, to state that “the underlying message is that the female
in her pure sexuality is sadistic… The absence of men from the photographs
encourages the belief that men are seeing women as they really are,
in private, with each other…” (p. 133) She says that this theory
not only appears on porn, but in scientific and ideological writing.
Examples of insects and other animals are used to prove this theory.
This idea is then used to justify the continued oppression of women.
Dworkin scoffs at this and points out that “naturally, they pick
bugs, fish, and fowl appropriate to their point of view.” (p. 134)
“This is the meanest
theme of pornography: the elucidation of what men insist is the
secret, hidden, true carnality of women, free women. When the secret
is revealed, the whore is exposed.” (p.136) Dworkin
says that men use porn to prove that women are really all sluts,
just as they suspected.
She says the reader
must work hard to suspend their disbelief when viewing porn, to
keep this idea alive. “Should disbelief prove stubborn and not easy
to suspend, the knowledge that the models posed for money provides
confirmation that they are whores and then the photographs are a
simple expression of a general truth.” (p. 137)
Dworkin insists that
the women in these photographs were not willing participants. “The
photographs also document a rape, a rape first enacted when the
women were set up and used: a rape repeated each time the viewer
consumes the photographs.” She then expands the definition of rape
by quite a large extent: “The essence of rape, then, is in the conviction
that no woman, however clearly degraded by what she does, is a victim.
If the harlot nature of the female is her true nature, then nothing
that signifies or reveals that nature is either violating or victimizing.
The essence of rape is in the conviction that such photographs –
in any way, to any degree – show a female sexuality independent
of male power… The rape of women who appear to “really like it that
way” by camera is the first definition of the female as victim in
contemporary society.” (p. 137-8)
Dworkin makes an
analogy of the idea of Jews going willingly to the gas chambers,
comparing it to the myth of women as willing victims of force. “This
is the fate of the metaphysical victim. She wants it, they all do.”
(p. 148)
She then links these
ideas to the possibility of cause and affect; to the idea that porn
can induce men to rape. “The pornographic conceit is that the normal
female demands the force, the violence, the pain. This
pornographic conceit is precisely reiterated in the works
of the most distinguished sexual philosophers, who as purveyors
of male supremacy necessarily share the values implicit in it. This
pornographic conceit accounts for the fact that men in general do
not believe that rap or battery are violations of female will… in
part because men of influence have consumed pornography in the private
world of men for centuries.” (pp. 165-6)
“[The idea] that
women are inhibited or have a low sex drive or do not want or need
sex. Perhaps this is a recognition, however perverse, that no one
could possibly like or want what men do to women.” (p. 179) Dworkin
discusses the idea of low female sex drive being used as a justification
for force, and says Kinsey’s research backs up this theory. His
research characterizes male sexuality as being predatory and constantly
in need of sex. “Kinsey considers women responsible for the unnatural
social restrictions on men.” (p. 183) Dworkin says women are cast
as inhibited for not wanting to engage in the violence of sex. She
also argues that the Kinsey study into sex offenders goes out of
its way to excuse the behaviour of the rapists they studied, even
in child abuse cases.
Chapter Six. Pornography
Chapter Seven.
Whores
Dworkin spends several
pages arguing that both the left (sexually liberal) and the right
(conservative) side of politics still insist on making whores of
women – whether they are prostitutes or “normal”. Even a wife is
an institutionalised whore.
“The pornography
of pregnancy – the graphic depiction of mothers as whores – completes
the picture. The maternal does not exclude the whorish… Pregnancy
is the triumph of the phallus over the death-dealing vagina.” (p.
222) Dworkin says pregnancy porn means that mothers cannot be treated
as holy, because obviously they are conquered whores. She even goes
so far to say that “the epidemic of caesarean sections in this country
is a sexual, not a medical, phenomenon. The doctors save the vagina
for the husband.” (p. 223)
In conclusion, she
writes: “In the system of male sexual domination explicated in pornography,
there is no way out, no redemption: not through desire, not through
reproduction.
“The woman’s sex
is appropriated, her body is possessed, she is used and she is despised:
the pornography does it and the pornography proves it… 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…”
(p. 224-225)
More Quotes
“The aversion of
women to the penis and to sex as men define it, overcome only when
survival and/or ideology demand it, must be seen not as Puritanism,
but as women’s refusal to pay homage to the primary purveyor of
male aggression against women.” P. 56
“… the grand truth:
that force leading to death is what men most secretly and most truly
value in sex.” P. 176
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