What follows is the transcription of a speech by Andrea Dworkin, regarding the prevalence of chauvinistic biological-determinism, in feminist circles, ideology.
Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous, Deadly Idea – by Andrea Dworkin.
One of the slurs constantly used against me by women writing in behalf of pornography under the flag of feminism in misogynist media is that I endorse a primitive biological determinism.
Woman Hating (1974) clearly repudiates any biological determinism; so does Our Blood (1976), especially “The Root Cause.” So does this piece, published twice, in 1978 in Heresies and in 1979 in Broadsheet. Heresies was widely read in the Women’s Movement in 1978. The event described in this piece, which occurred in 1977, was fairly notorious, and so my position on biological determinism–I am against it–is generally known in the Women’s Movement. One problem is that this essay, like others in this book, has no cultural presence: no one has to know about it or take it into account to appear less than ignorant; no one will be held accountable for ignoring it. Usually critics and political adversaries have to reckon with the published work of male writers whom they wish to malign.
No such rules protect girls.
One pro-pornography “feminist” published an article in which she said I was anti-abortion, this in the face of decades of work for abortion rights and membership in many pro-choice groups. No one even checked her allegation; the periodical would not publish a retraction. One’s published work counts as nothing, and so do years of one’s political life.
“All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.” -Hitler, Mein Kampf
“It would be lunacy to try to estimate the value of man according to his race, thus declaring war on the Marxist idea that men are equal, unless we are determined to draw the ultimate consequences. And the ultimate consequence of recognizing the importance of blood – that is, of the racial foundation in general – is the transference of this estimation to the individual person.” -Hitler, Mein Kampf
Hisses. Women shouting at me: slut, bisexual, she fucks men. And before I had spoken, I had been trembling, more afraid to speak than I had ever been. And, in a room of 200 sister lesbians, as angry as I have ever been. “Are you a bisexual?” some woman screamed over the pandemonium, the hisses and shouts merging into a raging noise. “I’m a Jew,” I answered; then, a pause, “and a lesbian, and a woman.”
And a coward….
Jew was enough. In that room, Jew was what mattered. In that room, to answer the question “Do you still fuck men?” with a No…as I did, was to betray my deepest convictions: All of my life, I have hated the proscribers – those who enforce sexual conformity. By answering “No”, I had given-in to the inquisitors.
I felt ashamed.
It humiliated me to see myself then: one who resists the enforcers out there with militancy, but gives in without resistance to the enforcers among us. The event was a panel on “Lesbianism as a Personal Politic” that took place in New York City, Lesbian Pride Week 1977. A self-proclaimed lesbian separatist had spoken; and, amidst the generally accurate description of male crimes against women, came an ideological rot – one articulated of late with increasing frequency in feminist circles: women and men are distinct species or races (the words are used interchangeably); men are biologically inferior to women; male violence is a biological inevitability – to eliminate it, one must eliminate the species/race itself; in eliminating the biologically inferior species/race Man, the new Ubermensch Womon (prophetically foreshadowed by the lesbian separatist herself) will have the earthly dominion that is her true biological destiny.
We are left to infer that the society of an Ubermensch Womon creation will be only good because she is good – biologically good. In the interim, incipient SuperWomon will not do anything to ‘encourage’ women to ‘collaborate’ with men: no abortion clinics or battered woman sanctuaries will come from her. After all, she has to conserve her ‘energy’ which must not be dissipated keeping ‘weaker’ women alive through reform measures. The audience applauded the passages on female superiority/male inferiority enthusiastically. This doctrine seemed to be music to their ears.
Was there dissent, silently buried in the applause? Was some of the response the spontaneous pleasure that we all know when, at last, the tables are turned, even for a minute, even in imagination? Or has powerlessness driven us mad, so that we dream secret dreams of a final solution perfect in its simplicity, absolute in its efficacy? Will a leader someday strike that secret chord, harness those dreams, our own nightmare turned upside down?
Is there no haunting, restraining memory of the blood spilled, the bodies burned, the ovens filled, the peoples enslaved, by those who have assented throughout history to the very same demagogic logic? In the audience, I saw women I like, women I love – women not strangers to me: women who are good not because of biology but because they care about being good. These women, too, were swept along in a sea of affirmation.
I spoke out.
I spoke out because those women had applauded. I spoke out because I am a Jew who has studied Nazi Germany; so I know that many Germans followed Hitler though they, also, cared about being good, but found it easier to be good by biological definition than by act. Those Germans, wretched in what they experienced as their own unbearable powerlessness, became convinced that they were so good biologically that nothing they did could be bad.
“We have exterminated a bacterium [Jews] because we did not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. I will not see so much as a small area of sepsis appear here or gain a hold. Wherever it may form, we will cauterize it. All in all, we can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it.” – Himmler (1943)
So I spoke, though afraid: I said that I would not be associated with a movement that advocated the most pernicious ideology on the face of the earth. It was this very ideology of biological determinism that had licensed the slaughter and/or enslavement of virtually any group one could name, including women by men. (“Use their own poison against them”, one woman screamed.)
Anywhere one looked, it was this philosophy that justified atrocity. This was one faith that destroyed life with a momentum all its own.Insults were hurled at me with unabated intensity as I spoke, but gradually those women I liked or loved, and others I did not know, began to question openly the philosophy they had been applauding…and also their own acquiescence. Embraced by many women on my way out, I left. Still sickened, humiliated by the insults, emotionally devastated by the abuse. Time passes, but the violence done is not undone. It never is.
“I am told that I am a sexist. I do believe that the differences between the sexes are our most precious heritage, even though they make women superior in the ways that matter most.” -George Gilder, Sexual Suicide
“Perhaps this female wisdom comes from resignation to the reality of male aggression. More likely it is a harmonic of the woman’s knowledge that ultimately she is the one who matters. As a result, while there are more brilliant men than brilliant women, there are more good women than good men.” -Steven Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy
As a class (not necessarily as individuals), women can bear children. From the above fact, according to male-supremacist ideology, do all women’s other attributes and potentialities derive. On the pedestal, immobile like waxen statues, or in the gutter, failed icons mired in shit, women are exalted or degraded because their biological traits are what they are. Citing genes, genitals, DNA, pattern-releasing smells, biograms, hormones, or whatever is in vogue, male supremacists make their case.
Their case, in essence: Women are biologically too good; or too bad; or, at least, too different to do anything other than reproduce and serve men sexually and domestically. The newest variations of this distressingly ancient theme center on hormones and DNA: Men are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into murder and rape. And, in women, pacifism is hormonal and addiction to birth is molecular.
Since in Darwinian terms, survival of the fittest means the triumph of the most aggressive human beings, men are and always will be superior to women in terms of their ability to protect and extend their own authority. Therefore women, being ‘weaker’ (less aggressive), will always be at the mercy of men. Must the fact that this theory of the social ascendancy of the fittest consigns women to eternal indignity and, applied to race, conjures up Hitler’s identical view of evolutionary struggle trouble us?
“By current theory,” writes Edward O. Wilson in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a bible of genetic justification for slaughter, “genocide or genosorption strongly favoring the aggressor need take place only once every few generations to direct evolution.”
“I have told you the very low opinion in which you [women] were held by Mr. Oscar Browning. I have indicated what Napoleon once thought of you and what Mussolini thinks now. Then, in case any of you aspire to fiction, I have copied out for your benefit the advice of the critic about courageously acknowledging the limitations of your sex. I have referred to Professor X and given prominence to his statement that women are intellectually, morally and physically inferior to men . . . and here is a final warning . . . Mr. John Langdon Davies warns women that ‘when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary’. I hope you will make note of it.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Pulled toward an ideology based on the moral and social significance of a distinct female biology because of its emotional and philosophical familiarity; drawn to the spiritual dignity inherent in a ‘female principle’; and, of course, unable to abandon, by will or impulse, a lifelong and centuries-old commitment to childbearing as the sole female-creative-act: Feminists have increasingly tried to transform the very ideology that has enslaved us into a dynamic, religious, psychologically compelling celebration of female biological potential.
Are women to accept the historically male world-view of a moral polarity that is biologically fixed, genetically or hormonally or genitally absolute; or does women’s own historical experience of social deprivation and injustice teach us that to be free and in a just world…that we will have to destroy the power, the dignity, the efficacy of this one idea – Biological Determinism – above all others?
Recently, more and more feminists have been advocating social, spiritual, and mythological models that are female-supremacist and/or matriarchal. To me, this advocacy signifies a basic conformity to the tenets of biological determinism that underpin the most corrupt aspects of the now-male social-system. The worship of our procreative capacity as power may temporarily stay the male-supremacist hand that cradles the test tube. True enough, this attempted transformation may have survival value.
But the price we pay is that we become carriers of the disease we must cure.
It is no accident that in the ancient matriarchies’ men were castrated, sacrificially slaughtered, and excluded from public forms of power; nor is it an accident that some female supremacists now believe men to be a distinct and inferior species or race: Wherever power is accessible, or bodily integrity honored, on the basis of biological attribute, systematized cruelty permeates the society and murder and mutilation contaminate it. We will not be different.
It is shamefully easy for us to enjoy our own fantasies of biological omnipotence while despising men for enjoying the reality of theirs. And it is dangerous: Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination. Any woman who believes Biological Determinism is worthwhile (because – for now – it benefits her), is a woman who doesn’t stop to realize that her heritage, as a women, is full of those who have been devastated by the concrete consequences of Biological Determinism.