“The antifeminism of the Left, Right, and center fixes the power of the Right over women.”
--Andrea Dworkin
No one was more thrilled than I when it was announced that an imprint of Macmillan was going to re-publish three of Andrea Dworkin’s classic works from the ‘70s and ‘80s. I came to Dworkin’s work about a decade later than when she wrote them; Life and Death was the first of her books I read. I have never been more transfixed by a book: it was literally impossible to put down, and I felt my brain exploding with each new point she made. She ripped the scales from my eyes, and it hurt so badly, but it was also truth. She spoke that truth in the most raw form possible, and that form was born of what she knew and what she had experienced. Andrea Dworkin was a seer and a revelator.
But by the time I encountered her work, she had also been turned into a straw woman footnote in the history of second wave feminism. By the advent of the third wave of feminism in the mid-1990s, which embraced a neoliberal definition of women’s empowerment, Dworkin was seen as rigid, unsophisticated, and--sin of sins--“sex negative.” Well, the third wave’s “sex positivity” has certainly not yielded anything like women’s empowerment, and in the third decade of the 21st century, it is Dworkin’s take on the sexual revolution that is becoming ascendant, ironically enough. Dworkin was always ahead of her time, but she is perfect for our time. [1] Macmillan judged aright in republishing some of her work for a new generation, for now there are ears to hear.
Of the three republished works, Right Wing Women contains the most trenchant political analysis, in my opinion. As a radical feminist, Dworkin asks how it is possible that right wing women exist--that is, how can any woman accept the rigid sex roles and required submission to patriarchal authority that are stereotyped as the position of the Right? Though the foils of her time were women such as Phyllis Schlafly and Marabel Morgan, the question is still very timely as mainstream feminists express utter bewilderment at the significant number of women voting for Donald Trump (43% overall and 53% of white women in 2024) and serving in his administration. Karoline Leavitt, a young Republican working mother, is literally the public face of the Trump administration today. Dworkin would not have been bewildered, however; in fact, she would have predicted all of this. Let’s examine her analysis.
Some suggest that right wing women are simply fools, according to Dworkin: “Noxious male philosophers from all disciplines have, for centuries, maintained that women follow a biological imperative derived directly from their reproductive capacities that translates necessarily into narrow lives, small minds, and a rather meanspirited puritanism . . . women as a class are the dulled conformists, the orthodox believers, the disciples of unwavering faith” (3, 4). Under this theory, women are simply too stupid not to realize that their interests do not align with the Right. A bit more education and consciousness-raising for women are the proffered antidotes. We certainly saw that approach on display in the 2024 election, where an ad promoting the Harris campaign showed women coming to their senses, conspiring together, and secretly voting for Harris while their husbands blithely assumed they voted for Trump. (Is there such a thing as womansplaining? It’s certainly just as tedious as mansplaining.)
Dworkin is not content with this explanation; she seems to believe that right wing women (as she calls them) are actually not stupid at all. This belief, of course, did not endear Dworkin to mainstream feminism. How utterly ironic that Dworkin’s insistence that right wing women were intelligent was viewed as an antifeminist stance. Surely the underestimation of women’s intelligence is the more truly antifeminist stance?
Indeed, Dworkin believes that an in-depth analysis of the conclusions right wing women have reached could inform feminism of its own glaring blind spots. For example, at one point Dworkin notes, “Because feminism is a movement for liberation of the powerless by the powerless in a closed system based on their powerlessness, right wing women judge it a futile movement.” (225) They are not necessarily wrong about this; indeed, this is a proposition worth analysis and debate—but the problem is, no debate will be forthcoming because right wing women are assumed, almost by definition, to be lacking in intelligence or courage and are therefore unworthy to debate.
This dismissiveness is uncalled for. Right wing women are women; it is wrong for feminism to refuse to even hear their voices and to refuse to assess whether these women have insights worth investigating. As Dworkin expresses it, “[T]he fate of every individual woman—no matter what her politics, character, values, qualities—is tied to the fate of all women whether she likes it or not. . . .[I]t means that every woman’s fate is tied to the fate of women whom she politically and morally abhors” (210). Unfortunately, mainstream feminism has actually encouraged the “othering” of right wing women; it often seems that no self-respecting leftist feminist would be caught dead talking to a right wing woman. To her credit, because Dworkin really is a feminist, and a radical one at that, she welcomes the debate. Dworkin is willing to ask all the right questions: How do right wing women assess the situation all women face in a male-dominated social system? Is their view justified? Going further, what do right wing women see that may be a blind spot for mainstream leftist feminists? And if their vision is clear-sighted, what changes must be made to feminist strategy in cognizance of that fact? And might right wing women actually be, in a sense, just as feminist as any other group of women? Dworkin the iconoclast is up for the challenge of investigating the answers to these questions.
In the first place, Dworkin asserts that right wing women see the subordination of women as clearly as any other women do. Like all women, they see and experience male violence, and they observe that it enjoys impunity in male-dominated society. How could they not? As Dworkin expresses it,
“The accounts of rape, wife-beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors, should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in the wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt.” (10)
Right wing women also see, with all other women, that a male-dominated social system will always ensure a male-dominated economic system, for “the disdain of men for women makes the work of women less simply because women do it” (55). That is, right wing women see that it is in the interest of men to value women’s labor less than that of men, to value traditionally women-heavy fields as less than that of traditionally male fields, to ensure that the accumulation of massive wealth—and the social and political power it brings--is only within the capabilities of men and not women. They understand that the general economic dependence of women on men is a requirement of the system men create; a feature, not a bug.
Right wing women, along with all other women, also see that men will seek to take from them their voice, their lives’ meaning, and their history. The works and inventions of men will be celebrated; the lives of women will pass into obscurity—and if not, they will be forced into obscurity. In fact, not standing out as a woman will be incentivized in a male system: “Like the chameleon, the woman must blend into her environment, ever calling attention to the qualities that distinguish her, because to do so would be to attract the predator’s deadly attention. She is, in fact, hunted meat—all the male auteurs, scientists, and homespun philosophers on street corners will say so proudly. . . women are despised when they refuse to be lost” (9, 30).
With all other women, right wing women know that forced sex (and possibly, therefore, forced childbearing) is always a threat, and that “women are interchangeable as sex objects” to men (133). This means peril, for violation of women by men arouses men: “Beat up a man for speaking his mind and there is a human rights violation—hunt him or capture him or terrorize him and his human rights have been violated; do the same to a woman and the violation is sexy. . . . violation becomes a synonym for sex” (201). The individuality of women disappears under this relentless propaganda, which is perilous for women. Dworkin calls this attitude towards women a key part of the “brothel model,” one of two models men adopt in thinking about women (the second is the “farm model” [2]). When women are seen as interchangeable, horrors await; the same horrors that characterize the life of a prostitute: “She is there because the man wants a woman, someone exactly of her [sex] class, someone who is her sex function, not human, but an it, a c**t: she is there for that reason, not for anything human in her . . . The individual woman is a fiction—as is her will—since individuality is precisely what women are denied when they are defined and used as a sex class” (167, 172). This leads to treatment that can only be considered hostile torture: “prostitution is by its nature antithetical to freedom” (166).
All women know these things: it would be difficult to conclude that right wing women have not analyzed the situation correctly. They are no fools. Where right wing women part company with mainstream feminists associated with the left is along two dimensions: 1) what is to be done?, and 2) who are women’s allies?
The question “what is to be done?” hinges first on a deeply personal response to facing life as a woman in a male-dominated system as described above. To date, there are three discernible responses: suicide, un-become a woman, and survive as a woman. As to the first response, in many countries of the world were women are especially subordinated, women commit suicide at a very high rate compared to men, and almost all female suicides are linked, in one way or the other, to the violative condition of being a woman in a male-dominated society. The tragic case of Kiena Dawes is a case in point, though this pattern is repeated in every country in the world from violations such as forced marriage, forced childbearing, forced sexual relations, domestic violence, psychological abuse, prostitution, and many other situations:
“A young mother who was tragically hit by a train after suffering a campaign of domestic abuse left a note saying her partner had 'killed me', a jury heard today. 'Bright and popular' Kiena Dawes, 23, left her nine-month-old daughter with a friend then drove to a nearby railway line, lying across the tracks as an express train approached at 110mph. Following her death, a suicide note was found on her phone in which she wrote: 'Ryan Wellings killed me.'
“Her final words were today read to a jury as 30-year-old Wellings stood trial for the manslaughter of Ms Dawes, as well as controlling and coercive behaviour over a two-and-a-half year period and assaulting causing actual bodily harm. Wellings treated Ms Dawes in 'a thoroughly abusive way' and subjected her to repeated physical assaults during the pair's relationship, Paul Greaney, KC, told jurors. A final assault on July 11, 2022 – just 11 days before her suicide on the West Coast Main Line near Garstang, Lancashire - was a 'significant factor' in her decision to take her own life, he said. In the suicide note, Ms Dawes wrote: 'Ryan Wellings killed me. . . 'He ruined every bit of strength I had left. I didn't deserve it. I didn't ask for it. I hope my life saves another by police services acting faster.'
“Writing that she 'went through pain no one could imagine', Ms Dawes added: 'No one will know what I went through. 'I was murdered. Slowly. 'They tortured me, till there was nothing left. I lost my fight but I didn't give up my battle.' Ms Dawes wrote that 'worst of all' was having to leave behind the daughter she shared with Wellings. 'Please can the world protect her,' she added. 'Make sure she is safe. She is loved. She is heard and she doesn't ever experience any of the pain I have. I'm so sorry I had to go. I tried my hardest to stay with you, to keep you safe from these monsters. But I couldn't, I couldn't protect you because they are allowed to live, speak, lie. Most importantly LIE. They lied. Repeatedly about me. The world turned their back on me. I would never have left otherwise. I was strong. I had dreams. I had a future at one point. That was taken away from me. I will always love my family. I love them unconditionally. I always have, I always will. Please protect them. I won't rest in peace till I know my girl is safe.'
“Ms Dawes wrote that she hoped her daughter is 'kept away from the monster who is called her dad': 'She deserves more.' Saying her daughter's 'beautiful smile when you wake up and see my face' was 'enough to save me', she concluded: 'But these people took me away, I am so sorry I hope your life turns out happy, don't forget how much I love you. I am going to miss you so much…. Good night and I am sorry.'
“The couple met in January 2020, with the relationship quickly becoming 'intense', Mr Greaney said. Within weeks, Wellings had the hairdresser's name tattooed on his neck and her face on his leg. However there were early signs of 'trouble', he added, with Ms Dawes sending him a message reading: 'Stop hurting me now.' . . . But in April, Wellings travelled to the south coast where he proposed to Ms Dawes on a beach, he told jurors. She accepted, and in May the pair moved into a house in Dorset, with Wellings sometimes buying 'extravagant' gifts and champagne, and at others behaving in a 'belittling' way towards her. After one argument, the friend found the house 'smashed up' and Ms Dawes told her Wellings had tried to strangle her with a phone charger, jurors heard. On another occasion on May 29, 2020, Ms Dawes later alleged in a statement to police that Wellings had thrown a stool at her, called her a 'slag' and told her to kill herself. [Mr Greaney] said a 'pattern' had developed of Wellings being 'aggressive and violent' before 'showering' Ms Dawes with affection. This amounted to coercive and controlling behaviour and was therefore a crime, Mr Greaney said. 'In the end, it was to grind Kiena down.'
“Messages were read to the jury including one in which Ms Dawes wrote: 'You've f****** terrorised me.' In another she wrote: 'You're a head f*** and you know it will ruin me.' She also wrote: 'You're a bully.' In February 2021, Ms Dawes discovered she was pregnant with Wellings' child, later saying both were 'over the moon'. From that point she stopped taking her medication and her mental health took a 'downturn', she later said in a police statement. 'The emotional abuse was on a daily basis,' she said. 'He would talk to other women on social media and was cheating.'
“Wellings would call her 'a psychopath and a freak' and tell her the baby would be taken off her when it was born, she said. She ended up in hospital for three weeks feeling 'suicidal', but while Wellings was 'supportive' the abuse continued after she was discharged. 'He would say he doesn't want to be with me because I'm too fat,' her statement continued. 'He would say that I am stuck with him and no one else would be with me.' That April she threw him out of the flat they were renting in Fleetwood because he had been cheating on her – only for 'associates' of Wellings to threaten to set her car on fire, jurors heard.”
While suicide cannot responsibly be advocated, it is impossible to read this account and conclude that Kiena Dawes did not fully understand her situation. Unfortunately, she saw no way out, and rather than continue to live in her situation of physical and psychological torture, she left this earth. This is one understandable, regrettable response to living as a woman in a male-dominated society.
Another strategem has only lately been employed: to flee womanhood itself by un-becoming one, that is, to become a transman by taking male hormones, perhaps also undergoing elective mastectomy, hysterectomy, and phalloplasty. In reading the stories of transitioning women, such as in Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, one finds stories of childhood sexual abuse, rigid sex roles for women they could not fit into, the horror of finding oneself as prey for men on the street when puberty began to transform their bodies, the terror of seeing what happens to women in heterosexual porn . . . the drumbeat of being fated to being, as Dworkin put it, “hunted meat.” And always lesser than. What would it be like to live free from fear, able to walk down the street at night without being filled with panic, able to retain one’s self conception as a human being in the company of men, able to love and be loved as an equal, not an inferior, not an object? It is a heady dream.
Of course, it is a dream without femaleness. And since one is a female, it is a metaphorical form of suicide. To survive in a male-dominated world, it helps to be a man. But then, we already knew that.
But is it possible to survive as a woman in a male-dominated society? Dworkin weighs in:
“Not wanting to die, and knowing the sadism of men, knowing what men can do in the name of sex, in the f**k, for the sake of pleasure, for the sake of power, knowing torture, having been able to predict all the prisons from her place in the bedroom and the brothel, knowing how callous men are to those less than themselves, knowing the fist, bondage, the farming f**k and the brothel f**k, seeing the indifference of men to human freedom, seeing the enthusiasm of men for diminishing others through physical domination, seeing the invisibility of women to men, seeing the absolute disregard of humanity in women by men, seeing the disdain of men for women’s lives, and not wanting to die—and not wanting to die—women propose two very different solutions for themselves in relation to men and this man’s world” (179).
The question “what is to be done?” then bifurcates according to whether one believes there is a genuine escape from a male-dominated system or not. Some believe there is an escape, that a single standard of human dignity can be asserted to apply to both men and women, and that men—with enough prodding—will come to see that a system of male dominance means that happiness and peace will forever elude them, and will therefore choose to abandon it. This will take time, of course; it’s been barely 100 years since women in the United States gained the right to vote; about 50 years since marital rape was criminalized. At the same time, it is not clear that progress will endure. For example, in the last decade, women in some US states have seen their right to abortion enshrined in state constitutions, while in other states a woman’s right to abortion has all but disappeared. Women find it almost financially impossible to both produce and reproduce, and so birth rates have plummeted worldwide. Domestic violence-related mass murders have soared, while the consumption of ever more depraved and violent pornography is watched by an overwhelming percentage of men (and also a smaller number of women) every week, even every day. Practices such as choking, slapping, ejaculation on the face, and other practices once seemed sadistic, are now standard fare for women in heterosexual sex—which is expected from women even after a first date.
In other words, the world is getting both better and much worse for women since securing our civil rights. Because of this very mixed picture, it is frankly difficult to believe that men of their own accord will give up their systems of power over women. Before we probe that hypothesis, let us first discuss the situation where this disbelief in any possible escape rules the day.
In Dworkin’s understanding, the only rationale response to the impossibility of escape—barring suicide and sex transition—would be to negotiate an accommodation with male power. This would have to be a two-level negotiation—first, with an individual male in an interpersonal relationship who would offer to provide personal protection and perhaps personal consideration for her as an individual woman. [3] But that would not be sufficient. Men are not known for keeping their bargains with women, or for being loyal or faithful to women. Women would therefore also have to negotiate with the rulers of men, whether those be kings or priests or presidents, for only these more powerful men could ensure there would be some level of accountability for how the men women live with and behave towards women. As Dworkin puts it, “The Right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus simplifying survival for women [and] promises that despite their absolute sovereignty, men too will follow specified rules” (11-12). In the case of Kiera Dawes, note that it was Mr. Greavey, an agent of the rulers of men, who sought posthumous justice for her against her lover/killer, who received a sentence of six and a half years in prison for his reign of terror over her.
It is this dicey strategy of accommodation with male power that most women wind up choosing—not because they are stupid, but because they are realistic. When leftist feminists smack their heads in bewilderment over women voting for the rightist side of the political spectrum, they are but showing their naiveté, not their sophistication. Dworkin’s contribution in Right Wing Women is to show that these women are rationally calculating where their day-to-day interest lies. And it lies in survival, for themselves and their children. While not every negotiation women enter will result in their survival—as it did not for Kiera Dawes—as a generalized strategy, it is, as Dworkin says, “the best deal” available:
“Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. [And so] by advocating male meaning, they seek to acquire meaning. . . . They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work, too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men [but] they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know they are valued for their sex—their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience . . . Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal; not human: they do what they have to to survive” (58-59, 11).
If Dworkin is right that men have but two models of women—the brothel model and the farm model—it is far better to be Beulah (Isaiah 62:4) than the prostitute who is ground down and destroyed by the use men make of her. Separating a man out of the herd of men, establishing a household with him, providing his children and then getting him to fix his eyes and his effort on them, offers her the best chance of coming to be seen as more than an object to him:
“[F]arming implied a relationship of some substance between the farmer and what was his: and it is grander being the earth, being nature, even being a cow, than being a c**t with no redeeming mythology. Motherhood ensconced a woman in the continuing life of a man: how he used her was going to have consequences for him. Since she was his, her state of being reflected on him; and therefore he had a social and psychological stake in her welfare as well as an economic one. Because the man farmed the woman over a period of years, they developed a personal relationship, at least from her point of view: one limited by his notions of her sex and her kind [but] it was her best chance to be known, to be regarded with some tenderness of compassion meant for her, one particular woman” (174).
Dworkin concludes: “If sex oppression is real, absolute, unchanging, inevitable, then the views of right wing women are more logical than not. Marriage is supposed to protect them from rape: being kept at home is supposed to protect them from the castelike economic exploitation of the marketplace; reproduction gives them what value and respect they have . . . religious marriage [is] supposed to protect against battery, since the wife is supposed to be cherished and respected” (221-222).
As noted, though, this is a very dicey strategy: too many men are tyrants and rapists in the home. As Dworkin comments, “The flaws in the logic are simple: the home is the most dangerous place for a woman to be, the place she is most likely to be murdered, raped, beaten, certainly the place where she is robbed of the value of her labor. What right wing women do to survive the sex-class system does not mean they will survive it” (222). But empirically speaking, they are far more likely to survive it than the prostitute, whose violent death rate exceeds that of all other professions, including soldiers and police, many times over.
In addition, because women in their Beulah incarnation are useful to the rulers of men, some protection from or accountability for what men do to women in the home can develop. As the Kiera Dawes case shows, it’s often too little and too late, but it’s not nothing, either. Male rulers’ need for women to play their part is one of the reasons that Dworkin insists that even in a secular society, a religious interpretation of motherhood will be promulgated. “Religion shrouds women in real as well as magical grace in that the sex-class functions of women are formally honored, carefully spelled out, and exploited within clear and prescribed boundaries” (180). Above all, it’s those boundaries on male behavior that women crave from the rulers of men who claim to act in the name of God. Religion thus becomes important to women, and women are often religion’s strongest supporters as a result. The easy equation of religion as an adversary of women is simply not true by half. If religion did not exist, women would have to invent it, because when God dies, the brothel model inevitably ascends within human society. [4] But if God lives, even men bow the knee to Him; a goodly number of men can accept constraints on their behavior if God commands it.
Overall, then, we should not be surprised to find that “as long as the sex-class system is intact, huge numbers of women will believe that the Right offers them the best deal: the highest reproductive value; the best protection against sexual aggression; the best economic security as the economic dependents of men who must provide; the most reliable protection against battery; the most respect” (224). Comparatively speaking, they are not wrong.
But why does this wind up being the best deal? What other deals are being offered? And here we reach the second question that many feminists—but obviously not Dworkin—are loathe to consider: who stands with women? Who are women’s allies? In our conventional political understanding, it is the Left that has ostensibly championed the feminist cause. Surely, then, the Left stands with women? And with such a powerful alliance—an alliance that includes Leftist men in a world run by men—surely this means women would have viable alternative deals to the right wing women’s strategy of accommodation with male power?
On the contrary, says Dworkin, this is one of mainstream feminism’s worst blind spots. The Left is no friend to women; Leftist men, if anything, are even worse in this regard than men on the Right. If feminism’s hope for an emancipatory politics is rooted in the allyship of the Left, then their hope is in vain--they might as well embrace the clear-eyed hopelessness of right wing women. Indeed, “right wing women are quite brilliant at discerning the hypocrisy of liberal support for women’s rights. Right wing women do not buy the partial truths and cynical lies that constitute the positions of various liberal and so-called radical groups on women’s rights. They see antifeminism, though they call it simple hypocrisy. They are outraged by it” (224).
One can see this hypocrisy in the exhortation for women to “lean in” for economic and political power as their surest route for escape from a male-dominated society. But leaning in isn’t in reality an escape at all: “Feminists have refused to face the fact that equal pay for equal work is impossible as long as men rule women, and right wing women have refused to forget it” (57). Despite the half century that has elapsed since the second wave of feminism, economic and political power is still safely entrenched in the hands of men, including Leftist men. In the present day, billionaire male techbros appear to rule not only our economy, but our government as well. And despite the fact that more women than ever are economically self-sufficient, the rates of violence against women have risen, maternal mortality is worse than it was than when Dworkin wrote this book, and sexual practices men commonly perpetrate on women rise to the level of criminal assault and grievous bodily harm. If the jailers at Abu Ghraib had done to their prisoners what men now routinely do to women in sexual relations, they would have been tried before the ICC for crimes against humanity.
Another example of the Left’s hypocrisy—which Dworkin could not have foreseen in her time---was the Left’s throwing of women under the proverbial bus with respect to the gender wars of 2015-2025. Waving the banner of “transwomen are women,” the Left systematically dismantled women’s hard-won sex-based rights, privileging the feelings of men who wished to be seen as women over women who had suffered the imperializing march of men throughout history. This was clearly a men’s rights movement, but it was completely embraced by the Left. Dissident women who complained that if male rapists and murderers were put into women’s prisons, this would be dangerous to women inmates, were lambasted as “transphobes”—by Leftists. Lesbians who denied there could be such a thing as “transbians,” and who wished to meet together without them, found themselves facing huge fines—from Leftist governments. Women who dissented from gender ideology were banned, harassed, doxed, threatened, forced to resign, cancelled, fined, and even jailed—by Leftist governments, institutions, and media with the full support of Leftist political parties and intellectuals. In the end, men mattered more to the Left than women in the gender wars. Bros before hos, with sophisticated and enlightened prose.
But to Dworkin’s mind, the worst betrayal by the Left and Leftist men is that freedom for women is defined by men in practice as freedom for men to use and abuse women sexually without consequence. That is, Leftist men want their whores and their porn more than they want dignity for women. If they could, says Dworkin, Leftist men would turn the whole world into a brothel, and all women into public pornified property for men. This was the essence, she says, of the Left’s “sexual revolution”:
“Sexual-liberation ideology, whether pop or traditionally leftist-intellectual, did not criticize, analyze, or repudiate forced sex, nor did it demand an end to the sexual and social subordination of women to men: neither reality was recognized. Instead, it posited that freedom for women existed in being f**ked more often by more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere” (83). Indeed, the embrace by Leftist men of the abortion cause, says Dworkin, was not about women, but about men: “The sexual revolution, in order to work, required that abortion be available to women on demand. If it were not, f**king would not be available to men on demand” (85). Indeed, it is no coincidence that the first champion of abortion rights was the Marquis de Sade, that original “sexual revolutionary.” Dworkin continues:
“Right wing women saw the cynicism of the Left in using abortion to make women sexually available, and they also saw the Left abandon women who said no. They know that men do not have principles or political agendas not congruent with the sex they want” (94). Dworkin contrasts the deal offered to women by the Left and by the Right. On the Left, not only does she have to be f**ked by him, but by all his buddies, and any kids that result are her responsibility alone. On the Right, she is to be f**ked by one man only, and the resulting kids are his financial responsibility. Her stark choice is to be private property or public property: which deal is better?
At the very least, according to Dworkin, there is less hypocrisy on the Right. As she puts it, “One simply cannot be both for and against the exploitation of women: for it, when it brings pleasure, against it in the abstract; for it when it brings profit, against it in principle; for it when no one is looking, against it when someone who might notice is around” (187). It is emblematic of the hypocrisy of the Left that it has latched onto the decriminalization of prostitution as part of its “feminism,” and rejects any call for curbing pornography as a violation of First Amendment rights. “Right wing women are sure that the selective blindness of liberals and leftists especially contributes to more violence, more humiliation, more exploitation for women, often in the name of humanism and freedom” (226). Again, they are not wrong. With Leftist friends like these, what woman needs enemies? And if this is the clear-eyed judgment of right wing women, how can we not call their analysis feminist in a sincere sense of the word?
Dworkin concludes, “the refusal to demand (with no compromise being possible) one absolute standard of human dignity [for both men and women] is the greatest triumph of antifeminism” (209). In that sense, both the Left and the Right are antifeminist, though the Left bears the additional sin of rank hypocrisy in its casual betrayal of women as a sex class. Since “antifeminism saturates the political spectrum from Right to Left, liberal to conservative, reactionary to progressive” (217), it is no wonder that women feel politically homeless and politically abandoned. A pox on both their houses is a justified reaction by all woman. Furthermore, as Dworkin notes, when push comes to shove, and a woman must choose between being public property and private property, don’t be surprised when she chooses the latter over the former—which explains why Dworkin believes “the antifeminism of Left, Right, and center fixes the power of the Right over women” (223).
I agree with this analysis, even as I lament it. Until and unless there is a body of men willing to ditch the prostitutes and the porn, there is no realistic escape from our social system of male dominance. But the “better deal”--the bargain struck by right wing women--is a deeply tragic one, on many levels. Under this bargain, we women are doomed to give birth to our own oppressors, nourishing them at our very breasts. By so doing, we ourselves ensure there will never be an escape for women. On my gloomiest days, I actually feel heartened by the dramatic drop in birth rates around the world: perhaps this is the only way that women can get through to men that unless a better modus vivendi is forged, the world of men will literally die—and it would be karmic justice if it did.
Dworkin’s contribution is two-fold, in my view. First, her work is implicitly a call for women of the Right and women of the Left to start talking with each other, rather than shunning each other. Women on both sides actually agree on the situation women find themselves in: what they disagree about is what to do about it. An honest dialogue might clarify the internal contradictions of contemporary feminism, reminding women of the need to center women and not political parties, in their feminism. It may well be that neither the Left nor the Right deserve the allegiance of women, and that new political forms must be created to further the cause of women in a male-dominated system.
Second, and perhaps even more importantly, Dworkin’s work suggests that feminism must finally call out the Left for its hypocritical antifeminism, and drop feminism’s allegiance to the Left if the Left cannot uphold that single standard of human dignity for both men and women. Women cannot be complicit in the neoliberal Left’s apparent quest to turn the entire world into a giant brothel, literally and figuratively, where every part of a woman, from her vagina to the child she carries in her womb, to the milk in her breasts, is for sale to the highest, almost certainly male, bidder.
In fact, I see Dworkin as endorsing the imagery of scripture, where at the end of days the revelator sees the great whore of Babylon sitting upon the many waters. Consider Dworkin’s take on that image: "The word whore is incomprehensible unless one is immersed in the lexicon of male domination. Men have created the group, the type, the concept, the epithet, the insult, the industry, the trade, the commodity, the reality of woman as whore. Woman as whore exists within the objective and real system of male sexual domination." Dworkin is revealing to us that our attention should not be on the image of the whore, but rather on the invisible men of all ideologies and religions and ethnicities who want there to be whores, and who therefore purposefully create the systems that produce her. It is those men who are the very image of powerful evil in our world. Those men are the whore of Babylon.
Women, especially if they consider themselves feminists, can never ally with the whoremakers. This is a grievous blindspot in contemporary feminism that must be attended to with the greatest urgency. It is high time to rethink the association of feminism with the Left, and to issue an ultimatum. The Left cannot have its whores and its feminism both: time to choose. Feminists must publicly compel that choice to be made by each and every politician and political party on the Left.
In conclusion, may the reissuance of Dworkin’s book Right Wing Women lead many more to read it, and contemplate its message. Perhaps the key to hope for women is to first heal the bond between them that has been broken by the philosophies of men on the Right and on the Left. Maybe--reunited as sisters--we will find a wisdom and a strength that has eluded feminism for a very long time.
NOTES:
[1] One of the three books by Dworkin that has been republished is Pornography, which is a must-read classic work on the subject. While pornography is not the focus of this essay, perhaps you will see a review of that book in the next issue of SquareTwo.
[Back to manuscript].
[2] The farm model treats women as farmland or as livestock, which is productive under the husbandry of the man. [Back to manuscript].
[3] In exchange for sex, children, and habitat-making labor. [Back to manuscript].
[4] Presciently, Dworkin predicts that men will attempt to apply the brothel model to reproduction, rendering it unnecessary to enter into a personal relationship with a woman in order to have children. Elon Musk’s reproductive strategy is a great example, but men dream of one day not even needing women’s bodies in order to reproduce. At that day, it will be interesting to see which side the religions of men come down on. Dworkin is cynical on this score: when that day arrives, “[w]omen will argue like the true believers they are for that old-time religion, but male theocrats will discover that God intended men to be the sole creators of life all along: did not God himself create Adam without female help and is not baptism the religious equivalent of being born of a male God? This is not farfetched for those who justify the subordination of women to men on the ground that God is a boy . . . The religiously orthodox women will find themselves characterized as politically dissident women one day too: there they will be, advocating and upholding old laws, customs, and ideas that are no longer in the best interests of men” (182, 184). [Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Cassler, V.H. (2025) "Book Review: Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin," SquareTwo, Vol. 18 No. 2 (Summer 2025), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCasslerRightWingWomen.html, accessed <give access date>.
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