Andrea Dworkin’s “Right-Wing Women”

March 17, 2025 6:24 AM

Right-Wing Women reappears in a moment of pitched anti-feminist backlash, as corporate America abandons all pretense of equal treatment and abusers of women fill the government. Women marched, rallied, and told their stories, but no hashtag is a match for misogyny. “No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or elegance, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in the wind or written in sand; they disappear, as if they are nothing,” Dworkin wrote. Male outrage drowned out female pain. As she put it, “The tellers and stories are ignored or ridiculed; threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt.” - Sarah Jones
posted by Lemkin (17 comments total)

If you flip directly to page 222 of Right-Wing Women, the diagram of "The Condition of Women," you get an immediate sense of the great schism between the waves of feminism; how you feel about the diagram may color how you view the rest of her analysis.
posted by mittens at 7:04 AM on March 17 [2 favorites]

I mean, maybe it will? I first heard of her in a very dismissive way, and I can see how a person might just look at this drawing and think, "What the hell???" But Dworkin then expounds on the meaning of the diagram at great length, and while to be honest I have not drunk the coffee I need to understand all that, it's very plain to me that the diagram is a 5000-foot view of a series of ideas that are extremely complicated. And, you know, really, it's a pretty complicated subject, so that is not real shocking to me. TL;DR what I'm saying is I suspect a disservice is being done to this line of thought by saying, "Look at this picture and U decide!!"
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:44 AM on March 17 [5 favorites]

just around 08, I worked for a growing family tech thing that was blue-state GOP. Pretty decent folks, honestly. But the racism and bullying would occasionally bubble up. Two things stick out as red flags: the scion of the family was obsessed with British pageantry, especially the role of the princesses. Then, the women across the board became obsessed with 50 Shades of Gray.

Not kink shaming; I think that the ideal of a rich, powerful man who takes your rights away may cross genders in a way that is not unconnected from sex. But it was...off-putting. I was shocked when they all became Trumpy. I feel like the signs were there.
posted by es_de_bah at 8:33 AM on March 17 [2 favorites]

here is the diagram
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 10:20 AM on March 17 [3 favorites]

Sure, it’s a really complicated subject, and I’m sure Dworkin brings a lot of nuance to it. But also the majority of Dworkin’s fans at this time are massive terfs, which make me feel pretty uncharitable to her writing.
posted by The River Ivel at 10:43 AM on March 17 [5 favorites]

Well, she's been dead for twenty years, so I doubt she is driving much anti-trans action.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:15 PM on March 17 [5 favorites]

It's a strange chart to have four spaces divided by three circles, and only two spaces and one circle are labeled.
posted by hypnogogue at 12:21 PM on March 17 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure that I understand what is even being said in that diagram. I mean, I can see that it is connecting all these different phenomena around the core of pornography, but why is prostitution the farthest out? Does prostitution contain rape, battery, economic & reproductive exploitation? Does it emerge from them, as they emerge from pornography?
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:05 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]

the explanation is quite long but here is some of it. here are all four of the charts she includes.

the crux seems to be this:

“Going back to the whole model-the circle, the pornography at the center of it, the all-encompassing wall of prostitution that circumscribes it-it does not matter whether prostitution is perceived as the surface condition, with pornography hidden in the deepest recesses of the psyche; or whether pornography is perceived as the surface condition, with prostitution being its wider, more important, hidden base, the largely unacknowledged sexual-economic necessity of women. Each has to be understood as intrinsically part of the condition of women—pornography being what women are, prostitution being what women do, the circle of crimes being what women are for. Rape, battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation require pornography as female metaphysics so as to be virtually self-justifying, virtually invisible abuses; and they also require the wall of prostitution confining women (meaning that whatever women do is within the bounds of prostitution) so that women are always and absolutely accessible. The heart of pornography and the wall of prostitution mirror each other in that both are meant to mean—and concretely do mean in the male system-that women deserve the crimes that define their condition, that those crimes are responses to what women are and what women do, that the crimes committed against women define the condition of women correctly—in accordance with what women are and what women do.”
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 1:17 PM on March 17 [5 favorites]

Jones puts it this way in the linked review (my emphasis): 'One of the principle functions of the right-wing woman is to police female sexuality and reproduction, and Dworkin’s logic ultimately pushed her into a similar role. In Right-Wing Women, Dworkin attacked sex work, pornography, and reproductive technology with the same ferocity she applied to Schlafly’s ilk. “Motherhood is becoming a new branch of female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to the womb for experimentation and power,” she wrote, but the truth is somewhat more complex. For conservatives who defend technologies like IVF, science is another way to bind women to motherhood, but it can also detach reproduction from compulsory heterosexuality, and it offers women a way to bear children on their own terms, which is why it has always been in danger from some factions of the right wing. Dworkin admitted the irony, but as with her fight against pornography, she stood firmly on reactionary ground. If there is a gynocide to come, as she feared, it would be carried out by the same forces who want to ban IVF, pornography, and sex work.'

Obviously I disagree with the idea that Dworkin was somehow pushed into a reactionary role--two opposing groups can be against the same thing, for different reasons. Patriarchy wants to have things both ways: It wants to put you in a box and judge you for having chosen to be in the box because the box is bad and a sin. To admit the box is bad isn't patriarchal.
posted by mittens at 1:38 PM on March 17 [8 favorites]

As an aside: while Dworkin certainly had many problematic ideas, the TERFs who are fans of her work are fundamentally misunderstanding it, because she was, or at least tried to be, a trans ally. She was categorically opposed to bioessentialism.

(Signed, a fan of her work, albeit a fan who is very willing to problematize what needs to be problematized.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:56 PM on March 17 [10 favorites]

To admit the box is bad isn't patriarchal.

hmm, what are you responding to here? are you saying jones thinks admitting the box is bad is patriarchal?
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 1:57 PM on March 17

You want to see a dodgy diagram - try Jordan Peterson "Maps of Meaning".
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 3:20 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]

are you saying jones thinks admitting the box is bad is patriarchal?

I think Jones is responding to something that is more of a...rhyme?...than an agreement. We get a little of this in that recent Lewis thread as well. Dworkin's position on pornography, while anti-, is not at all the same as the conservative Christian position, and I feel like a little of the grar against her in modern times is because people haven't fully explored that difference.
posted by mittens at 4:01 PM on March 17 [3 favorites]

is it that they don't differentiate her perspective, or that they are more interested in the harms of that particular alliance? i don’t think anyone thinks it’s the same, do they? (i have assumed it’s more the latter. that’s certainly my own feeling about it.)
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 4:06 PM on March 17 [2 favorites]

I think if people see it as an alliance, they should reconsider. The right is protean, appropriative of shapes and discourses, and if our analysis has to be truncated because it sounds like it's in similar terms as the right, or if someone thinks it looks like an alliance, then we have ceded the intellectual ground, because they will always steal our words and arguments to reflect back against us.

Or: If you see a murder, and a right-winger sees the murder, what do you gain from not calling it murder because someone might think you agree too closely with the right-winger? What happens to your moral clarity when you give up your verbal clarity?
posted by mittens at 4:30 PM on March 17 [6 favorites]

The four drawings together make it way easier to understand. And I'm a big proponent of 3 dimensional graphs for difficult issues, so I think that's some good work. And it's really worthwhile to this day to deconstruct the darker themes that pronography embraces and the way it mirrors society.
I still completely disagree with her, mostly.
posted by es_de_bah at 7:59 AM on March 18