Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

Jew-Hate / Woman-Hate
thet and insult, “self-hating Jew” is not faced as part of Jewish reality; this
is a self-contempt that triumphant pride does not erase. What might?
Woman-hate is a radical antagonism to existence itself; like it or not,
some women, and not some men, give birth. Like it or not, the egg, not
the sperm, is precious, each egg a potential life: there is no extravagant
surplus of eggs. In terms of human descent, eggs are the scarce resource.
Like it or not, women bleed every month for three, four, or five decades
and live; no man loses blood without losing some measure of life. In
childbirth the bleeding can be massive and sexual murders of women often
mimic the bloodletting of birth. No woman has to want pregnancy or
experience childbirth to symbolize life, although antinatalism on the part
of a woman will antagonize, repudiating as it does the inevitability of
anatomical meaning. Sexual access to women is access to life present and
future; destroying women destroys the present and future— replaces life
with death; when men hurt women, they champion death against life. If,
as Elie Wiesel says, Jews “are the question, ”56 women precede the question
and embody existence itself, without sentimentality or consolation; whatever
existence is, women are. What does it mean, to be life itself? “She was
demure, attentive, modest, passive, intuitive, all the crap qualities that are
ascribed to cipher women, ” writes novelist Will Self, “the way rhythm is
drummed into blacks and miserliness deposited with the Jews. ”57 Tamed,
made docile, far from the demands of existence as such, the woman is forbidden
to use her vitality; her body is stigmatized as filth— “If her bowels
and flesh were cut open, you would see what filth is covered by her white
skin. If a fine crimson cloth covered a pile of foul dung, would anyone be
foolish enough to love the dung because of it? ”; 58 her qualities of mind—
imagination, emotion, intellect— are traduced, as if existence itself
blighted them. She is kept from dominating her home, her tribe, two obvious
loci of what should be her secular power; she is denied learning to
stunt the mind and also to eclipse it from her own self-consciousness; her
body is constrained and often captive; battery is commonplace and shows
the unity of mind and body— both are trashed, betrayed, insulted, demeaned,
injured by physical brutality. Existence is killed in her: energy,
ambition, self-rule. Oppression replaces existence, overcomes it, subsumes
it. Her body is the first target: control it, use it, make her will dead
so that her body is accepting; or use force, cruelty, deprivation, violence.