Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

Jew-Hate / Woman-Hate
from our deliberations women, who, to prevent deprivation of morals and
ambiguity of issues, should not mix promiscuously in gatherings of
men. ”62 The sex of women became the stigma of women; the sex of
women made women base, lower as lower races were inferior; the sex of
women— overwhelming to the male the way female blood overwhelmed
him, frightened him— was not only the excuse for her internal exile from
human status but also the reason. Sex inhered in her; one had to go into
her to get sex, get life, get children; she became either chattel property or
prey, and her life was as worthless as any life degraded by race-hate.
“What care I, ” wrote George Moore in Confessions o f a Young Man in
1888, “that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh’s lash
or Egypt’s sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids
to look on.. . . What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old
maiden was the price paid for Ingres’ La Source?... Nay more, the knowledge
that a wrong was done— that millions of Israelites died in torments,
that a girl, or a thousand girls, died in hospital for that one virginal thing,
is an added pleasure which I could not afford to spare. ”63
Women are sacrificed to male desire— including aesthetic desire, art
for art’s sake—with less concern than the early Hebrews had for their Yom
Kippur goats. Art as scapegoating— by race, for instance, in Robert Mapplethorpe’s
photographs of a pornographized black man; by sex, for instance,
by Balthus and David Hamilton in their use of girls— is
sophisticated hating and produces sophisticated defenses of hate, as long
as the hate is pretty, formally pretty. As such, art becomes the equivalent
of anti-Semitism, the principled, intellectually legitimate assertion of
Jews’ lesser value, a degraded value. Approaching the great paintings of
Europe, aghast at Germaine Greer’s charge that misogyny is at the heart of
Western art, Edwin Mullins is forced to conclude in The Painted Witch:
How Western Artists Have Viewed the Sexuality o f Women that male
painters, including “some of the greatest of them, ” are “hostile” to
women; and further, “[t]he sensibility of artists is not singular, just a personal
vision, any more than a judgment of law is personal justice. It is
rooted in what society believes and what society wants. There can only be
one origin of so pervasive a desire to control woman, abuse woman, set
her up in order to tear her down, enclose her in a labyrinth of moral strictures
with so many blind exits she will never be free; and that is— fear. ”64
In fact, every marked exit from the circus, the cell, off the pedestal, is a
dead end because men hunt women— for sex, for children, for rape, for
battery, for prostitution, for murder. The children already know. As Deb­