Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Andrea Dworkin

But Greer has another side which allies itself with the worst of male chauvinism… In an interview in the Amerikan Screw, reprinted in Suck under the tide “Germaine: ‘I am a Whore, ’ ” she stated:

Ideally, you’ve got to the stage where you really could ball everyone — the fat, the blind, the foolish, the impotent, the dishonest. We have to rescue people who are already dead. We have to make love to people who are dead, and that’s not easy.

Here is the ever popular notion that women, extending our role as sex object, can humanize an atrophied world.

Pg 22 (also “best dressed concubines…”)
“There has been little recognition that the destruction of the middle-class lifestyle is crucial to the development of decent community forms in which all people can be free and have dignity.”

Pg 35
“Grown men are terrified of the wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts of memory.”

Pg 55
Story of O is particularly compelling for me because I once believed it to be what its defenders claim – the mystical revelation of the true, eternal, and sacred destiny of women.”

Pg 59
“In mystic experience communion (wrongly called possession sometimes) has meant the dissolution of the ego, the entry into ecstasy, union with and illumination of the godhead. The experience of communion has been the province of the mystic, prophet or visionary, those who were able to alchemize their energy into pure spirit and this spirit into a state of grace.

Possession, rightly defined, is the perversion of the mystic experience; it is by its very nature demonic because its goal is power, and its means are violence and oppression.”

Pg 73
The worship of virginity must be posited as a real sexual perversion, crueler and more insidious than those sex models condemned by the culture as perverse. The Christian institutionalization of that worship, its cultivation and refinement, have aborted women in the development and expression of natural sexuality by giving credence to that other: woman as whore. The dualism of good and evil, virgin and whore, lily and rose, spirit and nature is inherent in Christianity and finds its logical expression in the rituals of sadomasochism.
…
Lenny Bruce:
” I understand that intellectually — that a woman who sleeps with a different guy every week is a better 74 Woman Haling Christian than the virgin. Because she has the capacity to kiss and hug fifty guys a year. And that’s what that act is —kissing and hugging. You can’t do it to anyone you’re mad at. If you’re just a bit bugged with them, you can’t make it. So that chick who’s got that much love for all her fellowmen that she can make it with fifty guys a year— that’s intellectually; but emotionally, I don’t want to be the fifty-first guy. Cause I learned my lesson early, man. The people told me, “This is the way it is, Virgin is Good, Virgin is Good. ” Yeah, that’s really weird.”

Pg 75
newspapers like Suck, Oz, and Screw are important
The first issue of Suck appeared in Amsterdam, Holland, in 1969.

Pg 81
Germaine Greer once wrote for Suck — she was an editor—and her articles, the token women’s articles, were sometimes strong; her voice was always authentic. Her attempt was to bring women into closer touch with unaltered female sexuality and place that sexuality clearly, unapologetically, within the realm of humanity: women, not as objects, but as human beings, truly a revolutionary concept. But Greer has another side which allies itself with the worst of male chauvinism… In an interview in the Amerikan Screw, reprinted in Suck under the tide “Germaine: ‘I am a Whore, ’ ” she stated:

Ideally, you’ve got to the stage where you really could ball everyone — the fat, the blind, the foolish, the impotent, the dishonest. We have to rescue people who are already dead. We have to make love to people who are dead, and that’s not easy.

Here is the ever popular notion that women, extending our role as sex object, can humanize an atrophied world.

Pg 83
Rape is, in fact, simple straightforward heterosexual behavior in a male-dominated society.

Pg 137
Adam and Eve

Pg 157
As individuals, we experience ourselves as the center o f whatever social world we inhabit. We think that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions of our particular culture. That culture no longer organically reflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collective phenomenology o f our creative possibilities —it possesses and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow of sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to natural desire. In order to achieve proper balance in interhuman interaction, we must find ways to change ourselves from culturally defined agents into naturally defined beings. We must find ways of destroying the cultural personae imposed on our psyches and we must discover forms of relationship, behavior, sexual being and interaction, which are compatible with our inherent natural possibilities. We must move away from the perverse, two-dimensional definitions which stem from sexual repression, which are the source of social oppression, and move toward creative, full, multidimensional modes of sexual expression

Pg 172:
For the Kabbalists, as for the Tantrics, the ultimate sacrament is sexual intercourse which recreates androgyny.

Pg 189:
Chapter – Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community in Woman Hating
Incest
The parent-child relationship is primarily erotic because all human relationships are primarily erotic. The incest taboo is a particularized form of repression, one which functions as the bulwark of all the other repressions. The incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. The incest taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them, or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and hearts of other humans who are not our parents and never will be. The incest taboo does the worst work of the culture: it teaches us the mechanisms of repressing and internalizing erotic feeling—it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual “object” ; it demands that we place the nuclear family above the human family. The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism.

The Family
“For if we grant that the sexual drive is at birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the total personality (Freud’s “polymorphous perversity”) and. . . becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo; and that. . . the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family; then if we did away with the family we would in effect be doing away with the repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.”
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a sexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what one must know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriate to male-female polarity and the internalized mechanisms of sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclear family at the moment is the extended family, or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process of destroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity. As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they will also develop the forms of community appropriate to it. We cannot really imagine what those forms will be.

Children
“The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that moreover this oppression is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children.”
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

Dworkin:
” As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable o f participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic impulses. In androgynous community, those impulses would retain a high degree of nonspecificity and would no doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual self realization. The distinctions between “children” and “adults, ” and the social institutions which enforce those distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.”

Conclusion

Nothing short of everything will really do. Aldous Huxley, Island

The object is cultural transformation. The object is the development of a new kind of human being and a new kind of human community. All of us who have ever tried to right a wrong recognize that truly nothing short of everything will really do.

Download: Andrea-DWORKIN-Woman-Hating-A-Radical-Look-at-Sexuality-1974

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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/15/the-power-of-andrea-dworkins-rage/
In a letter from April 1969, she writes to her parents in New Jersey about her wedding, in Amsterdam

In her 1995 preface to the second edition of Intercourse, she speaks to the stubborn misreadings of her book’s central argument, faulting her critics’ profound failure of imagination. “If one has eroticized a differential in power that allows for force as a natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape,” she asked.
…
Adapted from the introduction to Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

The Revolution is not an event that takes two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out process in which new people are created, capable of renovating society so that the revolution does not replace one elite with another, but so that the revolution creates a new anti-authoritarian structure with anti-authoritarian people who in their turn re-organize the society so that it becomes a non-alienated human society, free from war, hunger, and exploitation.
Rudi Dutschke, March 7, 1968