Dworkin impresses me with her ability to be so sharp and concise. It feels like there is no pointless filler, each sentence speaks clearly and then builds onto her next point. No wonder she has been quoted so much. There's so much I want to quote, this is gonna be a loooong post.

In this chapter, Dworkin lays out the foundation of which the right-wing operates on. She explains the plight of being female in a patriarchal society, and shows the enticement of the right-wing's façade of safety and protection.

In societies of whatever description, however narrowly or broadly defined, women as a class are the dulled conformists, the orthodox believers, the obedient followers, the disciples of unwavering faith. To waver, whatever the creed of the men around them, is tantamount to rebellion; it is dangerous. Most women, holding on for dear life, do not dare abandon blind faith. From father’s house to husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence.

Women who "buy in" on the right's deceptive deals remind me of Benjamin Franklin's quote:

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

(Though I disagree about the "deserve" part, I do believe people still deserve liberty even if they made the mistake of trying to give it up at some point. We do all make mistakes.)

Women know, but must not acknowledge, that resisting male control or confronting male betrayal will lead to rape, battery, destitution, ostracization or exile, confinement in a mental institution or jail, or death.

It is frustrating how true this remains even fifty years later. It's like the players have changed but the game remains the same.

Rebellion can rarely survive the aversion therapy that passes for being brought up female. Male violence acts directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to survive. A girl may, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother’s patterns in acquiescing to male authority within her own chosen set.

It is essentially safer to submit to patriarchy, but feel like it's "different enough" than actively go against it entirely. Tie this with the fact the patriarchy encourages women to fight each other, making it difficult for the mother and daughter to even find common ground and recognize the deeper misogynistic problems they both face together as women.

And the derision of female lives does not stop with these toxic, ugly, insidious slanders because there is always, in every circumstance, the derision in its skeletal form, all bone, the meat stripped clean: she is pussy[.] [...] The very butchers who cut up the meat and throw away the useless parts are the comedians. The paring down of a whole person to vagina and womb and then to a dismembered obscenity is their best and favorite joke.

And...

The woman, in defending the ideologies of men who rise by climbing over her prone body in military formation, will not publicly mourn the loss of what those men have taken from her: she will not scream out as their heels dig into her flesh because to do so would mean the end of meaning itself; all the ideals that motivated her to deny herself would be indelibly stained with blood that she would have to acknowledge, at last, as her own.

And...

This singularly self-hating loyalty to those committed to her own destruction is the very essence of womanhood as men of all ideological persuasions define it.

These all echo strongly to me of the modern-day behavior of women who renounce being female/women to instead identify as "transgender." They do not realize they are playing into the same patriarchal game. The transgender-identifying woman, sometimes quite literally when she gets "transgender surgeries," spills her own blood and denies it is her own. Depressing.

Women die, mourning not the loss of their own lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as men define it for them. [...] The ideal, by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the male in his scheme of things.

Women constantly struggle with perfection. I experience this myself. To be able to read something like this is very "freeing" and I hope it might serve as maybe a wakeup call for any other woman out there.

Attempting to strike a bargain, the woman says: I come to you on your own terms. Her hope is that his murderous attention will focus on a female who conforms less artfully, less willingly. In effect, she ransoms the remains of a life—what is left over after she has renounced willful individuality—by promising indifference to the fate of other women.

So disturbingly resonating. I see this as especially true in religions that encourage covering up of women in any manner. "She was asking for it" is a common rhetoric to justify a "disobedient" woman's cruel punishments, possibly even death, while also something repeated to the woman who utters it, convincing her that she is safe because she "properly" follows "the rules" so she is "good."

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 are 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 wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing.

And...

The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings.

This hurts how true it is. Seeing /o/NameTheProblem, looking through my Google News for "women" and still seeing rapes and murders and women's concerns about violent men ignored, day after day.

No one can bear to live a meaningless life. Women fight for meaning just as women fight for survival: by attaching themselves to men and the values honored by men. By committing themselves to male values, women seek to acquire value. By advocating male meaning, women seek to acquire meaning. Subservient to male will, women believe that subservience itself is the meaning of a female life. In this way, women, whatever they suffer, do not suffer the anguish of a conscious recognition that, because they are women, they have been robbed of volition and choice, without which no life can have meaning.

Okay, I know this was written decades ago and focused on conservative/right-wing women, but dang if this chapter doesn't echo to me what I see in the behavior of transgender-identifying women and girls. In the case of TIFs, the "subservience to male will" is not however, being a perfect domestic woman, it is subservience to the norms of the patriarchy created by men. Thinking that by being subservient to sexist stereotypes that hurt women, by morphing into them and perpetuating them, they have "acquired value" or "meaning."

The Right offers women a simple, fixed, predetermined social, biological, and sexual order. Form conquers chaos. Form banishes confusion.

I think this ties into people potentially having a fear of "being wrong," along with living in a highly anxious society. A desire to conform the world into something simple and ordered. It is a false promise for any human to claim they have a "solution" to our chaotic world that is "simple."

Women are brought up to maintain a husband’s home and to believe that women without men are homeless.

Financial independence matters. I think we are now seeing the cultural effects of women having financial independence recently as women have grown up with the ability to go to school and enter professions that once had been largely denied to them. And of course, the news cries about how women aren't having kids or getting married (no shit, the men still act like entitled losers while no longer having a financial advantage).

The Right then manipulates the fear. The promise is that if a woman is obedient, harm will not befall her.

We all know how that goes...

The Right, very considerately, tells women the rules of the game on which their lives depend. The Right also promises that, despite their absolute sovereignty, men too will follow specified rules.

I just thought this was clever. And sad. It's really a scam but we know plenty of people fall for scams. Or protection rackets.

A woman is loved for fulfilling her female functions: obedience is an expression of love and so are sexual submission and childbearing.

It is sad the woman is not allowed to express love how she may want. Because she must "follow the rules of the game." It is so limiting.

And, increasingly, to redeem the cruel inadequacies of mortal men, the Right offers women the love of Jesus, beautiful brother, tender lover, compassionate friend, perfect healer of sorrow and resentment, the one male to whom one can submit absolutely—be Woman as it were—without being sexually violated or psychologically abused.

This and the following sections detailing how Christian women are encouraged to perform all sorts of bizarre mental tricks to imagine their terrible husbands as loving "Jesus Christ" was so disturbing.

Though fundamentalist male ministers have called her a witch, in typical female fashion Stapleton disclaims responsibility for her own inventiveness and credits the Holy Spirit, clearly male, thus soothing the savage misogyny of those who cannot bear for any woman to be both seen and heard.

Fascinating and why I dislike organized religion, especially Abrahamic religions, where followers claim all that is good is due to God and completely disregard the efforts of humanity and their fellow people.

A submissive nature is the miracle for which religious women pray.

Reminds me of the funny quip I've seen about how if women are "so submissive" then why do they need so much patriarchal religion, misogynistic culture, and threats of violence to convince women of such a thing? Why don't women just naturally do it? Why must women be browbeaten into it and convince themselves that is what they are?

Right-wing women consistently spoke to me about lesbians as if lesbians were rapists, certified committers of sexual assault against women and girls. No facts could intrude on this psychosexual fantasy. No facts or figures on male sexual violence against women and children could change the focus of their fear. They admitted that they knew of many cases of male assault against females, including within families, and did not know of any assaults by lesbians against females.

I think it's interesting how the tables have turned on the bolded part in regards to neoliberal women who now refuse to believe statistics on violence rates of "transwomen" (men pretending to be women).

Right-wing women regard abortion as the callous murder of infants. Female selflessness expresses itself in the conviction that a fertilized egg surpasses an adult female in the authenticity of its existence.

Always gets me. Decades later and this is still being pointed out by women recognizing the unfairness and misogyny when it comes to abortion debates.

Forcing women to bear unwanted babies is crucial to the social program of women who have been forced to bear unwanted babies and who cannot bear the grief and bitterness of such a recognition.

This mentality frustrates me: "I had to suffer, therefore you should too." So hateful and nihilistic.

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. [...] Some women [project their fears of systemic misogyny] by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites, or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own.

And...

Because women so displace their rage, they are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as sources of danger. [...] [T]he existence of the dangerous outsider always functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, pain-killer, and threat.

I feel like this applies in general to right-wing followers. It is extremely easy to convince a group of upset people to place their blame on something like another group of people (immigrants, black people, gay people, poor people, etc.) instead of seeing greater systemic rot, or looking inward towards one's own party and seeing manipulation and ulterior motives within their own party (eg. helping the rich get richer).

I do see how this applies more to women, and affects women harsher, by virtue of the patriarchy.

[Hopefully by these women becoming forced to articulate the realities of their own experiences as women subject to the will of men], the anger that necessarily arises from a true perception of how they have been debased may move them beyond the fear that transfixes them to a meaningful rebellion against the men who in fact diminish, despise, and terrorize them. This is the common struggle of all women, whatever their male-defined ideological origins; and this struggle alone has the power to transform women who are enemies against one another into allies fighting for individual and collective survival that is not based on self-loathing, fear, and humiliation, but instead on self-determination, dignity, and authentic integrity.

This was a very optimistic turn for the chapter and I appreciate it. I'm really impressed by Dworkin's writing. I had started reading Woman Hating a while ago and I was similarly immersed in the text because of her ability to see and convey ideas and behaviors from a clear and feminist perspective. Looking forward to the next chapter.

I love this book club idea; I am just waiting for a book I haven't read/am interested in talking about, like Holly Lawford-Smith's Gender Critical Feminism.