This chapter starts with talking about the time before Roe v Wade. It is somber and interesting, considering we are now considerably “back” in that same time — where abortion rights are determined by the states. Dworkin talks about how many women who got illegal abortions before Roe v Wade were actually already mothers, shattering the myth that women who get abortions are “shameless sl*ts” or “godless wh*res.”

Dissociation from other women is always the safest course. They are not sluttish, but other women who have had abortions probably are. They tried not to get pregnant (birth control being illegal in many parts of the country before 1973), but other women who had abortions probably did not. They love their children, but other women who have had abortions may well be the cold mothers, the cruel mothers, the vicious women. They are individuals of worth and good morals who had compelling reasons for aborting, but the other women who had abortions must have done something wrong, were wrong, are somehow indistinct (not emerged from the primal female slime as individuals), were sex not persons.

I am reminded of the article “The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion”.

She has learned (learned is a poor word for what has happened to her) that every life is more valuable than her own[.] [...] Abortion turns a woman into a murderer all right: she kills that child pregnant in her since her own childhood; she kills her allegiance to Motherhood First. This is a crime. She is guilty: of not wanting a baby.

Highlighting how female humans are socialized to put other lives as more important and valuable than her own, and how women are brainwashed to think their destiny is motherhood.

Dworkin then has a section explaining the male ego and why men are against abortion:

To many men, each aborted pregnancy is the killing of a son—and he is the son killed. His mother would have killed him if she had had the choice. These men have a peculiarly retroactive and abstract sense of murder: if she had had a choice, I would not have been born—which is murder. The male ego, which refuses to believe in its own death, now pushes backward, before birth. I was once a fertilized egg; therefore to abort a fertilized egg is to kill me. Women keep abortions secret because they are afraid of the hysteria of men confronted with what they regard as the specter of their own extinction. [...] At the very least, she must not murder him; nor should she outrage his existence by an assertion of her separateness from him, her distinctness, her importance as a person independent of him.

Dworkin then goes into forced sex, especially in the confines of marriage. While reading this section, I kept in mind this was written in the 70s so I was curious and looked up marital rape laws in modern day times, and I made a post about existing marital rape laws here. There has been significant progress on this front since the '70s.

The good wife submits; the bad wife can be forced to submit. All women are supposed to submit.

Women are required to submit to intercourse, and women may then be required to submit to the pregnancy.

Women are required to submit to the man, and women may then be required to submit to the fetus.

More explanations of the female socialization that all lives are more important than women's and how abortion restrictions play into that.

Women are brought up to conform: all the rules of femininity—dress, behavior, attitude—essentially break the spirit.

I just appreciated the "break the spirit" part.

The importance of this ignorance about intercourse cannot be overstated: it is as if no girl would grow up, or accept the hundred million lessons on how to be a girl, or want boys to like her, if she knew what she was for.

I think we can actually see this happening in modern day times as a result of transgenderism and the rapid exposure of children to hardcore pornography on the internet. Young girls no longer have the sweet frilly fantasy of love and marriage to men, there is no more illusion of prince charming awaiting them when they grow up, there is violent sex and degradation. This is why I believe ROGD has happened in girls. For the first time in history, masses of girls were blinded by the misogyny of the real world waiting for them when they would become women, and they wanted to opt out.

The right of men to women’s bodies for the purpose of intercourse remains the heart, soul, and balls of male supremacy: this is true whatever style of advocacy is used, Right or Left, to justify coital access. [...] Every woman is surrounded by this system of forced sex and is encapsulated by it. It acts on her, shapes her, defines her boundaries and her possibilities, tames her, domesticates her, determines the quality and nature of her privacy: it modifies her.

The right tells women to be “good wives” and submit to sex (of course they paint this not as “sex” but as “being fruitful and multiplying” leaving out the part that for the man, sex conveniently remains the same enjoyable and carefree experience for him, whether or not he gets the woman pregnant), the left tells women to not be “prudes” and submit to sex.

There is the definition of the female in terms of her function, which is to be fucked; so it may be unfortunate that she is fucked too early, but once fucked she has fulfilled a preordained function as a woman and therefore is a woman and therefore can legitimately be fucked.

This passage seriously reminded me of that one TIM, I think Andrea Long Chu, who said some shit about how "to be female is to be fucked." It's like he read this and took this passage positively or something. (More explanation on how transgenderism, especially for men who pretend to be women, is misogyny.)

Dworkin then goes into the 60s free love movement, which I found enlightening. Here Dworkin builds the stage for how the left views women as public property. She explained how young women revolted against their mothers—conservative women who thought it best for their daughters to be chaste until married and committed to one man, without explaining why—as regressive (I mean, it is, as Dworkin points out later) and joined the hippie movement instead. Dworkin shows how men destroyed the sexual revolution by focusing it on their dicks and male dominance. Men in the sexual revolution only viewed it for themselves in terms of being able to freely fuck women. Dworkin explains how the push for legal safe abortion on demand was largely meant for the benefit of men to encourage women to continue freely fucking them. The hippie communes were rife with sexual abuse. Once women began talking amongst each other about the sexual trauma they had experienced within the free love movement, they began to revolt. The feminist movement that then sparked in the 70s was focused women's right to bodily autonomy, and the penis-for-brains men in the '60s movement filled with rage when they realized that women's access to abortion did not equate to more women freely having sex with them. Women realized part of the sexual revolution was that they didn't have to have sex with men. Que the mantrums. That is why men stopped caring about abortion access, and abortion access eventually became a state issue instead of the once noble goal of safe and legal abortions for all women in the United States. This section was a fascinating and infuriating read, and shows how little all political classes of men view women's humanity.

Right-wing women defending the traditional family are public; they are loud and they are many. Especially they are loud about legal abortion, which they abhor; and what they have to say about legal abortion is connected to what they know about sex. They know some terrible things. [...] The right-wing woman makes what she considers the best deal. Her deal promises that she has to be fucked only by him, not by all his buddies too; that he will pay for the kids; that she can live in his house on his wages; and she smiles and says she wants to be a mommy and play house. [...] The women who rebel against their function must do it secretly, not causing grief, embarrassment, or confusion to other women isolated in their own reproductive quagmires, each on her own, each alone, each being a woman for all women in silence and in suffering and in solitude.

Dworkin concludes the chapter by wrapping up on how right-wing women consider private rapes with only one man in the confines of marriage as “the better deal.”