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Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin | The Coming Gynocide | Chapter 5
Posted June 1, 2024 by Unicorn in FeministBooks

Welcome to another discussion post for Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females by Andrea Dworkin.

In this post, we are discussing Chapter 5 The Coming Gynocide.

Share your thoughts on this chapter and overal book section in the comments. (Feel free to also share thoughts and suggestions on the discussion post and bookclub structure itself.)

Anyone who hasn't read the book but wants to give input on the topics discussed are welcome to as well! (I recommend mentioning that you haven't read the chapter in your post, so people are aware of that when replying.)

Readers are welcome to join in at anytime. Find a free copy of the book at frauenkultur.co.uk.

See you Saturday July 6th for the sixth and final chapter!

Previous Discussion Posts

8 comments

Unicorn [OP]June 2, 2024

Well shit. This was an intense chapter.

Dworkin's section on Nazi women reminds me of Project 2025's anti-woman agendas. Yeah, I know, comparing modern day politics to Nazis is overdone, but I mean, that's kind of how this chapter concludes, so...

Dworkin goes into the abuse in Medicare facilities and nursing homes, mainly affecting old women. Mainly alluding to how women are seen as "useless" once they can no longer produce children for the state.

The section on women being drugged and deemed hysterical by male doctors hit hard for me, as something I had recently experienced less than two years ago. It depresses me that despite the fact this book is fifty years old, in some ways, misogyny has stayed the same (or has even gotten worse).

Depression is commonplace among women because housework is boring, sex is boring, cooking is boring, children are boring, and the woman resents being bored but cannot change it. Depression is commonplace among women because women are often angry at the conditions of their lives, at what they must do because they are women, at the way they are treated because they are women; and depression truly is anger turned inward. Depression is commonplace among women because a woman’s life is often a series of dead ends, joy in which is the measure of femininity.

Dworkin also goes into the sexism, and the intersection of sexism and racism, in the welfare system.

The welfare system combines the imperatives of sex and money: get a man to marry and support you or we will punish you and yours until you wish you were all dead.

Dworkin then goes into the patriarchal society's two misogynistic views of women:

There are two models that essentially describe how women are socially controlled and sexually used: the brothel model and the farming model.

Commonly referred to in the popular phrase "the right views women as private property, the left views women as public property."

Poignant on the brothel model:

A pimp’s women are referred to as his “stable, ” but the analogy with horses is misleading. Horses are treated better, being more valuable. Prostitutes get treated like women; no analogy fits. For men this way of life would be seen clearly as a deprivation of human freedom; for women it is appropriate to what they are—women.

Dworkin then sadly predicts our current misogynistic state of society, in regards to surrogacy:

The notion of female will always articulated in discussions of prostitution (and currently pornography) also is central in a new area of discourse on what women are for: surrogate motherhood. A man, married to an infertile woman or on his own, wants a baby; he buys the egg and the use of the womb of a surrogate mother—a woman who will accept the introjection of his sperm through artificial insemination, gestate and give birth to what is contractually established as his child. In vitro fertilization—in which the egg is extracted from a woman surgically, fertilized in a petri dish, then vaginally introjected into the female—expands the possibilities of surrogate motherhood. The uterus is exempt from the immune response. Scientists already are able to remove the egg of one woman, fertilize it outside her body, then introduce it into a second woman’s uterus, where it will gestate. They have not done so, but there is no technological barrier to doing so.

Fifty years later, here we are, it is happening.

I found it interesting that Dworkin equates surrogacy with prostitution, as I had thought much of the same, in that it is the sale of women as female organs. And I even made a post a while ago, asking about applying the Nordic Model towards surrogacy.

Dworkin then talks about how feminists use, what I guess we now call the Nordic Model, to dismantle the objectification of women via prostitution:

[T]he state harasses and persecutes individual prostitutes and leaves the institutions and the powerful who profit from them alone. [...] Feminists, unlike the state, go after the institutions and the powerful, not the individual women, because feminists recognize above all that the prostitute is created by material conditions outside herself.

Shout-out to eco feminists:

The cultural and sexual intersection of women and earth is potent for men when they bomb “her, ” strip-mine “her, ” scorch “her, ” torch “her, ” denude “her, ” defoliate “her, ” pollute “her, ” despoil “her, ” rape “her, ” plunder “her, ” overcome, manipulate, dominate, conquer, or destroy “her. ” The significance of the farming model is both wide and deep. It has been the major way of using women—as mothers to produce children; metaphorically speaking, men have used the earth as if it were female, a huge fertile female that—one way or another—they will fuck to death.

Going to do a big quote from a beautiful section on what resonated with me in regards to feminism and women's liberation:

[Faced with overwhelming systemic misogyny,] women propose two very different solutions for themselves in relation to men and this man’s world.

The first honors the sexual and reproductive imperatives of men. [This is essentially women submitting to living in men's oppressive dehumanizing world as either private (right-wing) property or public (left-wing) property.]

The second solution is offered by feminists. It proposes, in the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “the individuality of each human soul... In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny... ” This is simply a recognition of the human condition, in which women are included. [...] Feminists have a vision of women, even women, as individual human beings; and this vision annihilates the system of gender polarity in which men are superior and powerful. This is not a bourgeois notion of individuality; it is not a self-indulgent notion of individuality; it is the recognition that every human being lives a separate life in a separate body and dies alone. In proposing “the individuality of each human soul, ” feminists propose that women are not their sex; nor their sex plus some other little thing—a liberal additive of personality, for instance; but that each life—including each woman’s life—must be a person’s own, not predetermined before her birth by totalitarian ideas about her nature and her function, not subject to guardianship by some more powerful class, not determined in the aggregate but worked out by herself, for herself. Frankly, no one much knows what feminists mean; the idea of women not defined by sex and reproduction is anathema or baffling. It is the simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and the most despised.

I thought this passage was beautiful. 💜

The chapter then ends on a more depressing note, as one might expect from a chapter titled "the coming gynocide". Dworkin's predictions are harrowing and worth considering, as cautionary text similar to The Handmaid's Tale.

coordJune 29, 2024

AD explained in easy words that nazi = patrix imo. She predicted a bad outcome for female bodies, I think to activate readers to revolt against what males want us to be and then help other females like cows too (for example in the movie Cloud Atlas the scene in Seoul). Our paths are interwoven.

coordJune 29, 2024

Really good as always. Right-Wing Women was the only book I read by AD. I followed every sentence she wrote like a thirsty rat that starts to smell water and just wants to dive. She connected so much. I liked that she didn't stay silent about how patriarchal therapy/psychology/pharma/psychiatry is.

Nothing really changed for good. The people who work there are guided by misogyny and lesbophobia and hold the patrix-view that women's behavior is crazy. Instead of changing/ stopping the environment and the bullies, the therapist targets the victim twice and creates functioning pharmapigs inbetween a abusive society that uses female bodies as resource for parasitical values.

ThelnebriatiJune 2, 2024

Narcissists seek to control everything they feel challenged by, because they lack the self control to manage their own emotions.

LapisLazuliJune 1, 2024

Thanks for the link, I will be reading this...I can't seem to find it affordable in print.

Unicorn [OP]June 1, 2024(Edited June 1, 2024)

Unfortunately, Dworkin's books have been out of print for a long time. Her husband owns them since she passed away, and I guess he doesn't bother to continue allowing them to be published? (Idk if that last part is correct or not, on why they are no longer being published.)

Edit: this reddit thread provides more information.

LapisLazuliJune 1, 2024

Thanks, that was a very educational thread...😥

CaeruleaJune 2, 2024

Yes. It illustrates perfectly why gay men are also not friends to women.

He is actually LOSING MONEY, free passive income, in order to not let her brilliant feminist work be published.