BOOK GROUP I'm reading Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin - anybody want to join me?

[Fuckedoffat48b]

I'm thinking it was high time we had a radfem book group on here.

I have just started reading Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin and wondered if anybody wanted to join me? We can discuss on here.

The PDF is here: www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Right-Wing-Women-The-Politics-of-Domesticated-Females-19831.pdf

I think it is a pretty timely read, and may go someway to framing my understanding of why so many women chose to be complicit with the patriarchy.

I'm in, will read and then give my thoughts, it's that how it works?

Just flicked through that pdf. If she hadn't written it down, all that hate could easily have died with her.

How's that song lyric go again...sympathy is what we need, cos there's not enough love to go around. Rare bird !

@OhHolyJesus yes, exactly. Or we can discuss as we go through it, put up particular topics for discussion etc.

I read it a long time ago but I found it very insightful. Looking forward to the discussion.

I'm in. I've read it a couple of times but many years ago.

I'd be up for that. I'll try to find an opportunity to read it over the week.

Shall we put a date in two weeks, so 6 August for final discussion of the book, but obviously will have ongoing discussion until then.

P14 "Sometimes it is a militant conformity. She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obedient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her. She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary Christian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a perfect fidelity. The males rarely keep their part of the bargain as she understands it: protection from male violence against her person.

This passage rang with a great resonance with me as I constantly come up against handmaidens on the 'far left' who will support men as they throw women under the bus in pursuit of their own political ideology. I feel some validation in my feelings about this from this passage.

Similarly:

P15 "It is the fashion among men to despise the smallness of women’s lives. The so-called bourgeois woman with her shallow vanity, for instance, is a joke to the brave intellectuals, truck drivers, and revolutionaries who have wider horizons on which to project and indulge deeper vanities that women dare not mock and to which women dare not aspire."

It makes it clear that the scathing way in which brocialists (and their handmaidens) scoff about 'middle class feminism' is just another misogynistic trope.

I always think of this book when watching The Handmaid Tale - Serena Joy and the aunts

I think we need to establish that when women talk about "what is good for women" it's not necessarily good for women as a class. So we can say that if all women rejected marriage en masse patriarchy would fall.
But women strike deals with men. Being a housewife is better than being a prostitute or working in a factory. This means that yes, this particular woman, benefits. That doesn't mean it's a right or good decision for women as a class.
Also, there are only a certain amount of housewife roles available so other roles such as whore, scivvy, whatever men require, must be taken up by other women.
The RWW is out for herself and wants to save herself and mothers who raise their daughters to be right wing women are doing the right thing by their daughters.

But like Dworkin said, men don't even uphold their end of the deal. To protect her from male violence and her kids too. Also, RWW were the ones having backstreet abortions . So failed on all levels

Women know, but must not acknowledge, that resisting male control or confronting male betrayal will lead to rape, battery, des­ titution, ostracization or exile, confinement in a mental institution or jail, or death. As Phyllis Chesler and Emily Jane Goodman make clear in Women, Money, and Power, women struggle, in the manner of Sisyphus, to avoid the “something worse” that can and will always happen to them if they transgress the rigid boundaries of appropriate female behavior. Most women cannot afford, either materially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt of­ ferings of obedience they bring to beg protection will not appease the angry little gods around them.

My Japanese mother in law, housewife extraordinaire. This is her

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

My DW runs me ragged most of the time - so in the context of exile, if the late Ms Dworkin is only half right, maybe this explains why she has left for two weeks.

Jamaica ?

No, Barnsley - off to visit her poorly mum, was the cover story.

I'm holding up though - reckon I could last the entire month, no sweat. When she gets back, I'm gonna ask her to call me her 'angry little god'

men always take the piss out of women's oppression and find it funny

@Sakura184 agreed. And I really like the way that Dworkin has called this behaviour out for the classist, misogynistic trope that it is.

I am slowly chewing my way through the rest of the book, but wanted to point out this Twitter thread about Munira Mirza (Bojo's new advisor), which feels horribly topical:

twitter.com/zarahsultana/status/1154334732009844736

I wondered what people's thoughts on the tract on wages were:

"Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence. But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating social system, women will never be paid equal wages."

I feel this part of the book makes it very difficult to square radical feminism with traditional socialist class-based analysis. Can anybody dissuade me??