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Feminist Andrea Dworkin on Family (She=s Against It)

In the spring of 2000 I audited an on-line course in violence against women offered by Harvard Law School. The general tenor of the course was that our culture must change to save women from violence. Underlying the curriculum was the subtle theme that without eliminating traditional Christianity and the traditional family, it would be impossible to effectively combat violence against women, which includes Asubtle@ forms such as denying women abortions and denying them equal opportunities on the workplace.  Participants were invited to suggest ways to eliminate this violence, and encouraged by the course material, including writings by such radical feminists as Andrea Dworkin, not surprisingly, many suggested we need to eliminate traditional marriage and encourage women to have children out of wedlock. As studies show, this puts children at risk. Yet our most prestigious institution of higher learning was promoting family breakdown.

I was not surprised.  I had attended a meeting in Lancaster on DV, at which Tom Ridge=s wife Michelle, a graduate of Harvard, had spoken. She had stated that every woman in Pennsylvania is Aat risk@ of domestic violence.

 

From Woman Hating by Andrea Dworkin, Penguin Books, 1974

 

p. 189, Chapter entitled "Androgyny, Androgyne F.....ng and Community"

Subheading: Incest

 

AI was coldBlater revolted a little, not muchBseemed perhaps a good idea to tryBknow the Monster of the Beginning WombBPerhapsBthat way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish@

 

AThe 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.

AThe incest taboo does the worst work of the culture: it teaches us the mechanisms of repressing and internalizing erotic feelingB 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 Aobject@; 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 free-flow of natural and androgynous eroticism.

AThe Family

 

AFor if we grant that the sexual drive is at birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the total personality (Freud=s Apolymorphous perversity@) and ... becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo; and that... the incest taboo is now necessarily only in order to preserve the family; and if we did away with the family we would in effect be doing away with repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.