Customer Reviews

Woman Hating (Plume)

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Fabulous book written by a fabulous woman who was more than the sum of her...well...parts. Although written in the early seventies Dworkin takes a very interesting, humorous, blunt, critical, approach to the misogyny which is typical of all nations and analyzes it thoroughly through various examples of psychological as well as physical brutality against women from Chinese foot-binding to the notorious "witch burnings". Great read, kept me laughing at various points throughout. Kept in mind that this was written during the heat of the women's revolution , and thus had a repetitive revolutionary tone-but nonetheless all said with good intentions in-spite of how male readers will obviously respond to the point she is trying to read. Vedy Vedy cool writing style though which makes it easily for any open minded reader to swallow.

Andrea Rita Dworkin (1946-2005) was an American radical feminist and writer, as well as anti-war activist and anarchist in the 1960s, best known for her criticism of pornography; she was married to John Stoltenberg. She wrote many books, such as Pornography: Men Possessing Women (Plume), Our Blood / Andrea Dworkin., Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, Intercourse, Scapegoat The Jews, Isreal, and women's Liberation, Life and Death, Right Wing Women, Letters from a War Zone, Mercy: A Novel, and Ice and Fire : A Novel.

She wrote in the Introduction to this 1974 book, "This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. It has no other purpose. It is not cerebral wisdom, or academic horses___, or ideas carved in granite or destined for immortality. It is part of a process and its context is change. It is part of a planetary movement to restructure community forms and human consciousness so that people have power over their own lives, participate fully in community, live in dignity and freedom... The core of this book is an analysis of sexism... what it is, how it operates on us and in us... Specifically, 'Woman Hating' is about women and men, the roles they play, the violence between them."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"For a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as close to it as possible. Catatonia is the good woman's most winning quality." (Pg. 42)
"Literary pornography is the cultural scenario of male/female... Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are." (Pg. 53)
"It is not hard to see that the struggle for gay male liberation and women's liberation is a common struggle; both mean freedom from the stigma of being female." (Pg. 89-90)
"Footbinding was a visible brand. Footbinding did not emphasize the differences between men and women---it created them, and they were then perpetuated in the name of morality." (Pg. 103)