How ‘Right-Wing Women’ Found Their Place in the Manosphere

RIGHT-WING WOMEN, by Andrea Dworkin

A tech mogul extols the virtues of “masculine energy”; a United States senator writes a book called “Manhood”; a president found liable for sexual abuse chooses a defense secretary accused of sexual assault (an allegation he has denied). Given aggressive assertions of male supremacy on the right, the politics of right-wing women might seem something of an enigma.

But for the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who died in 2005 at the age of 58, the insistent antifeminism of some conservative women was never perplexing at all. Her book “Right-Wing Women” — originally published in 1983 and just reissued after decades out of print — is a surprising work, even for Dworkin, who was known (and often caricatured) for her militant arguments and incendiary turns of phrase.

She compared sexual intercourse to territorial occupation, and pornography to Dachau. She merged a swaggering, incantatory style with her own experiences of painful vulnerability. As a child, she was molested by a stranger; as a young woman, she was battered by her husband, “the former flower child I am still too afraid to name.” She treated the feminist movement as a matter of life and death. Her warnings often verged on apocalyptic. A chapter in “Right-Wing Women” is called “The Coming Gynocide.”

You might expect that Dworkin would have been wholly unsympathetic to the right-wing women in her book. But no: She credits them with seeing a stifling, male-dominated world as it really is. She suggests that the optimistic liberal woman, who holds out hope that the patriarchy can be reformed through incremental tinkering, is the delusional one, clinging to a faith that feminist demands could be anything short of revolutionary. The right-wing woman, by contrast, is a realist to a fault. She notices how men oppress women, and she doesn’t believe in the possibility of transformative change. And so she acquiesces to male authority as a matter of survival: “She conforms, in order to be as safe as she can be.”

By way of example, Dworkin offers the Christian self-help of Ruth Carter Stapleton and Marabel Morgan, as well as the conservative activism of Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly, who campaigned against abortion, gay rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. Dworkin shares their assessments of the world as a menacing place, even if she objects to their fatalism about changing it. She gives an unexpectedly respectful hearing to Bryant, who called homosexuality “an abomination,” explaining how Bryant grew up “in brutal poverty” and married a domineering man who made her feel “guilt over the abnormality of her ambition.” “Bryant, like all the rest of us, is trying to be a ‘good’ woman,” Dworkin writes, in a startling bit of identification. “Bryant, like all the rest of us, is having one hell of a hard time.”