Free Woman Hating by Andrea Dworkin

war, stop slavery, stop the prisons, stop the killings, stop destruction. Ah, I might learn what love is.
When we feel, we will feel the emergency: when we feel the emergency, we will act: when we act, we will change the world.
    Julian Beck,The Life of the Theatre
     

The rapes, tortures, and violations of O, Claire, Anne,Suck'sHelen, et al., are fiction, documenting the twisted landscape of male wish-fulfillment. Here we have her-story, the underbelly of history, two acts of gynocide committed against women by men, their scope and substance largely ignored. One is not surprised to find that they document that same twisted landscape.
    I isolate in particular Chinese footbinding and the persecution of the witches because they are crimes which equal in sheer horror and sadism the extermination of Native Americans and Hitler’s massacre of the Jews. Those two horrendous slaughters have found a place, however tenuous, in the “conscience” of “man. ” Acts of genocide against women have barely been noticed, and they have never evoked rage, or horror, or sorrow. That sexist hatred equals racist hatred in its intensity, irrationality, and contempt for the sanctity of human life these two examples clearly demonstrate. That women have not been exterminated, and will not be (at least until the technology of creating life in the laboratory is perfected) can be attributed to our presumed ability to bear children and, more importantly no doubt, to the relative truth that men prefer to fuck cunts who are nominally alive. I except here necrophili-acs, those pure and unsullied princes, whose story begins where ours ends.
    In addition, in any war, in any violence between tribes or nations, a specific war crime is perpetrated against women —that of rape. Every woman raped during a political nation-state war is the victim of a much larger war, planetary in its dimensions —the war, more declared than we can bear to know, that men wage against women. That war had its most gruesome, grotesque expression when Chinese men bound the feet of Chinese women and when British, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, German, Dutch, French, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, and Amerikan men had women burned at the stake in the name of God the Father and His only Son.
     

FOOTBINDING EVENT
    Instructions Before Reading Chapter
1.     Find a piece of cloth 10 feet long and 2 inches wide
2.     Find a pair of children’s shoes
3.     Bend all toes except the big one under and into the sole of the foot. Wrap the cloth around these toes and then around the heel. Bring the heel and toes as close together as possible. Wrap the full length of the cloth as tightly as possible
4.     Squeeze foot into children’s shoes
5.     Walk
6.     Imagine that you are 5 years old
7.     Imagine being like this for the rest of your life
     
    CHAPTER 6
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    Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding
    The origins of Chinese footbinding, as of Chinese thought in general, belong to that amorphous entity called antiquity. The 10th century marks the beginning of the physical, intellectual, and spiritual dehumanization of women in China through the institution of footbinding. That institution itself, the implicit belief in its necessity and beauty, and the rigor with which it was practiced lasted another 10 centuries. There were sporadic attempts at emancipating the foot —some artists, intellectuals, and women in positions of power were the proverbial drop in the bucket. Those attempts, modest though they were, were doomed to failure footbinding was a political institution which reflected and perpetuated the sociological and psychological inferiority of women; footbinding cemented women to a certain sphere, with a certain function —women were sexual objects and breeders. Footbinding was mass attitude, mass culture —it was the key reality in a way of life lived by real women—10 centuries times that many millions of them.
    It is generally thought that footbinding originated