A woman has a right to safety - in real life, not abstractly. A lot has to change before safety is possible. All the implicit assumptions about women's inferiority have to change.
We cannot talk about what freedom is for women without talking about what freedom is for battered women. To me, that means every woman who is or has been battered has to have in our society a real right of sovereignty over her body. There have to be boundaries that she can set and that everyone else is legally bound to respect. If they don't, they will be punished. No exceptions. No bullshit.Women will never be free unless we are no longer treated as objects, which includes sexual objects. We are human beings; we are the center of our own lives. We are not things for men to act out on. We will never be free unless we stop the notion that violence is okay. It's not okay. Nobody has a right to control another human being through violence. We cannot sanction violence as a way of life - for both victim and executioner. Women are not ever going to be free unless all the institutions that support hurting women end - including the use of pornography by men, such that the hurting of women becomes a form of sexual entertainment; including the exploration of women in prostitution, such that men have a right to lease women's bodies for sexual release whenever they want; including incest, now the reigning model of male- female relations. (pp. 166-167)
And finally I want to say that what's urgent is to make the war against women visible. When it's invisible we can't fight it, and when it's invisible every single woman is isolated in the trauma of what's happening to her. She has no way out, and she has no way to become whole again. But standing together, and seeing the connections in the various kinds of violence against women - and in the exploitation that is not overly violent - we can go up against the power of the battered, the legal system that sill protects him, and the society that gives him privileges over us. (p.168)
In these passages from her essay, Freedom Now, Andrea Dworkin states with a clear voice the tasks (still) at hand for feminists. During her life, she courageously and repeatedly took a stand in hostile climates to demand that the oppression and exploitation of women and children be stopped. She was one of the most celebrated and maligned leaders for the second wave feminist movement whose own early traumas at the hand of the patriarchy gave her abundant and authentic expression for these truths. Her life's work on behalf of rape victims brought this country from the dark ages of thinking that a woman raped was a woman (or girl) who was asking for it, to the present day understanding of rape as an act of violence against women, including date rape and marital rape.
It is discouraging to see how much work has been done by Andrea and her peers and how much is still left to be done in fighting the battle against the hyper-sexualization of our culture created by pornography and our submission by apathy to it's political power and influence. The new war has arrived. Do we need a ribbon and and a poster child (a sacrificial female) before we will admit to the societal ills committed by pornographers?
There are already sacrificed women on every street corner, in strip joints and on the pages of adult entertainment magazines and videos. But they are the seedy sub-human type that society has agreed to designate for men to buy and violate. Are we waiting for our own daughters to be sacrificed in the name of men's violence against women. Sadly, I think we are. We are waiting for the female face of innocence that we know and love to be spat on, degraded and regarded as less than human before we say this must end, now.
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