One asks the same questions again and again, over a period of years, in the course of a lifetime. The questions have to do with people and what they do — the how and the why of it. How could the Germans have murdered 6,000,000 Jews, used their skins for lampshades, taken the gold out of their teeth? How could white people have bought and sold black people, hanged them and castrated them? How could "Americans" have slaughtered the Indian nations, stolen the land, spread famine and disease? How can the Indochina genocide continue, day after day, year after year? How is it possible? Why does it happen?
As a woman, one is forced to ask another series of hard questions: Why everywhere the oppression of women throughout recorded history? How could the Inquisitors torture and burn women as witches? How could men idealize the bound feet of crippled women? How and why?
The bound foot existed for 1,000 years. In what terms, using what measure, could one calculate the enormity of the crime, the dimensions of the transgression, the amount of cruelty and pain inherent in that 1,000-year herstory? In what terms, using what vocabulary, could one penetrate to the meaning, to the reality, of that 1,000-year herstory?
Here one race did not war with another to acquire food, or land, or civil power; one nation did not fight with another in the interest of survival, real or imagined; one group of people in a fever pitch of hysteria did not destroy another. None of the traditional explanations or justifications for brutality between or among peoples applies to this situation. On the contrary, here one sex mutilated (enslaved) the other in the interest of the art of sex, male-female harmony, role-definition, beauty.
Consider the magnitude of the crime.
Millions of women, over a period of 1,000 years, were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name of erotica.
Millions of human beings, over a period of 1,000 years, were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name of beauty.
Millions of men, over a period of 1,000 years, reveled in love-making devoted to the worship of the bound foot.
Millions of men, over a period of 1,000 years, worshiped and adored the bound foot.
Millions of mothers, over a period of 1,000 years, brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters for the sake of a secure marriage.
Millions of mothers, over a period of 1,000 years, brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters in the name of beauty.
But this thousand-year period is only the tip of an awesome, fearful iceberg: an extreme and visible expression of romantic attitudes, processes, and values organically rooted in all cultures, then and now. It demonstrates that man's love for woman, his sexual adoration of her, his human definition of her, his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation: physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That is the very nature of romantic love, which is the love based on polar role definitions, manifest in herstory as well as in fiction—he glories in her agony, he adores her deformity, he annihilates her freedom, he will have her as sex object, even if he must destroy the bones in her feet to do it. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge as the substantive core of the romantic ethos. That ethos is the warp and woof of culture as we know it.
-Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating
