Why Right Wing Women Hate Feminists and Lesbians

On how controversial Reagan-era writer predicted the anti-trans, anti-immigrant Trumpian world we live in today; in an era when equal rights for women and lesbians were the arch-enemy

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Andrea Dworkin {source: originally, Bennington College, photographer unknown}

I get tired of reading about men. I’m especially tired of reading about men when I pick up feminist or lesbian literature. I mean, personally, if I’m picking feminist or lesbian literature, it’s because I want to read about women. Too often though, third wave feminism¹, digresses into…men, the minutiae of heterosexual dating dynamics, the individual and private, and pink hats and the “the future is female” sweatshirts. I get it: men hold systemic power, of course it’s important to talk about them when you’re talking about feminism. Where third-wave feminism becomes reductive is when the discourse views and values women through men. We get divisive yet insipid views like “men are trash!”. That might feel cathartic, but does no good but probably some harm.

Not that any wave of feminism has been perfect. Second wave feminism, for one, was at times myopic, and not inclusive. But I think where it was stronger than third wave is that a lot of public intellectuals were involved it; it had direction and leadership. Can you name any leading third wave feminists? I really struggle. I know of a few, I know a few are on Substack too. To be honest, I’m not all that interested in reading their essays. Without leadership, this movement is weaker than first- and second-wave. No one whose books I want to read from start to finish over a single night.

Who is a Right Wing Woman?

On the other hand, Andrea Dworkin is someone I’d happily stay up late to read. I read two of her books in under a week. Have you ever read a writer that captured all all your thoughts onto her page. The type of writer whose words live on the edges of your mind, and they put everything together for you? It’s all there, and it’s better than you thought anything could be. That’s what reading Andrea Dworkin is to me, and probably to anyone who calls themselves a feminist.

I’ve known of Dworkin for years. She was a second wave feminist thought leader and public intellectual. I don’t know what you’ve heard about her, but I remember thinking that maybe she was too extreme when I first heard of her. Over time, I wised up, realized that women get called extreme when the reality is that they’re chosen not to conform.

Dworkin gets a bad rap, mired in controversy because she’s (1) very opinionated, and (2) against pornography. There’s also that thing where feminists and lesbians, eg., Sojourner Truth, Virginia Woolf…a lot more of them (us) get labelled ugly. That, of course, is the cardinal sin for women. That label has nothing to do with actual attractiveness, and everything to do with their race, queerness, and/or other ways in which some women refuse to signal submissiveness and gentleness. Calling a woman ugly is the cheapest insult, so easy that I’d lose respect for the intelligence of anyone who does so. The current American president does so to humiliate women, does so regularly when speaking about women present a challenge to him.

For the right wing, “ugly” isn’t a person’s features, it’s their aesthetic. Aesthetic choices always convey a message, though. As much as I’d love to tell you that my short hair and stylized, boyish clothes are only for me, it doesn’t hurt that (1) people take more seriously because of them (I’m smart but artsy!), and (2) women like them (especially the hair). The right wing woman, though, is trying to project a very different image. She has a certain hyper feminine look. The right wing women of the Reagan era are echoed in political wives: bright or pastel dresses, hair and makeup done to maximize femininity and helplessness (ever try running in heels and a skirt?). Nancy Reagan was an actress; her current successor was a model. Today, the conservative political woman’s high-effort hair and make up look like a direct descendant of the big hair, bright make up 1980s. Then you have the trad wife look, covered up, flowy fabrics, farm life that’s very in line with the country Christian fundamentalist women that Dworkin encounters in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Nowadays, we have this conservative/neoliberal tech element (including the vice president) have Asian-American wives. There are multiple theories for why this is: one is that Asian genes (and the stereotypical/model minority myth of intelligence and ambition) are considered desirable. In the brief period I went to tech parties, I remember feeling strange about being in rooms full of Asian-American women with nearly no Asian-American men; the men were white, but their girlfriends not. This tracks: there’s the Asian-woman stereotype of submissive, of standing by your man, of allowing him to pursue his professional goal and being endlessly supportive and being a mother. She’s the smart edition, a dark-haired lawyer or doctor doll.

No matter what the flavor, undergirding it is the idea that woman is secondary to man. A great example of this is Usha Vance, quitting the high-power big law she spent over a decade working on, standing by her husband even as he defended anti-Indian racism that could affect her and her children². She’s supporting her husband’s political ambition, and through it, her new ambition as a high power political wife. The danger in making this decision, especially in the modern era, is patently obvious: he could divorce you. And if you’ve given up your youth and/or career, then it curtails your options for the future.

As reflected in the aesthetic choices of its women, this conservatism of the 1980s and 2016-onward is conservatism at its most bombastic and flamboyant. In the introduction to Dworkin’s Right Wing Women, Moira Donegan writes about Dworkin’s insight into

“everyday misogyny: a reverence for domination and sadism, a cruel and peevish enforcement of oppressive hierarchies, an egotism that feed, with an almost erotic enthusiasm, on the pain and humiliation of others.”

Here, too, the 1980s and 2016-onward shared something: that their brand of conservatism isn’t merely hierarchical, upholding the status quo and deferring to the wealthy and powerful. No, it particularly gets off on humiliating minorities, indulging in feelings of domination and superiority as it punches down the most vulnerable, using fear to manipulation other conservatives to that sadistic cause.

I get that with my head, but not with my heart. As Toni Morrison said: “If you can only be tall because somebody's on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”

What Keep the Right Wing Woman Submissive

This sexual, sociological, and spiritual adaptation, which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is the primary imperative of survival for women who live under male-supremacist rule³.

In Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin tells us why conservative women agree to their role. The answer is so simple that it’s one that many of the survivors I’ve spoken to over the years independently have come to the same conclusion: that giving yourself over to one man will protect you from other male violence.

From father’s house to husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority to gain some protection from male violence.⁴

What the right offers to women is: a vision of male violence as unpredictable and uncontrollable. Since women live in a world they have by in large not built, the world and its machinations become mysterious, better to allow someone else to handle them for you. Allowing that someone else gives the world definition, it reigns in the chaos and confusion, it gives ignorance a shape, and it insulates against the violence. When men offer these women love, that love symbolizes order, stability, mutual accountability. Love from a man is earned through her obedience, sexual submission, and childbearing.

Dworkin wrote that the bargain was too often not upheld by men. She cites Phyllis Schlafly, anti-feminist, anti-ERA⁵ activist. She was also an accomplished lawyer, and denied an appointment to the Defense Department under the Reagan Administration. Schlafly’s position reminds me a bit of SCOTUS justice Amy Coney Barrett, who mostly stood by the conservative, Catholic agenda, only to be eviscerated by conservatives and called a “DEI hire” when she went against supporting one of the current president’s executive orders.

Of the ERA, Schlafly argued: “Since the mandate of the ERA is for sex equality, abortion is essential to relieve women of their unequal burden of being forced to bear an unwanted baby”⁶. For the right wing woman, this was an argument against the equal rights. Dworkin wrote that this was a tragedy: that survival under patriarchal systems meant a woman agreed to this bargain, that she agreed to what Dworkin called “committing suicide”. She frequently wrote of childbirth as if it was part of the bargain: that women agreed to in exchange for safety from men (yet, many women undoubtedly want to bear children for reasons outside of men), that compulsory childbearing was the equivalent of chattel-based slavery, that childbearing was a display of a woman’s selflessness.

The right to abortion wasn’t a guarantee for part of Dworkin’s life, and illegal abortions were rampant. Dworkin wrote of how right wing woman would accept illegal abortion over legal abortion because it kept abortions out of sight and out of mind. In 1979, the New York Times reported that there were 20 million illegal abortions worldwide, and it was a leading cause of death of women of child-bearing age⁷. That access to abortion has been curtailed shows a lack of thoughtfulness for the lives of women of child-bearing age.

We know now, more than ever, that citing such facts and statistics to change minds and/or plead for sympathy does no good, does not sway right wing women. The “maiming of moral capacity” necessary to their survival that Dworkin wrote about is such that the right wing women will accept the death (rape, abuse) of other women for her personal sense of safety.

To keep women unequal both under the law and in the workplace was (is) imperative in their dependency and support of men. Both Andrea Dworkin and Adrienne Rich (in her seminal essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence⁸) wrote of the necessity of women making less money than men, and of how sexual harassment (and assault) in the workplace further fixes women’s lower status in upholding patriarchy. In her brilliant book and study Sexual Harassment of the Working Woman, Catharine A. MacKinnon further expands on this: that under capitalism, women are segregated by gender and occupy a structurally lower position. MacKinnon supports this assertion by showing the reader (through data) that men will often refuse to hire a woman even if they can get away with paying her less. Further, sexual harassment and rape keeps women in a state of fear and dependency. Most women know that if they speak up about it, there are consequences: retaliation, unemployment. Worse, a ruined reputation in her industry that disables getting hired at another company.

In his Labelling Women Deviant: Gender, Stigma, and Social Contract⁹, Edwin Schur wrote of how women who come forward are consistently villainized moreso than the men that commit harassment. It’s the woman, after all, that’s broken the societal gender norm and social contract, both in resisting abuse and then in speaking up. To punish her serves as a lesson in silence for other women. Schur cities the devastation of workplace assault: that a year later, four out of five women hadn’t returned to work. In her groundbreaking Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller writes of how rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.¹⁰”

Writing of all women is essential, and Dworkin was more intersectional than other feminist (including Brownmiller, who I cited above). Part of this was probably that was a Jewish lesbian, signaling the lived experienced and need for intersectionality. She wrote at length about the additional suffering of Black women, as did Adrienne Rich (also Jewish, also lesbian), with both authors acknowledging the double bias of racism and homophobia. Part of the oppression of Black women is their financial oppression, that they, even more than white women, are kept impoverished. In particular, Reagan took advantage of this, creating the trope of the Black “welfare queen” that takes advantage of the white taxpayers. The parallel to the U.S.’s current administration openly and explicitly vilifying women, LGTBQI+, immigrants, government workers, Black people, et al, are striking.

Why Women Turn Away from Feminism

In Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin wrote about mothers raising their daughters to submit to men under the patriarchy. In The Will to Change, bell hooks wrote of how mothers raise sons to be dominant and out of touch with the emotions. That all genders suffer under this social contact makes no difference, it is upheld still. Right wing women (well, many women across political lines) are complicit in upholding this.

Here the thing: the right wing women who submit aren’t entirely wrong (so to speak) in doing so. Dworkin wrote that their submission was “a plea for safety, for belonging, for a security that they love more than their own freedom.” If “freedom” comes with the risks of poverty and continual abuse (from random men), then it stands to reason that some women chose alignment with a single male protector. If a career under the social contract is curtailed, if being a woman alone means risking rape (something lesbian writer Eileen Myles also wrote about), if a woman’s divorce meant she’d lose access to her children (something Constance Debré went through and details in Love Me Tender and a fear Adrienne Rich further describes in Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)…well, it stands to reason some women opt for to stay in.

How does this work? A woman goes from her father (and brothers) to a male romantic partner, which minimizes her risk of rape or abuse by random men. The statistics show that rape and abuse are frequent. There’s a proliferation of sexual harassment in the workplace (with 2017 data from EEOC showing that up to 85% of women experience sexual harassment in the workplace), showing that working outside the home still carries unfortunate risk for women. Data from RAINN shows that one out of six women will be raped or attempted to be raped in her lifetime, with the period when she’s most likely to be raped her earliest weeks of the first two years of college. The rate of rape/attempted rape is higher for women of the same age that opt out of college (according to RAINN). This lends credence to my theory that the period between fatherly protection and a spouse’s protection is the most risky in terms of rape.

Historically, laws against rape (both in the UK and US) are based on property law. That is, a woman is first the property of her father, then the property of her husband. If a woman is raped, especially if she’s raped before marriage, she’s devalued. Her father might need to provide for her longer since he’s less likely to be able to transfer his financial responsibility to a husband. For a husband, a woman is devalued as the bearer of his children. What if the child she bears isn’t his? Hence, virginity and sexual purity becomes crucial: to ensure paternity of children.

Extend this racially: that is, a white woman who raped by a Black man in the eyes of the white man is further devalued. This results in a strange outcome: the racialize fear of rape: that in some weird ways, it’s more acceptable for a white woman to be raped by a white man than it is to be raped by a man of another race (or by a lesbian, as I’ll get into later in this essay). Here’s an answer to the current undocumented immigrant fears of the current right wing: that undocumented immigrants might rape women, which conservative news sources disproportionally covering these relatively rare occurrences to increase women’s fears, dependency, and the base’s hatred of immigrants.

A few years, I had a conversation with a survivor of attempted rape about this. We talked about the single most effective strategy for avoiding rape by a random person: have a (non-raping, non-abusive) boyfriend (husband, male partner, you get the picture). A potential rapist will respect that which he sees as another man’s property over a woman’s “no”. This reminds me of how Gwenyth Paltrow was able to stop Harvey Weinstein’s harassment because her boyfriend at the time, Brad Pitt, had a “talk” with Weinstein. Assaulting a woman with a boyfriend (or brothers) is much risker than assaulting a woman without.

Yet, tt also stands to reason that women who live in this reality and make this bargain chafe against it, too. That means taking out their fears and frustrations at its inadequacies on women who don’t make the same bargain. As Dworkin wrote:

Only women die one by one, polished to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately ashamed to cry out. Only women die one by one, still believing that if only they had been perfect—perfect wife, mother, or whore—Women desperately try to embody a male-defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal, by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the male in his scheme of things.

To have your individuality and freedom reduced, even with your complicity, is no easy thing to bear. As with abortions, it’s easier for right wing women (in this case, women who’ve made the bargain, because some left wing women make it too) to feel frustration when they see women who haven’t. There’s an element of fear that comes into play in seeing a woman who fought to retain her freedom and individuality if you gave yours up, too. As with abortion, to keep those women out of sight is to keep them out of mind, and to be more comfortable with one’s choices if you are only surrounded by people who have made the same choice. If those women do appear, better to preemptively discredit those women, to soothe their conscience in doing so.

This, I believe is why women are so cruel to victims of rape (something I’ve written about in more detail HERE). For a woman to blame another woman for her rape is to for the blaming woman to come up reasons as to why she won’t be raped. To have a formula to avoid rape means that women who don’t abide by that social contract are punishable. After my own assault, I remember several women who said that it was my fault because I didn’t sexually engage with men. This would make a way to avoid rape… having sex with your would-be rapist. It completely disrespect notions of consent.

In Right Wing Women, Dworkin touched upon the story of anti-LGBTQI+ activist Anita Bryant (she of pie-in-the-face fame). Dworkin is more sympathetic to Bryant than most of us would be, describing how Bryant’s abusive husband pursued Bryant before their marriage, refusing to accept her many no’s. After he wore her down and they married, she prayed to God to save her married. It failed regardless.

Going back to Edwin M. Schur’s Labelling Women Deviant, for a woman to say no is itself a form of punishable deviance. Going back to Schur’s notion of the social contract and tying that contract to Dworkin’s theories of the bargain for safety, feminism’s call for equality would spell the end of that old contact. A new social contract is unknown, and for some, spells out a lack of safety. It’s like the old saying about the devil you know.

Right Wing Women’s Particular Fear of Lesbians

Andrea Dworkin, Jewish lesbian feminist, met with and interviewed several right wing women. She found these many of these women hadn’t met any actual lesbians, yet feared that lesbians would assault them, call them dirty names, and were certified committers of sexual assault against women and girls¹¹ (p 22). Dworkin found:

“no facts could intrude on this psychosexual fantasy. No facts or figures on male violence against women and children could change their fear. They admitted that they knew of many cases of male assault against females, including within families, and did not know of any assaults by lesbians against females. They men, they acknowledged when pressed, were sinners, and they hated the sin, but there was clearly something comforting in the normalcy of heterosexual rape. To them, the lesbians was inherently monstrous.¹²”

Does that remind you of some arguments you’ve heard recently? To me, it sounds almost exactly like today’s vehement anti-trans rhetoric¹³, which is opposed trans women in particular. Too many feminists indulge in this rhetoric¹⁴.

Dworkin wrote that she was surprised that the 1980s the old bathroom rhetoric of the civil rights era - bathrooms (that is, keeping Black and colored folks out of whites only bathrooms) hadn’t come back. It’s come back today, of course. I wouldn’t be surprised if us lesbians as well as trans women were kept out of bathrooms and changing rooms as well - to keep cis-heterosexual women safe, of course. The slippery slope to segregation may have already begun, we’ll see how far it goes, and how effective or ineffective it’ll be.

Dworkin learned about these anti-lesbian attitudes through her attendance of the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, TX. She was there to speak to and try to understand right wing women. At this conference, she spoke to a Black liberal delegate who thought the treatment of lesbians by the Republican party was terrible. This lines up with politics today: that there is wider support for the “left wing” amongst minorities, who are generally more supportive of one another¹⁵. Of the anti-abortion crowd, Dworkin wrote: “The grief of these women for fetuses is real, and their contempt for women who become pregnant out of wedlock is awesome to behold.¹⁶” Yes, these women have genuine compassion for fetuses. Their compassion doesn’t extend to lesbians, gay men, Jewish, or Black people.

In the most harrowing scene in Right Wing Women, a group of anti-feminists swarm Dworkin. Slowly, as they question her, they push her toward a balcony. Dworkin notices the drop of several stories. She was crowded so closely that her back was bending over the railing. She thought to herself about how, if or when she fell, the women that caused her fall would look blameless; it would look like an accident.

Fortunately for Dworkin, two dykes (her descriptor) appear, and begin asking questions. The anti-feminists back off, and the dykes (one of whom Dworkin already knew) warned her that she should never be alone with the anti-feminists (or others who hate) out of concern for her personal safety.

A Lesson to Remember Today: Gay People died en masse Because of Reagan

All over the internet, I keep reading how we’re not living in 1933, that this is illiberalism but not fascism (currently, sure), that our left wing fears are unfounded. Easy for you to say, I think to myself, when I hear people who are white (or my fellow Asian-Americans), heteronormative, and/or men who are saying it.

Dworkin’s book was published before the AIDS crisis: the real life Reagan-era epidemic that killed one out of ten gay men of her generation. Government inaction (not just in the US, but globally) because of the lack equality for LGBTQI+ folks has already been deadly on an enormous scale once already. Perhaps the global turn toward conservatism is gearing up to make it deadly again.

When #45 took office in 2017 under the promise of a “Muslim ban”, I had conversations with my fellow American-born South Asian friends about that ban being extended to all of us brown skinned folks. Many of us were genuinely afraid that as birth-right Americans, we’d become stateless. That didn’t happen, but I don’t know what the future holds today.

Sure, there’s a lot of hyperbole that comes out of the left’s current fear. I still wouldn’t completely dismiss fears of persecution. Yes, the Nazis took power in 1933, and it’s not the same as 2025 U.S. The Nazis didn’t agree upon the Final Solution until 1942. The future is long, and I hope our fears are unfounded. We just saw the nighttime arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, we know that Canary Mission has complied lists of similar protesters and the current US administration has promised to go after others. This, more than anything, signals the beginning of the end of free speech (as it is a restriction on speech), and the slippery slope toward broad inequality and persecution has become more slippery.

As an ethnically South-Asian woman, queer, feminist (I really hate laying out identities, by the way), I could be unsafe. As Dworkin’s balcony story shows, I am unsafe in some environments. But, as the old saying goes, I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees. As a woman, today and right now, I actively chose freedom and individuality over safety. For this, I went through the lived experience of rape. If you were to ask me if I would compromise my freedom in exchange for not having that experience - my answer is no. I wouldn’t be so much of a feminist, I wouldn’t fight to stop rape if I didn’t have the lived experience of why feminism is so important.

I sometimes have folks ask me how I can bear to hear stories (of assault) and bear to deal with it so often. I think there’s a quote from Dworkin that sums up my thoughts on this better than I could:

Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.

It’s agony sometimes, but it’s also cathartic. It also gives my life meaning and depth. And most of all, I don’t know how I could live with myself if I did not fight.

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That’s a signed title page of Dworkin’s Right Wing Women: it was signed and personalized for me by the author of the forward, Moira Donegan. Her reference to me “fighting” is to my telling her about my work/activism in helping survivors of rape.

1. Third-wave feminism is the wave that began in the 1990s. It argued for intersectionality. The writer that this piece focuses on, Andrea Dworkin, is pretty intersectional.

2. There was a DOGE employee who made some anti-Indian remarks. Vance defended him in a “boys will be boys” and forgive them way on social media.

3. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p 9.

4. Ibid, p. 4.

5. The ERA is the US’s Equal Rights Amendment. It was opposed by many Republicans for its attempts at equality for the sexes/genders, races, ethnicities, etc. In particular, there was an anti-feminist push against it, as second wave feminist and the ERA were closer in time than the earlier Black rights civil rights era of the 1960s.

6. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p 25.

7. Ibid. p. 67.

8. Rich, Adrienne. Ed. Gilbert, Sandra M. Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry. (New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.) p. 159.

9. Schur, Edwin M. Labelling Women Deviant: Gender, Stigma, and Social Contract. (New York: Random House, Inc, 1988).

10. Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975) p. 5.

Brownmiller’s work has been very widely criticized, including by Angela Davis, who said it bordered on racism.

11. This isn’t to say that lesbians aren’t ever abusive. There’s scant data on abuse within lesbian relationships, but what is out there shows that the rates aren’t exactly low. This, IMO, signals that the problem isn’t the abuser alone, it’s that we have a vulnerable underclass which a potential abuser can get away with abusing.

For example, I have a male friend who (both he and younger brother) was sexually abused by his mother’s lesbian partner (yes, parents were divorced). Yet: I have several male friends who were sexually abused as children by their mother’s boyfriends.

12. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 22.

13. A few weeks ago, I had a gay man and a lesbian woman here on Substack who liked some of my notes. The next day, when the lesbian decided to re-stack (reshare) a note of mine about lesbian activist Urvashi Vaid but add her own anti-trans twist, I blocked both of them so as to stop them from using my name and research to support an anti-trans agenda. I believe it’s important for us cis-lesbians and cis-gay dudes (and bi/pansexuals) to support trans folks as trans folks are being assaulted by the right wing, for the reasons I lay out in the essay, but also because I believe in equality and supporting others in general.

14. There’s a Substack writer who wrote a viral piece that I thought was pretty inaccurate on rape. She’s recently (unsurprisingly) written a piece defending a few anti-trans feminists.

Here’s my piece:

What Do Too Many Women Do When She Hears About Another Woman's Rape?

15. This is obviously not universal support.

16. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 22.