In a 1975 speech, published later as “ The Root Cause” in Our Blood (1976), Andrea elaborated on this important distinction between truth and reality: The first was about an absolute truth the second was about a social regime imposed by male supremacy. But she was also very clear that the sex binary we infer from and impute to those two classes does not itself exist: it is a cultural illusion, not a biological either/or.įor Andrea there was no contradiction between her view that humans are not divisible into two sexes and her impassioned exhortations to end the sex-class hierarchy. The discovery is inescapable: We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.Īndrea was very clear that the system of male supremacy is enforced over and against a political class called “women” in order to delineate and reify a sex class called “men”-and she was eloquent in her analysis of how cultural practices such as rape, battery, prostitution, and pornography institutionalize that class-based oppression. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As she wrote in her 1974 book Woman Hating: One was that she repudiated the sex binary-and the biological essentialism upon which belief in it is based.

During those thirty-one years, she changed my life, and at first it was hard to go on.įrom long before I met her, Andrea held strong radical views, as people who have read her or heard her speak know well. The invidious ideology of biological sex essentialism inflames a bigotry that would have appalled Andrea.Īndrea and I began living together on August 1, 1974, in New York City, and she died in our home in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 2005.

Woman hating andrea