… [A]s Robin Morgan wrote in 1970: “We have met the enemy and he’s our friend. And dangerous.” Acknowledging the forced sex so pervasive in the counterculture in the language of the counterculture, Morgan wrote: “It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn’t want to be raped.” These were the beginnings: recognizing that the brother-lovers were sexual exploiters as cynical as any other exploiters – they ruled and demeaned and discarded women, they used women to get and consolidate power, they used women for sex and for menial labor, they used women up; recognizing that rape was a matter of utter indifference to these brother-lovers – they took it any way they could get it; and recognizing that all the work for justice had been done on the backs of sexually exploited women within the movement. “But surely,” wrote Robin Morgan in 1968, “even a male reactionary on this issue can realize that it is really mind-blowing to hear some young male ‘revolutionary’ – supposedly dedicated to building a new, free social order to replace this vicious one under which we live – turn around and absent-mindedly order his ‘chick’ to shut up and make supper or wash his socks – he’s talking now. We’re used to such attitudes from the average American clod, but from this brave new radical?”

It was the raw, terrible realization that sex was not brother-sister but master-servant – that this brave new radical wanted to be not only master in his own home but pasha in his own harem – that proved explosive. The women ignited with the realization that they had been sexually used. Going beyond the male agenda on sexual liberation, these women discussed sex and politics with one another – something not done even when they had shared the same bed with the same man – and discovered that their experiences had been staggeringly the same, ranging from forced sex to sexual humiliation to abandonment to cynical manipulation as both menials and pieces of ass. And the men were entrenched in sex as power: they wanted the women for fucking, not revolution: the two were revealed to be different after all. The men refused to change but even more important they hated the women for refusing to service them anymore on the old terms – there it was, revealed for what it was. The women left the men – in droves. The women formed an autonomous women’s movement, a militant feminist movement, to fight against the sexual cruelty they had experienced and to fight for the sexual justice they had been denied.

Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

(Found at the Bewilderness)