Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist activist and writer. She is best known for her analysis of pornography, although her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 40 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US Constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
Her discursive style, coupled with antipathy for her views, produced sharply polarizing debate. She was viewed with derision and scorn: “People think Andrea’s a man-hater, she gets called a Fascist and a Nazi—particularly by the American left, but it’s not detectable in her work.” But not only from the left. After her death, the conservative gay writer and political commentator, Andrew Sullivan, claimed that
“Many on the social right liked Andrea Dworkin. Like Dworkin, their essential impulse when they see human beings living freely is to try and control or stop them—for their own good, they are horrified by male sexuality, and see men as such as a problem to be tamed, they believe in the power of the state to censor and coerce sexual freedoms. Like Dworkin, they view the enormous new freedom that women and gay people have acquired since the 1960s as a terrible development for human culture.”
Libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young complained of a “whitewash” in feminist obituaries for Dworkin, arguing that Dworkin’s positions were manifestly misandrist, stating that Dworkin was in fact insane,criticizing what she called Dworkin’s “destructive legacy”, and describing Dworkin as a “sad ghost” that feminism needs to exorcise. (via Wikipedia)
Lets take a look at a few of her great quotes and proverbs:
On Love:
Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation.
On Life:
I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die.
Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however inspired, can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is not a dreadful form of dying.
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs or because he thinks logically and analytically or because he is ”sensitive” or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man’s life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.
On Fear:
By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air it is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it. Instead of ‘I am afraid,’ we say, ‘I don’t want to,’ or ‘I don’t know how,’ or ‘I can’t.’
On Feminism:
Feminism is hated because women are hated. Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of woman hating.
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.
Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice.
The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.
A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence. But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating social system, women will never be paid equal wages. Men in all their institutions of power are sustained by the sex labor and sexual subordination of women. The sex labor of women must be maintained; and systematic low wages for sex-neutral work effectively force women to sell sex to survive. The economic system that pays women lower wages than it pays men actually punishes women for working outside marriage or prostitution.
On Freedom:
Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.
Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.