Andrea Dworkin Quotes on Woman (16 Quotes)

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.

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

Women are an enslaved population --the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses. Women are forced into committing sexual acts with men that violate integrity because the universal religion -- contempt for women. . .

We think that we live in a heterosexual society because most men are fixated on women as sexual objects but, in fact, we live in a homosexual society because all credible transactions of power, authority, and authenticity take place among men. . .

Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.

Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.

The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this --since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other in other words, women absorb male aggression.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.

No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.

You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.

Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.

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. . . .

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

"Women's fashion" is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.

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.'