Andrea Dworkin Quotes (50 Quotes)


    Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.

    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.

    Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free.

    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.

    Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.


    Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.


    As long as there is rape... there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become. You are not going to live in the world you want to live in.

    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. . .

    The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.

    The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

    Wealth of any kind, is an expression of male sexual power.

    The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment.

    Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.


    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.

    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. . .

    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.

    Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women and what is left, according to men, is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis.

    Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

    Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.

    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.

    Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.

    Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.

    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.

    Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.

    We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violentsee, he's jealous, he caresa woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt by how much she will take how much she will endure how suicidal she's prepared to be.

    In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man's identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus. . .

    Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

    Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.

    All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source the phallic identities of men.

    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.

    Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.

    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.

    Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity by money, admiration, recognition, respect, and the genuflection of others honoring their sacred and proven masculinity.

    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.

    Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species.

    "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.'

    The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not. . .

    We as women know that there are no disembodied processes that all history originates in human flesh that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another that all social change is built on the bone and muscle. . .

    For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values. . .

    A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

    Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.

    The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.


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