Andrea Dworkin Quotes

I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind.

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."

All around us there are other women, seemingly not hurt, making small talk, acting normal, which means happy, not discontent, certainly not devastated. Girls are still being socialised not to identify with—feel empathy for—other females: she got hurt because she did x, y, z—I didn’t, so I didn’t get hurt; she’s at fault, I’m not; the punishment fits her crime; blame her, exonerate him. This continuing, culturally applauded socialisation of women not to empathize with other women is a malignant part of the culture of men, dead white ones or not. Women are perceived to be appalling failures when we are sad. Women are pathetic when we are angry. Women are ridiculous when we are militant. Women are unpleasant when we are bitter, no matter what the cause. Women are deranged when women want justice. Women are man-haters when women want accountability and respect from men. Women are trash when women let men do what men want Women are shrews or puritans when we do not.

This is nihilism; or this is truth. He has to push past his boundaries. There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist withe intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied—physically, internally, in her privacy.

...pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity–the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her.

Sex is the dim echo of that original nakedness, primal, before anything else that is also human; later, isolated in an identity, hidden by it, in insensate because of it, one is a societal human being ruled by conformity and convention, not naked.

Being female in this world is having been robbed of he potential for human choice by men who love to hate s. One 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 Objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy, specially as it exists in relation to intercourse.

Wife beating and marital rape , pervasive here as elsewhere, are predicated on the conviction that a man's ownership of his wife licenses whatever he wishes to do to her: her boy belongs to him to use for his own sexual release, to beat, to impregnate. The male power of owning by virtue of its historical centrality, is barely constrained b the modest legal restrictions put on it.

[I]n the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography: better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. As with the call girl and the streetwalker, one is turned out better but both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service.

Berlin says: "… You cannot combine full liberty with full equality—full liberty for the wolves cannot be combined with full liberty for the sheep...." …. Are women sheep ("led like sheep to the slaughter")? Must women become wolves? Is violence against women a direct result of the fact that there is no inevitable, painful, retaliatory consequence for hurting women?

Rape is a question of access. Men will rape woman to whom they have access. The stranger in rape is used in a very important political way especially in organizing woman on the right: the stranger is used as a scapegoat. In the United States the stranger is black and he is a rapist. In Nazi Germany the stranger was a Jew and he was a rapist.This use of rape associated with a stranger is a basic component of racism. Women's fears of rape are legitimate. Those fears are manipulated to serve the ends of racism. We now see the same scapegoat strategy being used against homosexual men, who are accused of child molestation when most child molestation is of little girls. It is not that homosexual men do not rape. They do. So do black men and Jewish men. Men in all classes and of all races and ethnicities rape, which is not to say that all men rape. It is to say that all men benefit from rape, because all men benefit from the fact that women are not free in this society; that women cower; that women are afraid; that women cannot assert the rights that we have, limited as those rights are, because of the ubiquitous presence of rape.'''

To become the object, she takes herself and transforms herself into a thing: all freedoms are diminished and she is caged, even in the cage docile, sometimes physically maimed, movement is limited: she physically becomes the thing he wants to fuck.

Enemies of women, those who are determined to deny us freedom an dignity, use the word lesbian to provoke a hatred of women who do not conform. This hatred rumbles everywhere. This hatred is sustained and expressed by virtually every institution. When male power is challenged, this hatred can be intensified and inflamed so into violence. The threat is omnipresent because violence against women is culturally applauded. And so the word lesbian, hurled or whispered as accusation, is used to focus male hostility on women who dare to rebel, and it is also used to frighten and bully women who have not yet rebelled.

(Dworkin's statements quoted:) Her own experiences—as a rape victim, a prostitute and a battered wife—only added to the trenchancy of her views, but she reacted with fury to suggestions that such traumas had made it difficult for her to be objective. "I've never heard Solzhenitsyn asked if he can be objective about the gulag," she snarled. "As if not paying attention to rape and wife battery were some kind of objectivity."

One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.