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Andrea Dworkin Quotes | Quotes said by Andrea Dworkin

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #1

    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.


  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #2

    Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #3

    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.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #4

    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...

    Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #5

    Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #6

    But Dracula, the book, the myth, goes beyond metaphor in its intuitive rendering of an oncoming century filled with sexual horror: the throat as a female genital; sex and death as synonyms; killing as a sex act; slow dying as sensuality; men watching the slow dying, and the watching is sexual; mutilation of the female body as male heroism and adventure; callous, ruthless, predatory lust as the one-note meaning of sexual desire; intercourse itself needing blood, someone's, somewhere, to count as a sex act in a world excited by sado-masochism, bored by the dull thud-thud of the literal fuck. The new virginity is emerging, a twentieth century nightmare: no matter how much we have fucked, now matter with how many, now matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freedom) or passion or promiscuous abandon, no matter how often or where or when or how, we are virgins, innocents, knowing nothing, untouched, unless blood has been spilled – ours: not the blood of the first time; the blood of every time; this elegant blood-letting of sex a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty, and despair. Trivial and decadent; proud; foolish; liars; we are free.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #7

    Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #8

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

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #9

    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, since women work hard for low wages and still must sell sex. The economic system that punishes women for working outside the bedroom by paying low wages contributes significantly to women's perception that the sexual serving of men is a necessary part of any woman's life: or how else could she live? Feminists appear to think that equal pay for equal work is a simple reform, whereas it no reform at all; it is revolution. Feminists have refused to face the fact that equal pay for equal work is impossible as long as men rule women, and right-wing women have refused to forget it.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #10

    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.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #11

    How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #12

    I listened; I wrote; I learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to pick one kind of pedagogy over all others, I pick listening. It breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed limits; it takes one into another's life, her hard times and, if there is any, her joy too.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #13

    I need the money, people are very coy about money, and the ladies arent just coy, they are sci fi about money…

    …people ask, well, dont sweet things happen? yes, indeed, many sweet things, but sweet doesnt keep you from dying, making love doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, writing doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, being wise doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, facts are facts, being poor makes you face facts which also does not keep you from dying.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #14

    I'm going to ask you to remember the prostituted, the homeless, the battered, the raped, the tortured, the murdered, the raped-then-murdered, the murdered-then-raped; and I am going to ask you to remember the photographed, the ones that any or all of the above happened to and it was photographed and now the photographs are for sale in our free countries. I want you to think about those who have been hurt for the fun, the entertainment, the so-called speech of others; those who have been hurt for profit, for the financial benefit of pimps and entrepreneurs. I want you to remember the perpetrator and I am going to ask you to remember the victims: not just tonight but tomorrow and the next day. I want you to find a way to include them -- the perpetrators and the victims -- in what you do, how you think, how you act, what you care about, what your life means to you.

    Now, I know, in this room, some of you are the women I have been talking about. I know that. People around you may not. I am going to ask you to use every single thing you can remember about what was done to you -- how it was done, where, by whom, when, and, if you know -- why -- to begin to tear male dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it, to mess it up, to get in its way, to fuck it up. I have to ask you to resist, not to comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to refuse to accept it, to abhor it and to do whatever is necessary despite its cost to you to change it.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #15

    I’ve read Hamlet, I know men suffer.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #16

    If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #17

    In her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to become, to act, to change self and society. And each year she is stronger and there are more of her.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #18

    Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or
    circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise
    perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial
    inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but
    (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view”
    that some people with soft skins find “ offensive. ” It is the deep
    and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth
    and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from
    even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority
    puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by
    insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates
    a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments—
    scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never
    be made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what is
    normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt
    her—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as a
    consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a
    piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently
    loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences
    and perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferior
    in the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologically
    pejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she is
    needy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in and
    of itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Her
    personal experiences or perceptions are never credited as having
    a hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never loved
    enough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never loved
    enough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible to
    feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior.
    ” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely
    learns them all, even in one’s native language.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #19

    It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #20

    It is not in becoming a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man's world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her seperateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not his. Prostitution may be against the written law, but no prostitute has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men who enjoy them.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #21

    Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #22

    Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. 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. No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming... As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #23

    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.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #24

    Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #25

    Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high?

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #26

    She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. 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. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #27

    Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #28

    The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi
    ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.

    The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #29

    The central question is not: what is force and what is freedom? That is a good question, but in the realm of human cruelty - the realm of history - it is utterly abstract. The central question is: why is force never acknowledged as such when used against the racially or sexually despised? Nazi terror used against the Jews is not in dispute. Still, there is an almost universal - and intrinsically anti-Semitic - conviction that the Jews went voluntarily to the ovens. Rational discourse on how the Jews were terrorized does not displace or transform this irrational conviction. And similarly, no matter what force is used against women as a class or as individuals, the universal conviction is that women want (either seek out or assent to) whatever happens to them, however awful, dangerous, destructive, painful, or humiliating. A statement is made about the nature of the Jew, the nature of the woman. The nature of each and both is to be a victim. A metaphysical victim is never forced, only actualized.

  • Andrea Dworkin Quote #30

    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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