Andrea Dworkin Quotes

1946-, American Feminist Critic
quotes
37
topics
12
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“Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.”
Money
“No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.”
Sex
“Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.”
Pregnancy
“''Women's fashion'' is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.”
Fashion
“Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.”
Language
“Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.”
Seduction
“The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.”
Wives
“Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.”
Intelligence and Intellectuals
“Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.”
Poetry and Poets
“Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.”
Judaism and Jews
“Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.”
Feminism
“Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.”
Sex
“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.”
Men
“All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.”
Power
“Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.”
Eroticism
“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.”
Gossip
“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.”
Equality
“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.”
Dissent
“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.”
Slavery
“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.”
Human Fellowship
“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.”
Feminism
“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.”
Marriage
“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.”
Women
“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.”
Feminism
“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.”
Definition
“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.''”
Fear
“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.”
Pornography
“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. The penis is sensate; the penis is the man; the man is human; the penis signifies humanity.”
Body
“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; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.”
Mothers
“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. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.”
Oppression