Andrea Dworkin Quotes

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

One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible.

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.

Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role.

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.

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.

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.

Touch is the meaning of being human.

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

Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.

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.

Feminism exists so that no woman ever has to face her abuser in isolation, alone.

The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.

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

I love books the way I love nature. ... I can imagine now that a time will come, that it is almost upon us, when no one will love books ... It is no accident, I think, that books and nature (as we know it) may disappear simultaneously from human experience. There is no mind-body split.

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.

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.

I also had nightmares. Somehow all the feelings I didn't feel when each thing had actually happened to me I did feel when I slept.

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

Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.

So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it's a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn't have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can't tell the adults that; they don't care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there's something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she's still on her knees, dead and raw and tender.

Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.

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.

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.

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.

The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.

Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.

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 ina homosexual society because all credible transactions of power, authority, and authenticity take place among men; all transactions based on equity and individuality take place among men. Men are real; therefore, all real relationship is between men; all real communication is between men; all real reciprocity is between men; all real mutuality is between men.

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

The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations-for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right-these institutions are real and they must be destroyed.

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

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.

Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is.

The man takes a body that is not his, claims it, sows his so-called seed, reaps a harvest - he colonizes a female body, robs it of its natural resources, controls it.

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, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.

Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea.

Any man will follow any feminine looking thing down any dark alley; I've always wanted to see a man beaten to a shit bloody pulp with a high-heeled shoe stuffed up his mouth, sort of the pig with the apple; it would be good to put him on a serving plate but you'd need good silver.

I never met a man who wasn't stupider than me.

And on that day, the day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing, because it is nothing; It is not real; It is not true.

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. It is art which will take the great human themes -love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself -and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others -should we call it joy?

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.

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic non-identity in women--that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know them so that this division of human flesh into two camps--one an armed camp and the other a concentration camp--is no longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.

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

I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will.

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.