Andrea Dworkin quotes

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

#Inspiring #Hate #Expression

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Art #Hero #Thinking

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Women #Ideas #Gossip

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

#Class #Political #Discrimination

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

#Heart #Warrior #Self

I don’t believe rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Country #Believe #Knives

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Reality #Uprising #Genius

Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Dna #Abuse #Nuance

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

#Class #People #Coward

Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Bravery #Feminism #Males

Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who use to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with any more. It doesn't matter who the individual women are.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Fighting #Practice #Class

I have to ask you to resist, not 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

#Men #Cost #Accepting

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

#Funny #Stupid #Men

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

#Sex #Men #Body

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Inspiring #Struggle #Learning

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Giving #Accounting

I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Hate #Men #Pigs

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

#Peace #Abuse #Foundation

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Fall #Feminist #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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Power #Men #Names

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

#Suicide #Survival #Tragedy

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

#Wine #Bottles #Seduction

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

#Character #Personality #Feminist

Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Art #Passion #Men

Women, for centuries not having access to ***** and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what ***** says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Women #Believe #Bears

No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Women #Needs #Intercourse

Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Women #Childbearing

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#War #Men #Female

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

#Believe #Reality #Suffering

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?
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Love #Running #Art

Romantic love, in ***** 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. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Love #Integrity #Sacrifice

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Daughter #Mother #Children

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Sex #Feminism #Males

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Choices #Feminist #Mazes

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

#Mean #Pimp

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

#Sex #Pain #Loneliness

Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Son #Feminist #Inevitable

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Home #Work Out #Feminist

...In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Expression #Feminist #Males

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.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Art #Father #Real

One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Feminist #Degradation #Way

Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized, made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Sex #Class #Feminist

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

#Self #Rights #Brave

On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Self #Expression #Feminist

Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it 'Her'. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Religious #Hero #Airplane

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

#Tragedy #Language #Force

We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist - marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Marriage #Evil #Definitions

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. In male culture, police are heroic and so are outlaws; males who enforce standards are heroic and so are those who violate them.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Peace #Men #Practice

The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Essence #Choices #Oppression

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

#Hate #Mean #Men

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for.
-- Andrea Dworkin

#Mother #Boys #Projects