Andrea Dworkin Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Andrea Dworkin quote about:
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“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 -
“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 know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.”
-- Andrea Dworkin -
“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 -
“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 -
“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