Quotes by Dworkin, Andrea

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on definition   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on dissent   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on equality   

"Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer."

Dworkin, Andrea on eroticism   

"Women's fashion is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women."

Dworkin, Andrea on fashion
5 fans of this quote   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on fear   

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

Dworkin, Andrea on feminism   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on feminism
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on feminism   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on gossip   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on heroes and heroism   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on fellowship   

"Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use."

Dworkin, Andrea on intelligence and intellectuals   

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

Dworkin, Andrea on judaism and jews   

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

Dworkin, Andrea on language   

"Romantic love, in pornography 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."

Dworkin, Andrea on love
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"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on marriage   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on men   

"In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man's identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man's worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are not recognized as fully human."

Dworkin, Andrea on men
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"Women are an enslaved population -- the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses. Women are forced into committing sexual acts with men that violate integrity because the universal religion -- contempt for women -- has as its first commandment that women exist purely as sexual fodder for men."

Dworkin, Andrea on women
4 fans of this quote   

"Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice."

Dworkin, Andrea on money   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on 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."

Dworkin, Andrea on oppression   

"Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis."

Dworkin, Andrea on poetry and poets   

"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?"

Dworkin, Andrea on art   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on pornography   

"All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men."

Dworkin, Andrea on power   

"Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it."

Dworkin, Andrea on pregnancy   

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

Dworkin, Andrea on seduction
3 fans of this quote   

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

Dworkin, Andrea on sex   

"No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it."

Dworkin, Andrea on sex   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on slavery   

"For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values -- or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be -- to be through her son, to live through her son."

Dworkin, Andrea on sons   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on body   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on violence   

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

Dworkin, Andrea on wives   

"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."

Dworkin, Andrea on women
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