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Andrea Dworkin

95 quotes

“I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The nature of women's oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Woman Hating, ch. 9, p. 23, E.P. Dutton, New York (1974)
“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.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Our Blood (1973) p.16.
“Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Right Wing Women, ch.2 (1978)
“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 (1946–2005) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Right Wing Women, ch.2 (1978)
“Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Our Blood (1976)
“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.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976)
“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.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976)
“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.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech, first delivered at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976)
“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 (1946–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Queen's College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, published in Our Blood (1976)
“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.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (September 26, 1975). "The Root Cause", ch. 9, Our Blood (1976)
“I represent the morbid side of the women's movement. I deal with the shit, the real shit.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Feminism: An Agenda, (1983)
“The female life-force is characterized as a negative one: we are defined as inherently masochistic. [. . .] Sexual masochism actualizes female negativity, just as sexual sadism actualizes male positivity. A woman’s erotic femininity is measured by the degree to which she needs to be hurt, needs to be possessed, needs to be abused, needs to submit, needs to be beaten, needs to be humiliated, needs to be degraded.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Root Cause (1976)
“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 (1946–2005) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Our Blood 1976 as quoted in The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling by Rebecca Wanzo
“I think the essence of romantic love for women is being the special one, and that's an absolutely terrible trap. If the lover treats certain other people badly, you will be treated that badly, too.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Norah Vincent, Sex, Love and Politics: Andrea Dworkin, in New York Press, vol. 11, no. 5, Feb. 4–10, 1998, p. 40, col. 4 (main title and subtitle may have been in either order, per id., p. [1])
“Q: People think you are very hostile to men. A: I am. Q: Doesn't that worry you? A: From what you said, it worries them.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nervous Interview (1979) Dworkin wrote both the questions and the answers
“Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape. The fact is that rape and prostitution caused and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and prostitution of women.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pornography and Male Supremacy (1981), Letters from a War Zone, p 230.
“Anti-feminism is also operating whenever any political group is ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women, some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including both extreme ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves, to the brothels or the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly anti-feminist; it is also profoundly immoral...”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Anti-feminism," Right Wing Women (1983), pp. 230-231.
“When a word is used to provoke hatred, it does not matter what the word actually means. What matters is only what the haters insist it means—the meaning they give it, the common prejudices they exploit.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Power of Words" (1978)
“It is no secret that fear and hatred of homosexuals permeate our society. But the contempt for lesbians is distinct. It is directly rooted in the abhorrence of the self defined woman, the self-determining woman, the woman who is not controlled by male need, imperative, or manipulation. Contempt for lesbians is most often a political repudiation of women who organize in their own behalf to achieve public presence, significant power, visible integrity.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Power of Words" (1978)
“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.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Andrea (narrating), in Mercy: A Novel (1990)
“(On prostitution:) Incest is boot camp. Incest is where you send the girl to learn how to do it. So you don't, obviously, have to send her anywhere, she's already there and she's got nowhere else to go. She's trained. And the training is specific and it is important: not to have any real boundaries to her own body; to know that she's valued only for sex; to learn about men what the offender, the sex offender, is teaching her.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Prostitution and Male Supremacy" (1993), Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 1(1):1–12. Reprinted in Life and Death (1997), p 139–51.
“one thing to talk about the redistribution of wealth. It's quite another thing to talk about the redistribution of power. That's more what interests me.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Interviewer:] What would you say is the most overrated virtue? [Dworkin:] Compliance and conformity.... normal is seriously overrated.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“is often a hostile act, often an exercise of power over somebody else.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pornography is used in rape—to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Testimony before the New York Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in 1986.
“The pornographers actually use our bodies as their language. We are their speech. . . . Protecting what they 'say' means protecting what they do to us, how they do it. It means protecting their sadism on our bodies, because that is how they write: not like a writer at all; like a torturer.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Modern Times Interview of Andrea Dworkin With Larry Josephson, on "Modern Times" (American Public Radio, 1992) (radio program) (transcript of tape (end of tape missing)), as accessed Sep. 5, 2010.
“I know a hell of a lot about intercourse. I wish I knew less.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Dworkin's statements quoted:) Her own experiences—as a rape victim, a prostitute and a battered wife—only added to the trenchancy of her views, but she reacted with fury to suggestions that such traumas had made it difficult for her to be objective. "I've never heard Solzhenitsyn asked if he can be objective about the gulag," she snarled. "As if not paying attention to rape and wife battery were some kind of objectivity.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Andrea Dworkin, in The Telegraph, April 13, 2005, 12:02 a.m. (section "News", subsection "Obits", subsubsection "Culture"), as accessed February 15, 2013 (obituary).
“Men characterize pornography as something mental because their minds, their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies, are more real to them than women's bodies or lives; in fact, men have used their social power to characterize a $10-billion-a-year trade in women as fantasy.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity–the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]n the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography: better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. As with the call girl and the streetwalker, one is turned out better but both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Male supremacy is fused into language, so that every sentence as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. Men have defined the parameters of every subject.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Money speaks, but it speaks in a male voice. In the hands of women, money stays literal; count it out it buys what it is worth or less. In the hands of men, money buys women, sex, status, dignity, esteem, recognition, loyalty, all manner of possibility.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wife beating and marital rape , pervasive here as elsewhere, are predicated on the conviction that a man's ownership of his wife licenses whatever he wishes to do to her: her boy belongs to him to use for his own sexual release, to beat, to impregnate. The male power of owning by virtue of its historical centrality, is barely constrained b the modest legal restrictions put on it.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it. Men are regarded for leaning 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. The conflict between these groups embody the male commitment to violence: conflict is action; action is masculine.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; and whatis left according to men, is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those leftists who champion Sade might do well to remember that prerevolutionary France was filled with starving people. The feudal system was both cruel and crude. The rights of the aristocracy to the labor and bodies of the poor were unchallenged and not challengeable. The tyranny of class was absolute. The poor sold what they could, including themselves, to survive. Sade learned and upheld the ethic of his class.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Intercourse is a world that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women's words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence' sometimes men react to women's words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men must make women afraid and compliant, including through beatings; women must be housebound and servile. The men, then, can attend orgies or engage in any other sexual activity.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sex is the dim echo of that original nakedness, primal, before anything else that is also human; later, isolated in an identity, hidden by it, in insensate because of it, one is a societal human being ruled by conformity and convention, not naked.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Amerika, there is the nearly—or so it appears—that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right: morally right; a sign of human health; nearly a standard for citizenship. Even those who believe in original sin and have a theology of hellfire and damnation express the Amerikan creed, an optimism that glows in the dark: sex is good, healthy, wholesome, pleasant fun; we like it, we enjoy it, we want it, we are cheerful abut it; it is as simple as we are, the citizens of this strange country with no memory and no mind.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source