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Andrea Dworkin

95 quotes

“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.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one deserves brutality because of what they are, their condition of birth, including being born female; and the women in this book are not asking for it—instead they are risking as much as any man risks to live, to love.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is nihilism; or this is truth. He has to push past his boundaries. There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist withe intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied—physically, internally, in her privacy.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life can be better for women—economic and political conditions improved—and at the same time the status of women can remain resistant, in deed impervious, to change: so far in history this is precisely the paradigm for social change as it relates to the conditions of women. Reforms are made, important ones' but the status of women relative to men does not change. Women are still less significant, have less privacy, less integrity, less self-determination. This means that women have less freedom.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freedom is not an abstraction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more of it is not enough either. Having less, being less, impoverished in freedom and rights, women then inevitably have less self-respect: less self-respect than men have and less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life. Intercourse as domination battens of that awful absence of self respect.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. The discourse of male truth—literature, science, philosophy, pornography—calls that penetration violation. This it does with some consistency and some confidence. Violation is a synonym for intercourse. At the same time, the penetration is taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use; it is appropriate to enter her, to push into ("violate") the boundaries of her body. She is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include physical privacy.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being female in this world is having been robbed of he potential for human choice by men who love to hate s. One 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 Objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy, specially as it exists in relation to intercourse.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can intercourse exist without the woman herself turning herself into a thing, which she must do because men cannot fuck equals and men must fuck: because one price of dominance is that one impotent in the face of equality?”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To become the object, she takes herself and transforms herself into a thing: all freedoms are diminished and she is caged, even in the cage docile, sometimes physically maimed, movement is limited: she physically becomes the thing he wants to fuck.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Society says with the authority of its police power how intercourse will and will not occur. Any act so controlled by the state, proscribed and prescribed in detail, cannot be private in the ordinary sense. Privacy is essentially a sphere of freedom immune from regulation by the state. In that sense, intercourse has never occurred in private.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women do not know how to be women exactly; men constantly fail to be men.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Law steps in where nature fails: virtually everywhere. Laws create nature—a male nature and a female nature and natural intercourse—by telling errant, unnatural human beings what to do and what not to do to protect and express their real nature—the real man, the real female, the real hierarchy that nature or God created putting man on top.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Laws creates male dominance, and maintain it, as a social environment. Male dominance is the environment we know, in which we must live. It is our air, water, earth. Laws shape our perceptions and knowledge of what male dominance is, of how it works, of what it means to us. Laws shape the experiences the experiences we have before we have them Laws significantly predetermine how we will feel, will understand, what will happen to us in life. Laws establish or humans the terms of our symbiosis with male dominance: what it takes from us to sustain itself as an overall environmental system.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Berlin says: "… You cannot combine full liberty with full equality—full liberty for the wolves cannot be combined with full liberty for the sheep...." …. Are women sheep ("led like sheep to the slaughter")? Must women become wolves? Is violence against women a direct result of the fact that there is no inevitable, painful, retaliatory consequence for hurting women?”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can women make use of men's vulnerability not to marry but instead to destroy male power?”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The women's movement is like other political movements in one important way. Every political movement is committed to the belie that there are certain kinds of pain that people should not have to endure. They are unnecessary. They are gratuitous. They are not part of the God-given order. They are not biologically inevitable. They are acts of human will. They are acts done by some human beings to other human beings.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Feminism: An Agenda" (1983)
“The pride comes from accomplishment. I have done what I wanted to do more than any other thing in life. I have become a writer, published two books of integrity and worth. I did not know what those two books would cost me, how very difficult it would be to write them, to survive the opposition to them.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Battered Wife Survives", (1978)
“If you believe that God made women to be submissive and inferior, then there is almost nothing that feminism can say to you about your place in society.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Feminism: An Agenda" (1983)
“In the 1980s, Ellen Willis led the so-called pro-sex radical feminists in their heated challenge to the antipornography movement. Countering the arguments of Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and others that "sexual liberation is a male supremacist plot, Willis proclaimed that sexual liberation was the keystone of broader social and cultural change.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2020)
“Andrea presented herself as a street fighter intellectual, a bohemian freedom fighter, and someone who wanted to get to the bottom of things. That quote about Malcolm X is apt. Malcolm pointed out “The problem is WHITE PEOPLE.” Dworkin said, “The problem is MEN.” And for all the holes that can be poked in that cloth, there is something about that grain that is absolutely true, when you are the short end of the bolt.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Andrea Dworkin Has Died" by Susie Bright, Susie Bright's Journal (blog), April 11, 2005.
Also quoted by: Susie Bright
“Even if you believe that prostitution and pornography are fundamentally acceptable, the challenge of Dworkin is to explain why they should exist – rather than merely accepting their current existence as an argument for their continuation. We are creatures of culture and Intercourse is the promise that we are not doomed to the endless replication of misogyny, but can reinvent that culture in new and better shapes.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sarah Ditum on Andrea Dworkin: Sex as terrorism, the New Statesman, May 15, 2014
“Dworkin, like Kate Millet, has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera. Dworkin publicly boasts of her bizarre multiple rapes, assaults, beatings, breakdowns and tacky traumas, as if her inability to cope with life were the patriarchy’s fault rather than her own. She pretends to be a daring truth-teller but never mentions her most obvious problem: food.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Paglia, C. (1994). “The Return of Carry Nation: Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin”. Vamps & Tramps: New Essays. New York: Vintage Books. 109.
“Seductive mirages of progress notwithstanding, nowhere in the world is apartheid practiced with more cruelty and finality than in Saudi Arabia. Of course, it is women who are locked in and kept out, exiled to invisibility and object powerlessness within their own country. It is women who are degraded systematically from birth to early death, utterly and total and without exception deprived of freedom. It is women who are sold into marriage or concubinage, often before puberty; killed if their hymens are not intact on the wedding night; kept confined, ignorant, pregnant, poor, without choice or recourse. It is women who are raped and beaten with full sanction of the law. It is women who cannot own property or work for a living or determine in any way the circumstances of their own lives. It is women who are subject to a despotism that knows no restraint. Women, locked out and locked in. Mr Carter, enchanted with his good friends, the Saudis. Mr Carter, a sincere advocate of human rights. Sometimes even a feminist with a realistic knowledge of male hypocrisy and a strong stomach cannot believe the world she lives in.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Feminist Looks at Saudi Arabia" (1978)
“I want to see this men's movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don't make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can't be self-indulgent.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape" (1983)
“Enemies of women, those who are determined to deny us freedom an dignity, use the word lesbian to provoke a hatred of women who do not conform. This hatred rumbles everywhere. This hatred is sustained and expressed by virtually every institution. When male power is challenged, this hatred can be intensified and inflamed so into violence. The threat is omnipresent because violence against women is culturally applauded. And so the word lesbian, hurled or whispered as accusation, is used to focus male hostility on women who dare to rebel, and it is also used to frighten and bully women who have not yet rebelled.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Power of Words" (1978)
“All around us there are other women, seemingly not hurt, making small talk, acting normal, which means happy, not discontent, certainly not devastated. Girls are still being socialised not to identify with—feel empathy for—other females: she got hurt because she did x, y, z—I didn’t, so I didn’t get hurt; she’s at fault, I’m not; the punishment fits her crime; blame her, exonerate him. This continuing, culturally applauded socialisation of women not to empathize with other women is a malignant part of the culture of men, dead white ones or not. Women are perceived to be appalling failures when we are sad. Women are pathetic when we are angry. Women are ridiculous when we are militant. Women are unpleasant when we are bitter, no matter what the cause. Women are deranged when women want justice. Women are man-haters when women want accountability and respect from men. Women are trash when women let men do what men want Women are shrews or puritans when we do not.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm going to ask you to remember the prostituted, the homeless, the battered, the raped, the tortured, the murdered, the raped-then-murdered, the murdered-then-raped; and I am going to ask you to remember the photographed, the ones that any or all of the above happened to and it was photographed and now the photographs are for sale in our free countries. I want you to think about those who have been hurt for the fun, the entertainment, the so-called speech of others; those who have been hurt for profit, for the financial benefit of pimps and entrepreneurs. I want you to remember the perpetrator and I am going to ask you to remember the victims: not just tonight but tomorrow and the next day. I want you to find a way to include them -- the perpetrators and the victims -- in what you do, how you think, how you act, what you care about, what your life means to you. Now, I know, in this room, some of you are the women I have been talking about. I know that. People around you may not. I am going to ask you to use every single thing you can remember about what was done to you -- how it was done, where, by whom, when, and, if you know -- why -- to begin to tear male dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it, to mess it up, to get in its way, to fuck it up. 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.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remember, resist, do not comply (1995)
“Michael Moorcock: Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven't found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying? Dworkin: No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say that, then or ever.… My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse—it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in New Statesman & Society (21 April 1995), discussing her books Intercourse and Right Wing Women.
“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. In the home the question will be couched in a million cruelties, some subtle, some so egregious they rival the injuries of organized war. … It must be admitted that those who want me to account for myself are intrigued in hostile, voyeuristic ways, and their projections of me are not the usual run-of-the-mill rudeness or arrogance to which writers, especially women writers, become accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfortunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here's the deal as I see it: I am ambitious—God knows, not for money; in most respects but not all I am honorable; and I wear overalls: kill the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says, alone in a small room.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface," Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002)
“Rape is a question of access. Men will rape woman to whom they have access. The stranger in rape is used in a very important political way especially in organizing woman on the right: the stranger is used as a scapegoat. In the United States the stranger is black and he is a rapist. In Nazi Germany the stranger was a Jew and he was a rapist.This use of rape associated with a stranger is a basic component of racism. Women's fears of rape are legitimate. Those fears are manipulated to serve the ends of racism. We now see the same scapegoat strategy being used against homosexual men, who are accused of child molestation when most child molestation is of little girls. It is not that homosexual men do not rape. They do. So do black men and Jewish men. Men in all classes and of all races and ethnicities rape, which is not to say that all men rape. It is to say that all men benefit from rape, because all men benefit from the fact that women are not free in this society; that women cower; that women are afraid; that women cannot assert the rights that we have, limited as those rights are, because of the ubiquitous presence of rape.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Feminism: An Agenda" (1983)
“Boys and Men do experience sexual abuse at the hands of men. The honmophobes distorting concentration on this fact, which cannot and must not be denied, neatly eliminates from view the primary victim of male sexual abuse: women and girls. This is congruent with the fact that crimes against females are ultimately viewed as expressions of male normalcy, while crimes against men and boys are viewed as perversions of that same normalcy. Society's general willingness to do anything necessary to protect boys and men from male sexual aggression is testimony to the value of a male life. Society's general refusal to do anything meaningful to protect women and girls from male sexual aggression is testimony to the worthlessness of a female life. A male life must be protected for its own sake. A female life warrants protection only when the female belongs to a male, as wife, daughter, mistress, whore; it is the owner who has a right to have his rights over his females protected from other men. A female's bodily integrity or well-being is not protected because of the value of the woman as a human being in her own right.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop culture magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan would suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no imagination in fetishlike sexual conformity; and no questions are being asked in political discourse on sex about hope and sorrow, intimacy and anguish, communion and loss. Imagination is both aggressive and delicate, a mode of cognition unmatched in its ability to reveal the hidden meanings in reality now and the likely shape of tomorrow. Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which is only—pathetically—a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses. The paring down of the vocabulary of human affect to fuck-related expletives suggests that one destroys the complexity of human response by destroying the language that communicates its existence.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Intercourse is commonly written about and comprehended as a form of possession or an act of possession in which, during which, because of which, a man inhabits a woman, physically covering her and overwhelming her and at the same time penetrating her; and this physical relational—over her and inside her 0 is his possession oh her. He has her, or when is is done, he has had her. By thrusting into her, he takes her over. His thrusting into her is taken to be her capitulation to him as a conqueror; it is a physical surrender of herself to him; he occupies and rules her, expresses his elemental dominance over her, by his possession of her in the fuck.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right. Intercourse appears to be the expression of that contempt in pure form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it requires no passion or heart because it is power without invention articulating the arrogance of those who do the fucking. Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se. Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. it is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor it is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a "point of view" that some people with soft skins find "offensive." It is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do women need sovereignty—not only over their own bodies as currently understood in the United States ...; but control of a boundary further away from their bodies, a defended boundary? Do women need land and an army ...; or a feminist government in exile ...? Or is it simpler: the bed belongs to the woman; the house belongs to the woman; any land belongs to the woman; if a male intimate is violent he is removed from the place where she has the superior and inviolate claim, arrested, denied parole, and prosecuted. .... Could women "set a high price on our blood"? Could women set any price on our blood? Could women manage self-defense if not retaliation? Would self-defense be enough? Could women execute men who raped or beat or tortured women? .... [¶] .... Could the acts of women in behalf of women … have a code of honor woman-to-woman that weakens the male-dominant demands of nationalism or race-pride or ethnic pride? Could women commit treason to the men of their own group: put women first, even the putative enemy women? Do women have enough militancy and self-respect to see themselves as the central makers of legal codes, ethics, honor codes, and culture?”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A take back the night march goes right to our emotional core. We women are especially supposed to be afraid of the night The night promises harm to women. For a woman to walk on the street at night is not only to risk abuse, but also—according to the values of male domination—to ask for it. The woman who transgresses the boundaries of night is an outlaw who breaks an elementary rule of civilized behavior: a decent woman does not go out—certainly not alone, certainly not only with other women—at night. A woman out in the night, not on a leash, is thought to be a slut or an uppity bitch who does not know her place.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Night and Danger" (1979)
“The purpose of theory is to clarify the world in which we live, how it works, why things happen as they do. The purpose of theory is understanding. Understanding is energizing. It energizes to action. When theory becomes an impediment to action, it is time to discard the theory and return naked, that is, without theory, to the world of reality. People become slaves to theory because people are used to meeting expectations they have not originated—to doing what they are told, to having everything mapped out, to having reality prepackaged. People can have an antiauthoritarian intention and yet function in a way totally consonant with the demands of authority. The deepest struggle is to root out of us and the institutions in which we participate the requirement that we slavishly conform. But an adherence to ideology, to any ideology, can give us the grand illusion of freedom when in fact we are being manipulated and used by those whom the theory serves. The struggle for freedom has to be a struggle toward integrity defined in every possible sphere of reality—sexual integrity, economic integrity, psychological integrity, integrity of expression, integrity of faith and loyalty and heart. Anything that shortcuts us away from viewing integrity as an essential goal or anything that diverts our attention from integrity as a revolutionary value serves only to reinforce the authoritarian values of the world in which we live.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m sorry Andrea Dworkin started a sexual revolution that she ended up repudiating. She never got to see people like me, Carol, and the rest of us little protégées who took her inspiration and flew to a new dimension. She got stuck, and then she got sick, and when you’re famous for one thing, no one wants to see you change unless you reject it all, like a pathetic sinner seeking redemption. She was too stubborn and too old-fashioned for that. Andrea Dworkin never would have admitted that she was a SuperStar. She was the animator of the ultimate porno horror loop, where the Final Girl never gets a chance to slay the monster, she only dies, dies, dies, with the cries of the angry mourners to remember her.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Andrea Dworkin Has Died" by Susie Bright, Susie Bright's Journal (blog), April 11, 2005.
Also quoted by: Susie Bright
“So now we come to what Andrea Dworkin wants and it is this: she wants women to have their own country. But that's mad, I said to her. Why bother discussing it? It isn't going to happen. To which she has a reply -- didn't they say that about Israel? And didn't the world think that Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, was a crank? The Jews got a country because they had been persecuted, said that enough was enough, decided what they wanted and went out and fought for it. Women should do the same. And if you don't want to live in Womenland, so what? Not all Jews live in Israel, but it is there, a place of potential refuge if persecution comes to call. Furthermore, Dworkin says, as the Jews fought for Israel so women have the right to execute -- that's right, execute -- rapists and the state should not intervene. I couldn't really believe she was serious, but she is.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Take no prisoners", interview by Linda Grant, The Guardian (13 May 2000).
“Andrea Dworkin, who was pelted and ridiculed for decades of her life, was another of those rare people who feel other people's pain as if it were their own. When she first sent me one of her books, I was all ready to snigger. But she could write, and think, and argue, and it was often a pleasure to disagree violently with her, which is more than I can say for some of her detractors. Like many clever and tormented people, she had the gift of getting the gist of supposedly complex questions. It wasn't OK with her that President Clinton had a special staff of private dicks to "handle" and to slander truth-telling women; it wasn't OK with her that Serbia used rape as a weapon of ethnic cleansing; and she wasn't neutral against a jihadist threat that wanted, and wants, to enslave and torture females. That she could be denounced as a "conservative" for holding any of those positions says much about the left to which she used to belong. If she was indeed crazy, I wish she had bitten more of her twisted sisters.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Ibrahims and Two Women", by Christopher Hitchens, Slate (18 April 2005)
“I am just thinking of Andrea Dworkin. I have really known Andrea since she was very young. I have known her since she was about eighteen years old. I used to love her very much. She was very dear to me. I mean when she writes about sexual life, it's horrible. And she did have some horrible experiences, you know, but I am not writing about her. That's all I can say. For me I really want to celebrate sexuality. (“Because that's the way you feel about it?”) And because I want to celebrate it. Because I think it's one of the greatest things invented [laughs], and it may be a pure invention that it is so great. I could be wrong, and Andrea could be right. But I think it should be. One of the things that bothers me with a lot of my sisters in movements that I have worked with is that their anger with men really has turned them not against men, which is all right as far as I am concerned, but against sex in general, so that even their lesbian experiences don't strike me as so hot as far as that's concerned.”
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1995 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley