Welcome to our collection of quotes by Andrea Dworkin. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist activist and writer. She is best known for her analysis of pornography, although her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US Constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
The central theme of Dworkin's work is re-evaluating Western society, culture, and politics. She did this through the prism of men's sexual violence against women in a patriarchal context. She wrote on a wide range of topics including the lives of Joan of Arc, Margaret Papandreou, and Nicole Brown Simpson; she analyzed the literature of Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, Leo Tolstoy, Kōbō Abe, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Isaac Bashevis Singer; she brought her own radical feminist perspective to her examination of subjects historically written or described from men's point of view, including fairy tales, homosexuality, lesbianism, virginity, antisemitism, the State of Israel, the Holocaust, biological superiority, and racism. She interrogated premises underlying concepts such as freedom of the press and civil liberties. She theorized the sexual politics of intelligence, fear, courage, and integrity. She described a male supremacist political ideology manifesting in and constituted by rape, battery, prostitution, and pornography.
In Dworkin's lifetime, two volumes were written with consideration and analysis of the body of her work: Andrea Dworkin by Jeremy Mark Robinson, first published in 1994, and Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin's Art and Politics by Cindy Jenefsky in 1998. Following Dworkin's death, several works by or about her have been released. A play, Aftermath, was produced in 2015 by John Stoltenberg after he found unpublished writing of hers that he edited for the stage. An anthology of her work, Last Days at Hot Slit, was published in 2019. In 2020, a documentary feature about her, My Name Is Andrea, by Pratibha Parmar was released, and a biography of her life, Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary, by Martin Duberman, was published.
Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.
People want me to shut up, but I won't. I believe social change is possible; that's why I'm an activist.
My hatred is precious. I don't want to waste it on those who are colluding in their own oppression.
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.
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.
How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?
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.
All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.
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.
I also had nightmares. Somehow all the feelings I didn't feel when each thing had actually happened to me I did feel when I slept.
Social outrage is power protecting itself; it is not morality.
A man wants what a woman has -- sex. He can steal it, persuade her to give it away, rent it, , lease it over the long term, or own it outright.
Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power.
A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man.
No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.
Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.
One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.
Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea.
Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman.
For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for.
I believe couples should have separate bedrooms.
I see my books as a body of work, in my opinion, of singular importance and deeply disrespected in a way that is savagely unfair.
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.
The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world.
People don't understand the tyranny of media. The few women that the media will allow in have to think about male approval and their own success -- and their writing reflects that.
Feminism exists so that no woman ever has to face her abuser in isolation, alone.
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.
There is nothing as dangerous as an unembodied principle: no matter what blood flows, the principle comes first. The First Amendment absolutists operate precisely on unembodied principle.
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.
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.
The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.
The man takes a body that is not his, claims it, sows his so-called seed, reaps a harvest -- he colonizes a female body, robs it of its natural resources, controls it.
Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.
Feminist art may... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme... should we call it 'joy'?
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.
Feminist art... will take the great human themes -- love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself -- and render them fully human.
Most women cannot afford, either
materially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt offerings of obedience they bring to beg protection will not appease
the angry little gods around them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.
In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.
The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.
Men use the night to erase us.
I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind.
Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.
And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in an infant's mouth belongs to Himmler's circle of hell.
Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.
Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
Violation is a synonym for intercourse.
When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.
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.
If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving?
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, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species.
And on that day, the day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing, because it is nothing; It is not real; It is not true.
Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.
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.
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.
In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.
Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.
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.
Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.
The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.
Women's fashion is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.
You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.
'Women's fashion' is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.
Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.
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.
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.
As long as there is rape... there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become. You are not going to live in the world you want to live in.
Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.
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.