Andrea Dworkin Quotes
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind.
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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.
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Pornography is used in rape - to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.
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Can women make use of men's vulnerability not to marry but instead to destroy male power?
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I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.
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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.
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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.
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Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?
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One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.
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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.
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It's 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.
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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.
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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.
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Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.
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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.
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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.