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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.
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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.
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Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
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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.
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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.
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Interviewer: What would you say is the most overrated virtue? Dworkin: Compliance and conformity.... Being normal is seriously overrated.
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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.
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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.