Andrea Dworkin
Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it 'Her'. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination.Collection: Religious
Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who use to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with any more. It doesn't matter who the individual women are.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Ignorance
Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.Collection: Peace
When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.Collection: Two
If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving?Collection: Book
To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is.Collection: Feminist
...In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.Collection: Expression
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.Collection: Sex
Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.Collection: Son
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.Collection: Practice
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Feminist
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.Collection: Love
The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.Collection: Character
Feminism exists so that no woman ever has to face her abuser in isolation, alone.Collection: Feminism
Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Courage
Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.Collection: Mean
Violation is a synonym for intercourse.Collection: Violation
I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Family
Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.Collection: Mean
I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.Collection: Book
Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.Collection: Sports
One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Wings
Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does 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... Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?Collection: Hate
The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this--since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it.Collection: Men
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.Collection: World
The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.Collection: War
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.Collection: Real
Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea.Collection: Ideas
We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent-see, he's jealous, he cares-a woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure; how suicidal she's prepared to be.Collection: Hurt
Does the sun ask itself, "Am I good? Am I worthwhile? Is there enough of me?" No, it burns and it shines. Does the sun ask itself, "What does the moon think of me? How does Mars feel about me today?" No it burns, it shines. Does the sun ask itself, "Am I as big as other suns in other galaxies?" No, it burns, it shines.Collection: Moon
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.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Commitment
In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.Collection: Choices
All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Self
[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.Collection: Girl
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.Collection: Suicide
We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.Collection: Choices
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.Collection: Mean
Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized, made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire.Collection: Sex
Touch is the meaning of being human.Collection: Being Human
Women's fashion is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.Collection: Fashion
How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?Collection: One Love