Andrea Dworkin Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

Andrea Dworkin
Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
Only when manhood is dead – and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it – only then will we know what it is to be free.

Andrea Dworkin
No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.

Andrea Dworkin
One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.

Andrea Dworkin
There is no place on earth, no day or night, no hour or minute, when one is not a Jew or a woman.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

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.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.

Andrea Dworkin
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?

Andrea Dworkin
One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin