Andrea Dworkin Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Andrea Dworkin
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. If they take it inside with them, they do something else, because society is in the room with them.

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
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.

Andrea Dworkin
Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.

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
Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

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

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

Andrea Dworkin
Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

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
Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however inspired,can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is not a dreadful form of dying.

Andrea Dworkin
Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.

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
The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.

Andrea Dworkin
Can women make use of men's vulnerability not to marry but instead to destroy male power?

Andrea Dworkin
Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can use her body. They define precisely the dimension of her physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

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

Andrea Dworkin
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.

Andrea Dworkin
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.

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
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