Andrea Dworkin Quotes & Sayings

Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power — Andrea Dworkin

I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love. — Andrea Dworkin

Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates. — 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

Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking. — Andrea Dworkin

[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. — Andrea Dworkin

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not. — Andrea Dworkin

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig. — Andrea Dworkin

As long as there is rape ... there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become. You are not going to live in the world you want to live in. — Andrea Dworkin

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

She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. 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. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind. — Andrea Dworkin

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. 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. No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming ... As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect. — Andrea Dworkin

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

Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in 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 used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. They all have the same vulnerability to rape, to battery, as children to incest. Poorer women have more vulnerability to prostitution, which is basically a form of sexual exploitation that is intolerable in an egalitarian society, which is the society we are fighting for. — Andrea Dworkin

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

The dark was hissing and hot and hard with a jagged bone, a cold brutal bone, and hips packed tight. The dark wasn't just at night. The dark was any time, any place; you open your eyes and the dark is there, right up against you, pressing. You can't see anything and you don't know any names, not who they are or the names for what they do ... — 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

Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role. — Andrea Dworkin

A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is sensitive; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture
in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers. — Andrea Dworkin

Violation is a synonym for intercourse. — Andrea Dworkin

I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind. — Andrea Dworkin

I never met a man who wasn't stupider than me. — Andrea Dworkin

In her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to become, to act, to change self and society. And each year she is stronger and there are more of her. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

I love books the way I love nature ... I can imagine now that a time will come, that it is almost upon us, when no one will love books ... It is no accident, I think, that books and nature (as we know it) may disappear simultaneously from human experience. There is no mind-body split. — Andrea Dworkin

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? — Andrea Dworkin

The universal religion - contempt for women. — Andrea Dworkin

The beauty of a Jewish education is that you learn how to argue. — Andrea Dworkin

Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it. — Andrea Dworkin

Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps. — Andrea Dworkin

Female knowledge of objectification usually stops at a necessary but superficial understanding: beauty is rewarded and lack of beauty is punished. The punishments are understood as personal misfortune; they are not seem as systematic, institutional, or historical. Women do not understand that they are also punished through sexual use for being beautiful; and women do not understand the lengths to which men go to protect themselves and their society from contamination by ugly women who do not induce a lustful desire to punish, violate, or destroy, though men manage to punish, violate, or destroy these women anyway. — Andrea Dworkin

Men use the night to erase us. — 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

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

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. — 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

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

I also had nightmares. Somehow all the feelings I didn't feel when each thing had actually happened to me I did feel when I slept. — 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

'Women's fashion' is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women. — 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

As individuals, we experience ourselves as the center of whatever social world we inhabit. We think that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions of our particular culture. That culture no longer organically reflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collective phenomenology of our creative possibilities - it possess and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow of sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to natural desire. — Andrea Dworkin

Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are. — 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

Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are "sex-negative" without qualification or examination, perhaps because so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid, and without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste. — Andrea Dworkin

There's a special freedom for girls; it doesn't get written down in constitutions; there's this freedom where they use you how they want and you say I am, I choose, I decide, I want - after or before, when you're young or when you're a hundred - it's the liturgy of the free woman - I choose, I decide, I want, I am - and you have to be a devout follower of the faith, a fanatic of freedom, to be able to say the words and remember the acts at the same time; devout. You really have to love freedom, darling; be a little Buddha girl, no I, free from the chain of being because you are empty inside, no ego, Freud couldn't even find you under a microscope. — Andrea Dworkin

If you want a definition of what a coward is, it's needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them. — Andrea Dworkin

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

So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it's a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn't have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can't tell the adults that; they don't care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there's something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she's still on her knees, dead and raw and tender. — Andrea Dworkin

In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

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

The bait's got a theory; the bait's finding a practice, working it out; the bait's going to write it down and she don't have to use words, she'll make signs, in blood, she's good at bleeding, boys, the vein's open, boys, the bait's got plenty, each month more and more without dying for a certain long period of her life, she can lose it or use it, she works in broad strokes, she makes big gestures, big signs; oh and honey there's so much bait around that there's going to be a bloodbath in the old town tonight, when the new art gets its start. — 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, and most of the time we do not even notice it. — Andrea Dworkin

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. — Andrea Dworkin

Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination. — Andrea Dworkin

A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. — Andrea Dworkin

The hurting of women is ... basic to the sexual pleasure of men. — Andrea Dworkin

Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact. — Andrea Dworkin

Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list. — 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

In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man's identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man's worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are not recognized as fully human. — Andrea Dworkin

Consciousness means that we have developed an acute awareness of both our suffering and our humanity: what happens to us and what we have a right to. We know we are human and so the suffering (inferior status, exploitation, sexual abuse) is an intolerable series of violations that must be stopped. Experiencing suffering as such - instead of becoming numb - forces us to act human: to resist oppression, to demand fairness, to create new social arrangements that include us as human. When humans rebel against suffering, the heroes of history, known and unknown, are born. — Andrea Dworkin

Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies. — Andrea Dworkin

Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea. — Andrea Dworkin

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.' (Leviticus 18:22). That means simply that it is foul to do to other men what men habitually, proudly, manfully do to women: use them as inanimate, empty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world. — Andrea Dworkin

It's not as if there's an empty patch that one can see and so one can say, 'There's my ignorance; it's about ten by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty patch. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving? — Andrea Dworkin

The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice. — Andrea Dworkin

Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination. — 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

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. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

Americans, by which I mean people who live in the United States, are incredibly juvenile about social change. Robin Morgan called it "ejaculatory politics": if it doesn't happen right away it doesn't happen. The Women's Movement in this country has all the same characteristics as the culture that we live in, short-term gratification, personal fulfilment, personal advancement, and yes, coming out as a lesbian can get in the way of that. Liberals and left-wing men have recolonised women around the fear of the right. This troubles me - it makes me feel like we're really suckers. — 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

I didn't believe any words were dirty until I heard the white boys say cunt. — Andrea Dworkin

It is not in becoming a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man's world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her seperateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not his. Prostitution may be against the written law, but no prostitute has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men who enjoy them. — Andrea Dworkin

How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se? — Andrea Dworkin

There is a great deal at stake here, many writers fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for the writer? freedom of invention, freedom to tell the truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new structures. — 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

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

Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships. — Andrea Dworkin

With the possible exception of the Shakers, it is difficult to think of an American movement that has failed more spectacularly than antipornography feminism. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

Men often react to women's words - speaking and writing - as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women's words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men - control, violence, insult, contempt - that no threat seems empty. — Andrea Dworkin

Men on "Women"
For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when."
"Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together" which is profound and moving. — Andrea Dworkin

Touch is the meaning of being human. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — 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

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

The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used. — Andrea Dworkin

The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations-for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right-these institutions are real and they must be destroyed. — Andrea Dworkin

I dream that love without tyranny is possible — Andrea Dworkin