Andrea Dworkin: Trending quotes

Andrea Dworkin trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Andrea Dworkin: 168   quotes 84   likes

“Q: People think you are very hostile to men.
A: I am.
Q: Doesn't that worry you?
A: From what you said, it worries them.”

Andrea Dworkin

Nervous Interview http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIA.html (1979). Dworkin wrote both the questions and the answers

Men , Hostility , People , Thinking

“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

Speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (September 26, 1975). "The Root Cause", ch. 9, Our Blood (1976).

Love , Life , Lovers

“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

Source: Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

Women , Thinking , Personality

“Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.”

Andrea Dworkin
Universe

“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

Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

Women , Men , Dreams

“[[S]ex] is often a hostile act, often an exercise of power over somebody else.”

Andrea Dworkin

Norah Vincent, Sex, Love and Politics, id., p. 40, col. 1.

Hostility , Exercises

“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.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 2

Sex

“One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.”

Andrea Dworkin book Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation

Source: Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000), p. 336.

“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
People

“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

Context: Anti-feminism is also operating whenever any political group is ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women, some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including both extreme ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves, to the brothels or the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly anti-feminist; it is also profoundly immoral...

"Anti-feminism," Right Wing Women (1983), pp. 230-231.

Women , Hate

“Objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7
Context: Being female in this world is having been robbed of he potential for human choice by men who love to hate s. One 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 Objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy, specially as it exists in relation to intercourse.

“Violation is a synonym for intercourse.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7
Context: A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. The discourse of male truth—literature, science, philosophy, pornography—calls that penetration violation. This it does with some consistency and some confidence. Violation is a synonym for intercourse. At the same time, the penetration is taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use; it is appropriate to enter her, to push into ("violate") the boundaries of her body. She is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include physical privacy.

“Reforms are made, important ones' but the status of women relative to men does not change.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7
Context: Life can be better for women - economic and political conditions improved - and at the same time the status of women can remain resistant, in deed impervious, to change: so far in history this is precisely the paradigm for social change as it relates to the conditions of women. Reforms are made, important ones' but the status of women relative to men does not change. Women are still less significant, have less privacy, less integrity, less self-determination. This means that women have less freedom.

Women , Men , Change

“The women's movement is like other political movements in one important way. Every political movement is committed to the belie that there are certain kinds of pain that people should not have to endure. They are unnecessary. They are gratuitous. They are not part of the God-given order. They are not biologically inevitable. They are acts of human will. They are acts done by some human beings to other human beings.”

Andrea Dworkin

"Feminism: An Agenda" (1983)
Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987

God , Pain , People , Women

“If you believe that God made women to be submissive and inferior, then there is almost nothing that feminism can say to you about your place in society.”

Andrea Dworkin

"Feminism: An Agenda" (1983)
Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987

God , Women

“This is nihilism; or this is truth. He has to push past his boundaries. There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because un seen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist withe intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied - physically, internally, in her privacy.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7, "Occupation/Collaboration"

Truth , Past

“[Interviewer:] What would you say is the most overrated virtue? [Dworkin:] Compliance and conformity…. [[B]eing] normal is seriously overrated.”

Andrea Dworkin

Norah Vincent, Sex, Love and Politics, id., p. 40, col. 2

“Michael Moorcock: Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven't found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?
Dworkin: No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say that, then or ever.… My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse — it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman.”

Andrea Dworkin

Interview in New Statesman & Society (21 April 1995), discussing her books Intercourse and Right Wing Women.

Marriage , Books , Law , Reading

“So now we come to what Andrea Dworkin wants and it is this: she wants women to have their own country. But that's mad, I said to her. Why bother discussing it? It isn't going to happen. To which she has a reply -- didn't they say that about Israel? And didn't the world think that Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, was a crank? The Jews got a country because they had been persecuted, said that enough was enough, decided what they wanted and went out and fought for it. Women should do the same. And if you don't want to live in Womenland, so what? Not all Jews live in Israel, but it is there, a place of potential refuge if persecution comes to call. Furthermore, Dworkin says, as the Jews fought for Israel so women have the right to execute -- that's right, execute -- rapists and the state should not intervene. I couldn't really believe she was serious, but she is.”

Andrea Dworkin

"Take no prisoners" http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,220099,00.html, interview by Linda Grant, The Guardian (13 May 2000).
About

Women , World , Thinking , Madness