Andrea Dworkin: Quotes about women

Andrea Dworkin was Feminist writer. Explore interesting quotes on women.

Andrea Dworkin: 168 quotes109 likes

“…pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity–the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her.”

Introduction http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/PornIntro2.html, p xxvii. <br class="br">Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

“Men must make women afraid and compliant, including through beatings; women must be housebound and servile. The men, then, can attend orgies or engage in any other sexual activity.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter One, "Repulsion"

“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. it is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor it is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a "point of view" that some people with soft skins find "offensive." it is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth an human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of whole ness or internal integrity.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 9

“Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape. The fact is that rape and prostitution caused and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and prostitution of women.”

Pornography and Male Supremacy http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIVH.html (1981), Letters from a War Zone, p 230.

“Women do not know how to be women exactly; men constantly fail to be men.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 8, "Law"

“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 book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 4

“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.”

Right Wing Women, ch.2 (1978)

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

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

Source: Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000), p. 248.

“The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.”

Our Blood (1973) p.16.

“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.

“Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; and whatis left according to men, is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis.”

Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

“Money speaks, but it speaks in a male voice. In the hands of women, money stays literal; count it out it buys what it is worth or less. In the hands of men, money buys women, sex, status, dignity, esteem, recognition, loyalty, all manner of possibility.”

Source: Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979), p. 20.

“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.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7