“Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.”

— Andrea Dworkin

Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sex…" by Andrea Dworkin?

Andrea Dworkin photo

Andrea Dworkin 84

Feminist writer 1946–2005

Related quotes

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

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

“Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

p 69.
Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

“Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

Source: Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory (1982) Signs Vol. 7, No.3, p. 533

“The female life-force is characterized as a negative one: we are defined as inherently masochistic. [... ] Sexual masochism actualizes female negativity, just as sexual sadism actualizes male positivity. A woman’s erotic femininity is measured by the degree to which she needs to be hurt, needs to be possessed, needs to be abused, needs to submit, needs to be beaten, needs to be humiliated, needs to be degraded.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

The Root Cause (1976)

“[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 (1946–2005) Feminist writer

p 10.
Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

“Cultural products which present women who do not want to be household slaves or universal mothers or sex objects as bitches or sexual failures objectively aid male supremacy.”

Meredith Tax (1942) American writer

Source: "Culture is not Neutral, Whom Does it Serve?" (1972), p. 15

“Some have argued that lesbian sexuality-meaning here simply women having sex with women not men-solves the problem of gender by eliminating men from women's voluntary sexual encounters. Yet women's sexuality remains constructed under conditions of male supremacy; women remain socially defined as women in relation to men; the definition of women as men's inferiors remains sexual even if not heterosexual, whether men are present at the time or not.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

“On an unconscious level, the demonization of sexuality usually implies the demonization of males and the victimization of females.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 97.

“When we add the devaluation of male values to the demonizing of male sexuality, many boys feel like a pervert before they know who they are.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 103.

“The male claim that females find fulfillment through motherhood and sexuality reflects what males think they'd find fulfilling if they were female.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 2.

Related topics