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

— 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 is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance." by Andrea Dworkin?

Andrea Dworkin photo

Andrea Dworkin 84

Feminist writer 1946–2005

Related quotes

“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 (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)

“[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)

“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)

“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.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

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

“Without changing the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic 'classless' and 'non-exploitative' form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of 'people's democracies,' 'socialism' and the 'public ownership' of 'natural resources.' And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

Toward an Ecological Society (1980).

“You will understand easily if you know a bit about men’s sexual mechanism. Pornography itself can ease and satisfy men’s sexual impulses.”

Sung Jae-gi (1967–2013) South Korean masculism activist

Quoted in: " (Voice) Should pornography be censored? http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=104&oid=044&aid=0000127216" The Korea Herald, 2012.12.17

“Political pornography is not unlike the sexual kind: difficult to define, but you know it when you see it.”

Pat Sajak (1946) American television host

Pat Sajak, cited in: Shastri Ramachandaran. " Sleaze as political biography: The Truth About Hillary by Edward Klein http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050904/spectrum/book7.htm," in The Tribune, Sunday, September 4, 2005
2000s

“Pornography is definitely not a reflection of real life. Accepted or rejected, it will always be at odds. However, sexual expression in pornography is a celebration of the denial of women's dignity. For a man, it is an affirmation of the myth of masculinity to dominate, to rule and to show his might. Conversely, for a woman, sex must be accepted as a form of willingness to be submissive, to submit to the destruction of her own dignity. In pornography there is no love, no passion or drama. There is only manipulation of the body, the mind and the lowly human desire to be satisfied. That humans cannot be separated from animalistic lust.”

Titon Rahmawan

Related topics