Andrea Dworkin

“Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high?”

“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.”

“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin orcircles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwiseperfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivialinconvenience, 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 deepand destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worthand human recognition, the forced alienation of a person fromeven the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiorityputs rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented byinsult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority createsa person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments—scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can neverbe made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what isnormal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurther—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as aconsequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called apiece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficientlyloved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiencesand perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferiorin the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologicallypejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she isneedy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in andof itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Herpersonal experiences or perceptions are never credited as havinga hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never lovedenough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never lovedenough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible tofeel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior.” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarelylearns them all, even in one’s native language.”

“Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.”

“I believe couples should have separate bedrooms.”

“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.”

“When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The central question is not: what is force and what is freedom? That is a good question, but in the realm of human cruelty - the realm of history - it is utterly abstract. The central question is: why is force never acknowledged as such when used against the racially or sexually despised? Nazi terror used against the Jews is not in dispute. Still, there is an almost universal - and intrinsically anti-Semitic - conviction that the Jews went voluntarily to the ovens. Rational discourse on how the Jews were terrorized does not displace or transform this irrational conviction. And similarly, no matter what force is used against women as a class or as individuals, the universal conviction is that women want (either seek out or assent to) whatever happens to them, however awful, dangerous, destructive, painful, or humiliating. A statement is made about the nature of the Jew, the nature of the woman. The nature of each and both is to be a victim. A metaphysical victim is never forced, only actualized.”

“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.”

“Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.”

“Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.”

“Now, when I talk about a resistance, I am talking about an organized political resistance. I'm not just talking about something that comes and something that goes. I'm not talking about a feeling. I'm not talking about having in your heart the way things shuold be and going through a regular day having good, decent, wonderful ideas in your heart. I'm talking about when you put your body and your mind on the line and you commit yourself to years of struggle in order to change the society in which you live. This does not mean just changing the men whom you know so that their manners will get better - although that wouldn't be bad either. It has been fifteen years. Their manners haven't gotten appreciably better, even. But that's not what a political resistance is. A political resistance goes on day and night, under cover and over ground, where people can see it and where people can't. It is passed from generation to generation. It is taught. It is encouraged. It is celebrated. It is smart. It is savvy. It is committed. And someday it will win. It will win.”

“I need the money, people are very coy about money, and the ladies arent just coy, they are sci fi about money……people ask, well, dont sweet things happen? yes, indeed, many sweet things, but sweet doesnt keep you from dying, making love doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, writing doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, being wise doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, facts are facts, being poor makes you face facts which also does not keep you from dying.”

“My hatred is precious. I don't want to waste it on those who are colluding in their own oppression.”

“I think as feminists we have a way of looking at problems that other people appear not to understand. To name names, the right and theleft appear not to understand what it is that feminists are trying to do. Feminists are trying to destroy a sex hierarchy, a race hierarchy, aneconomic hierarchy, in which women are hurt, are disempowered, and in which society celebrates cruelty over us and refuses us the integrity of our own bodies and the dignity of our own lives.... So feminists look at the society we live in and try to understand how we are going to fight male power. And in order to try to figure outhow we're going to fight it, we have to figure out how it's organized, how it works. How does it survive? How does it work itself out? Howdoes it maintain itself as a system of power?... So feminists come along, and we say: Well, we are going to understand how it is that these people do what they do. We are going toapproach the problem politically. That means that we are going to try to isolate and describe systems of exploitation as they work on us, from our point of view as the people who are being hurt by them. It means that even though we're on the bottom and they're on the top, we are examining them for points of vulnerability. And as we find those points of vulnerability—and you might locate them anatomically, as well as any other way—we are going to move whatever muscles we have, from whatever positions we are in, and we are going to get that bastard in his collective manifestation off of us.And that means we are politically organizing a resistance to male supremacy.”

“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.”

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