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Quotes of Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin (born November 21, 1929) is an American author known for her feminist novels and non-fiction. In her work, French asserts that women's oppression is an intrinsic part of the male-dominated global culture. Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (1985) is an historical examination of the effects of patriarchy on the world. French defines patriarchy as a system that values power and control above life and pleasure.
- A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
- All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.
- Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.
- Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.
- Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.
- Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.
- Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.
- Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
- Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.
- Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.
- 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.
- Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.
- Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.
- No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.
- No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.
- 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.
- Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.
- Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.
- Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.
- The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.
- The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.
- The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.
- Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.
- 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.
- Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.
- 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.
- 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.
- Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.
- "Women's fashion" is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.