110+ Andrea Dworkin Quotes (Feminist, Radical And Controversial)

Andrea Dworkin was an American radical feminist, writer, and activist. She was known for her criticism of pornography and her strong stance against sexism, rape, and other forms of violence against women. Her work had a major influence on the way society views gender and sexuality.

Top 10 Andrea Dworkin Quotes

1. Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.
2. Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.
3. 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.
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.
5. 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.
6. Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.
7. Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.
8. Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.
9. Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.
10. 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.

Andrea Dworkin Short Quotes

• Women's fashion is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.
• Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
• Violation is a synonym for intercourse.
• Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.
• Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.
• If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving?
• I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind.
• In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.
• No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.
• Men use the night to erase us.

Andrea Dworkin Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Andrea Dworkin

Any man will follow any feminine looking thing down any dark alley; I've always wanted to see a man beaten to a shit bloody pulp with a high-heeled shoe stuffed up his mouth, sort of the pig with the apple; it would be good to put him on a serving plate but you'd need good silver. — Andrea Dworkin

Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior. — Andrea Dworkin

In her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to become, to act, to change self and society. And each year she is stronger and there are more of her. — Andrea Dworkin

Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us. — Andrea Dworkin

Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination. — Andrea Dworkin

One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man. — Andrea Dworkin

Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who use to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with any more. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. — Andrea Dworkin

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. — Andrea Dworkin

Men characterize pornography as something mental because their minds, their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies, are more real to them than women's bodies or lives; in fact, men have used their social power to characterize a $10-billion-a-year trade in women as fantasy. — Andrea Dworkin

Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth. — Andrea Dworkin

We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent-see, he's jealous, he cares-a woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure; how suicidal she's prepared to be. — Andrea Dworkin

I have to ask you to resist, not to comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to refuse to accept it, to abhor it and to do whatever is necessary despite its cost to you to change it. — Andrea Dworkin

Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are. — Andrea Dworkin

Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman. — Andrea Dworkin

The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other. — Andrea Dworkin

Feminist art... will take the great human themes – love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself – and render them fully human. — Andrea Dworkin

You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love. — Andrea Dworkin

The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality. — Andrea Dworkin

We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist - marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil. — Andrea Dworkin

Feminist art may... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme... should we call it 'joy'? — Andrea Dworkin

One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available. — Andrea Dworkin

The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this--since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it. — Andrea Dworkin

On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom. — Andrea Dworkin

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

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. — Andrea Dworkin

Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men. — Andrea Dworkin

The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

The man takes a body that is not his, claims it, sows his so-called seed, reaps a harvest - he colonizes a female body, robs it of its natural resources, controls it. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude. — Andrea Dworkin

Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity by money, admiration, recognition, respect, and the genuflection of others honoring their sacred and proven masculinity. In male culture, police are heroic and so are outlaws; males who enforce standards are heroic and so are those who violate them. — Andrea Dworkin

Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

And on that day, the day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing, because it is nothing; It is not real; It is not true. — Andrea Dworkin

The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations-for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right-these institutions are real and they must be destroyed. — Andrea Dworkin

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. — Andrea Dworkin

One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible. — Andrea Dworkin

...In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom. — Andrea Dworkin

When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love. — Andrea Dworkin

Does the sun ask itself, "Am I good? Am I worthwhile? Is there enough of me?" No, it burns and it shines. Does the sun ask itself, "What does the moon think of me? How does Mars feel about me today?" No it burns, it shines. Does the sun ask itself, "Am I as big as other suns in other galaxies?" No, it burns, it shines. — Andrea Dworkin

The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide. — Andrea Dworkin

Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women. — Andrea Dworkin

Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice. — Andrea Dworkin

Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it. — Andrea Dworkin

I love books the way I love nature. ... I can imagine now that a time will come, that it is almost upon us, when no one will love books ... It is no accident, I think, that books and nature (as we know it) may disappear simultaneously from human experience. There is no mind-body split. — Andrea Dworkin

By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it. — Andrea Dworkin

Women are an enslaved population -- the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses. Women are forced into committing sexual acts with men that violate integrity because the universal religion -- contempt for women -- has as its first commandment that women exist purely as sexual fodder for men. — Andrea Dworkin

"Women's fashion" is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women. — Andrea Dworkin

Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women. — Andrea Dworkin

Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role. — Andrea Dworkin

Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice... Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us? — Andrea Dworkin

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

By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it. Instead of I am afraid, we say, I don't want to, or I don't know how, or I can't. — Andrea Dworkin

If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them. — Andrea Dworkin

Remember: Resist do not comply. — Andrea Dworkin

Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea. — Andrea Dworkin

Touch is the meaning of being human. — Andrea Dworkin

There is no place on earth, no day or night, no hour or minute, when one is not a Jew or a woman. — Andrea Dworkin

To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is. — Andrea Dworkin

I don’t believe rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence. — Andrea Dworkin

The hurting of women is . . . basic to the sexual pleasure of men. — Andrea Dworkin

I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love. — Andrea Dworkin

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action. — Andrea Dworkin

The universal religion - contempt for women. — Andrea Dworkin

One needs either equality or political and economic superiority. — Andrea Dworkin

It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy? — Andrea Dworkin

Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground? — Andrea Dworkin

I never met a man who wasn't stupider than me. — Andrea Dworkin

Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it 'Her'. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination. — Andrea Dworkin

I also had nightmares. Somehow all the feelings I didn't feel when each thing had actually happened to me I did feel when I slept. — Andrea Dworkin

The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world. — Andrea Dworkin

Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives. — Andrea Dworkin

Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates. — Andrea Dworkin

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values -- or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be -- to be through her son, to live through her son. — Andrea Dworkin

Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover. — Andrea Dworkin

There is nothing as dangerous as an unembodied principle: no matter what blood flows, the principle comes first. The First Amendment absolutists operate precisely on unembodied principle. — Andrea Dworkin

I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will. — Andrea Dworkin

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis. — Andrea Dworkin

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. — Andrea Dworkin

Life Lessons by Andrea Dworkin

1. Andrea Dworkin taught that all forms of oppression and discrimination must be challenged and confronted in order to create a more equitable and just society.
2. She also believed that the only way to achieve true liberation was through the empowerment of women, both in terms of their rights and their ability to make their own decisions.
3. Finally, she argued that the only way to create lasting change was through collective action and solidarity.