Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Rita Dworkinwas an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women. Although a radical, she said there was a need for liberals, but was widely criticized by liberal feminists. At the same time, she maintained a dialogue with political conservatives and wrote a topically-related book, Right-Wing Women. After suffering abuse from her first husband, she was introduced to radical feminist literature...
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth26 September 1946
CityCamden, NJ
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.
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.
Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.
Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?
The universal religion - contempt for women.
If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving?
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.
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.
Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
Touch is the meaning of being human.
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.
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.
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 ...