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
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.
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.
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'?
Feminist art... will take the great human themes – love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself – and render them fully human.
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.
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is sensitive; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture -- in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.
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.
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.
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.
The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.
I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.
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.
Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.
I dream that love without tyranny is possible