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
No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.
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 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.
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.
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.
Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.
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.
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.