Quotes from Andrea Dworkin

Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of woman hating.

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.

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?

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.

Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.' (Leviticus 18:22). That means simply that it is foul to do to other men what men habitually, proudly, manfully do to women: use them as inanimate, empty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex.

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.

No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.

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.

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

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.

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.

'Women's fashion' is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.

Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.

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.

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.

I've read Hamlet, I know men suffer.

The object, the woman, goes out into the world formed as men have formed her to be used as men wish to use her. She is then a provocation. The object provokes its use. It provokes its use because of its form, determined by the one who is provoked. The carpenter makes a chair, sits on it, then blames the chair because he is not standing. When the object complains about the use to which she is put, she is told, simply and firmly, not to provoke.

All this talk, for and against and about babies, " wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.. . . The women bear and rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: 'We are running short of children—make some more.

In the world men seem to exercise power, but all of that comes to nothing in the face of the lust provoked by a woman. Whatever he does to her, she is still more powerful than he is because he wants her, he needs her, he is being driven by a desire for her. In the sexual woman-superior model, power is articulated as being intrinsically female because power is redefined beyond reason, beyond coherence: as if power is in the corpse that draws the vultures.