Quotes from Andrea Dworkin

Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are "sex-negative" without qualification or examination, perhaps because so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid, and without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste.

Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.

The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation. Woman have been chattels to man as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of woman. He owns you - he fucks you. The fucking conveys the quality of ownership - he owns you inside out.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.

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

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.

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.

Social outrage is power protecting itself; it is not morality.

Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman.

sexual freedom is when women do the things men think are sexy; the more women do these things, the more sexually free they are.

You tell the truth and people can shit all over it... but somehow once it's said it can't be unsaid; it stays living, somewhere, in someone's heart.

The dark was hissing and hot and hard with a jagged bone, a cold brutal bone, and hips packed tight. The dark wasn't just at night. The dark was any time, any place; you open your eyes and the dark is there, right up against you, pressing. You can't see anything and you don't know any names, not who they are or the names for what they do...

The intelligence of women is not out in the world, acting on its own behalf; it is kept small, inside the home, acting on behalf of another. This is true even when the woman works outside the home, because she is segregated into women's work, and her intelligence does not have the same importance as the lay of her ass.

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

Most women cannot afford, either materially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt offerings of obedience they bring to beg protection will not appease the angry little gods around them.

Because feminism is a movement for liberation of the powerless by the powerless in a closed system based on their powerlessness, right-wing women judge it a futile movement. Frequently they also judge it a malicious movement in that it jeopardizes the bargains with power that they can make; feminism calls into question for the men confronted by it the sincerity of women who conform without political resistance.

Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing it's realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself. [...] The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way.

The separation of man from nature, man placing himself over and above it, is directly responsible for the current ecological situation which may lead to the extinction of many forms of life, including human life. Man has treated nature much as he has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence.

Women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others. But it is only by asserting one's humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all is the core of our struggle.

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women.

Men hate intelligence in women. It cannot flame; it cannot burn; it cannot burn out and end up in ashes, having been consumed in adventure. It cannot be cold, rational, ice; no warm womb would tolerate a cold, icy, splendid mind. It cannot be ebullient and it cannot be morbid; it cannot be anything that does not end in reproduction or whoring. It cannot be what intelligence is: a vitality of mind that acts directly in and on the world, without mediation.

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

I love the literature that these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not. Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they know more about women than we know about ourselves.

God exacted interest like a loanshark, you paid and kept paying and still He broke all yr bones, one Yom Kippur, at the beginning of her 30th year, God had written her name once again in the book of loss, Bertha Schneider, let her lose everything, God had written in that pedestrian prose of His. rub it in, pile it on, and let her eat cake, the kind wrapped in plastic, God had scratched in the margin.