Quotes from Andrea Dworkin

With the possible exception of the Shakers, it is difficult to think of an American movement that has failed more spectacularly than antipornography feminism.

Being naked takes on different values, according to the self-consciousness of the one who is naked; or according to the consciousness of the one who is looking at the nakedness. The men are tortured in their minds by the meaning of being naked, especially by the literal nakedness of women but also by their own nakedness: what it means to be seen and to be vulnerable. The nakedness of the women they look at, interpret, desire, associate with acts of violence they want to commit.

For me, being a lesbian means three things— First, it means that I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love.

I will say here what I have never said before: my pacifism was not challenged by the beating and torture I experienced in marriage some thirty years ago; I finally got away not because I knew that he would kill me but because I thought I would kill him.

Only the toughest among women will make the necessary next moves, the revolutionary moves, and among prostituted women one finds the toughest if not always the best. If prostituted women worked together to end male supremacy, it would end. Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you rights, honor and knowledge, because you earn them.

We take girls and send them to schools. It is good of us, because girls are not supposed to know anything much, and in many other societies girls are not sent to school or taught to read and write. In our society, such a generous one to women, girls are taught some facts, but not inquiry or the passion of knowing. Girls are taught in order to make them compliant: intellectual adventurousness is drained, punished, ridiculed out of girls.

Jeder richtige Gedanke ist eine wahrhafte Eroberung für Frauen unter der Herrschaft von Männern. Sie wissen nicht, wie schwer es ist, freundlich zu sein. Unser Unterdrücker verbreitet seine Version von uns überall, auf Wänden, in den Zeitungen, auf der Kinoleinwand. Wie Giftgas sickert sie ein. Jedes Wort, das wir äußern, ist eine Erklärung unserer Rechte. Jede Geste ist ein Bekenntnis. Ich mache Gesten.

The discovery is, of course, that "man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The conclusion is inescapable: we are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.

Will feminism be a political movement that confronts the power of men over women in order to dismantle that power; or will feminism be a lifestyle choice, a post-modernist fad, a cyclically noted fashion?

The questions now really are: why is pornography credible in our society? how can anyone believe it? And then: how subhuman would women have to be for the pornography to be true? To the men who use the pornography, how subhuman are women?

The victim of encapsulating violence carries both the real fear and the memory of fear with her always. Together, they wash over her like an ocean, and if she does not learn to swim in that terrible sea, she goes under.

The appeals judge said that pornography did all the harm we claimed--it promoted insult and injury, rape and assault, even caused women to have lower wages--and that these effects proved its power as speech; therefore, it had to be protected.

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 symbols of terror are commonplace and utterly familiar: the gun, the knife, the bomb, the fist, and so on. Even more significant is the hidden symbol of terror, the penis.

You damn well better believe that you're involved in this tragedy and that it's your tragedy too. Because you're turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live.

And I want one day of respite, one day off, one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for less--it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.

I used writing to take language where women's pain was--and women's fear--and I kept excavating for the words that could bear the burden of speaking the unspeakable...

I think God is really a ruthless artist and earth is an early draft. This draft was bad, overloaded with gratuitous cruelty. Love doesn't work. Pride is a sin. Nothing we do is right.

Nous avons dit non. (...) Il y a une réponse à notre non. Un fusil semi-automatique est une réponse. Il y a aussi des poignards. Ce que nous vivons n'est pas une conversation plaisante. sur la tuerie de Montréal

My own experience is that night and day are more alike than different -- in which case they couldn't possibly be opposite.

Ethereal or promiscuous, she is stigmatized by the awesome drive behind her desire, the restlessness of her soul on earth, the mercilessness of her passion, [...] Her desire is grandiose and amoral, beyond the timidity she practices and the conscious morality she knows. She is stigmatized by her capacity for passion, not unlike artistic genius, the great wildness of a soul forever discontent with existing forms and their meanings; but she, unlike the artist, has no adequate means of expression.

It's not as if there's an empty patch that one can see and so one can say, 'There's my ignorance; it's about ten by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty patch.

The shame women feel on being fucked and simultaneously feeling pleasure in being possessed, in the shame of having one acknowledged both physically and emotionally the extent to which one has internalized and eroticized their subordination.

On what motivated her: I see it like this. All women are on a leash, because we are all oppressed. But those who get to adulthood without being raped or beaten have a longer leash than those who were. It should be that the ones with the longest leashes do more to help others. But it doesn't work that way, so we are the ones that fight the fight.