Quotes from Andrea Dworkin

There is a misery of the body and a misery of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we looked at them, poured nectar into our mouths, and the grass became bread, we would still be sad. We live in a system that manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm, and we drown down, dead, too soon.

And mother, handmaiden to the Lord, says wear this, do that, don't do that, don't say that, sit, close your legs, wear white gloves and don't get them dirty, girls don't climb trees, girls don't run, girls don't, girls don't, girls don't; wasn't nothing girls actually did do of any interest whatsoever. It's when they get you a doll that pees that you recognize the dimensions of conspiracy, its institutional reach, its metaphysical ambition.

Klansmen were notorious for 'beating hell out of their wives," writes reporter Jack Nelson in Terror in the Night: The Klaris Campaign Against the Jews, "and their wives would complain to the FBI and request that their husbands be arrested. Instead the agents would inform the Klansmen of their wives' complaints, generating pressure within the families that the FBI could exploit.

They don't act like human beings and they're pretty proud of it so there's no point in pretending they are; though you want to - pretend.

I have a certain ruthless objectivity not uncommon among those who live inside the senses; I love him without restraint, without limit, without respect to consequences, for me or for him; I am not sentimental; I want him; this is not dopey, stupid, sentimental love; nostalgia and lingering romance; this is it; all; everything.

I had a big fight with God when I learned in Hebrew School that women couldn't go into the Temple when they had their periods because I got nine when I was in, I was an adult when I went to the movies alone in the Bible, and it hurt so terrible, so bad, and still did every month, and I couldn't think when anyone would need God more, and how could He keep me away and say awful things like that I was unclean when He gave you the thing.

and if you are a stubborn child, a strong-willed child, you say the almost-ten-year-old version of fuck you something happened all right the fuck put his hands in my legs and rubbed me all over; my legs; *my legs*; me; my; my legs; my; my; my legs; and he rubbed

I have no patience with the untom, anyone who hasnt weathered rough weather, fallen apart, been ripped to pieces, put herself back together, big stitches, jagged cuts, nothing nice, then something shines out. but these ones all shined up on the outside, the ass wigglers.

I always wanted excellence. I wanted to attain it. I didn't start out with apologies. I thought: I am. I wanted to mix with the world, hands on, me and it, and I'd have courage. I wasn't born nice necessarily but nurture triumphed over nature and I wanted to be the good citizen.

I believe in pure love, I-Thou, love without boundaries or categories or conditions or making someone less than you are; not treating people like they are foreign or lower or things, I-It.

I had an abhorrence for killing, but it was raped from me, raped from my brain; obliterated, like freedom.

her first goal was 19. then she became 19, and she didnt die. it surprised her. nothing had ever surprised her like that.

I'm a veteran of Birkenau and Massada and deep throat, uncounted rapes, thousands of men, I'm twenty-seven, I don't sleep. They leave the shell for reasons of their own. I have no fear of any kind, they fucked it out of me some time age, it's neither here nor there, not good or bad, except girls without fear scare them.

Prostitution means for the woman the carnal annihilation of will and choice, but for the man it once again signifies an increase in power, pure and simple.

I've always wanted to see a man beaten to a shit bloody pulp with a high-heeled shoe stuffed up his mouth, sort of the pig with the apple.

Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without mediation-such that what she says and how she says it are not determined by boundaries men have set for her?

Equality in the realm of sex is an antisexual idea if sex requires dominance in order to register as sensation.

I want writers to write books because they are committed to the content of those books. I want writers to write books as actions. I want writers to write books that can make a difference in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to write books that are worth being jailed for, worth fighting for, and should it come to that in this country, worth dying for.

The analysis is androcentric in the extreme; but still, the story does suggest that the repulsion is not simply deserved by its victims. The repulsion, Tolstoy insists, requires scrutiny and, ultimately, disavowal; the sex act that causes it needs to be eliminated. The radical social change demanded by Tolstoy in this story-the end of intercourse-is a measured repudiation of gynocide: in order not to kill women, he said, we must stop fucking them.

It is this superiority, this contemptuous but absolutely normal and unremarkable arrogance, that he now sees as the essence of sexual depravity, and also as a first step toward killing his wife. Having actually killed, he sees the sex he took for granted as murderous in its diminution of human life-how it made women's humanity invisible, meaningless; but the prerogatives of both sex and class made the exploitation as invisible as gravity, as certain.

In the early part of the marriage, the anger was intrinsic to the sex act, be cause it was an inevitable consequence of being finished with it: satiation. [...] Later, the rage and hatred were intrinsic to the sex, because the sex had brought him to her and he had contempt for her.

Feminists have good reasons for feeling tired. The backlash against feminism has been deeply stupid.

One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an unfree world, and in the course of redefining family, church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. To attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.

Most Amerikans do not read books--they prefer television. Academics lock books in a tangled web of mindfuck and abstraction. The notion is that there are ideas, then art, then somewhere else, unrelated, life.