Quotes from Andrea Dworkin

standard forms are sometimes called conventions, conventions are mightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrument of the Law, an unfeeling guard punching his fellow man hard in the belly.

For those who remain devout, God endowed man with what, by any standard, must be considered a universally bad disposition, fortunately put to good use in subduing women.

In art, [Tolstoy] articulates with almost prophetic brilliance the elements that combine to make and keep women inferior, all of them originating, in his view, in sexual intercourse, because sexual intercourse requires objectification and therefore is exploitation. In life, he blamed and hated Sophie [his wife], feeling antagonism and repulsion, because he wanted to fuck her and did fuck her.

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.

On my twenty-fifth birthday, when I had lived one quarter of a century, I was nearly dead, almost catatonic, without the will to live. By my twenty-sixth birthday, I wanted more than anything to live. I was one year old, an infant born out of a corpse, still with the smell of death on her, but hating death.

My fiction is not autobiography. I am not an exhibitionist. I do not show myself. I am not asking for forgiveness. I do not want to confess. But I have used everything I know—my life—to show what I believe must be shown so that it can be faced. The imperative at the heart of my writing—what must be done—comes directly from my life. But I do not show my life directly, in full view; nor even look at it while others watch.

Especially, [the skin] is both identity and sex, what one is and what one feels in the realm of the sensual, [...] where the self meets the world-intercourse being, ultimately, the self in the act of meeting the world. The other person embodies not one's own privacy, but everything outside it.

You do not teach someone to count only up to eight. You do not say nine and ten and beyond do not exist. You give people everything or they are not able to count at all. There is a real revolution or none at all.

Und ich hasse die Mittelschichts-Blödmänner, die so viel zu sagen haben, aber nie einen einzigen verdammten Tag mit dem Versuch verbracht haben, am Leben zu bleiben.

punishment evokes sexual feelings in him; skin is logically connected in his mind with force, because sex is what he feels when he feels the urge to hurt her. [...] Force is suggested by the skin, because both to him mean real touch; [...] still conditioned by civilization to have abstract sexual impulses, he is drawn most by the silhouette, halfway between the fictive and the real.

She wanted a passion larger than what she perceived as mere physical sex, a passion less commonplace (less vulgar); and though Tennessee Williams frames her as a model of repression, [...] in fact the character he created is too immense and original for that to be true, John too small and ordinary.

Es ist wie eine mathematische Gleichung, aber niemand lernt sie in der Schule auswendig; sie wird nicht deutlich auf die Tafel geschrieben. Es ist Algebra für Mädchen, aber niemand bringt sie dir bei. Du wirst zu Fall gebracht oder niedergeworfen, und du lernst selber. Keine Mutter der Welt kann es ertragen, es dir zu erklären.

Ich erfinde keine Geschichten. Ich schreibe eine andere Sorte Geschichten. Ich schreibe so wahrhaftig wie der Mann mit seinen Fingern, wenn ich nur alles behalten und sagen kann; aber ich bin nicht auf seiner Seite. Ich bin auf einer anderen Seite. Ich sage die Wahrheit, aber aus einer anderen Sicht. Ich bin diejenige, der er es angetan hat. Der Köder spricht, Süßer.

Unable to transcend ego, to be naked inside and out, or being left alone because passion is burnt out and when it is burnt out it is over in an instant, the men use violence - capture, murder, violent revenge. Alienated because of their self-absorption, their thoughts of women are saturated with violence; they dream of violence when they think of the woman they want.

The only fiction in pornography is the smile on the woman's face.

In discussing the so-called biological origins of male dominance, the boys can afford to compare themselves to baboons and insects: they are writing books or teaching in universities when they do it. A Harvard professor does not refuse tenure because a baboon has never been granted it.

Incest is a crime committed against someone, a crime from which many victims never recover.

Feminists try hard to fight for women at the same time maintaining special loyalties to subgroups of men. How could we not?

In analyzing the sex-class system, feminists are accused of inventing or perpetuating it. Calling attention to it, we are told, insults women by suggesting that they are victims, stupid enough to allow themselves to be victimized. Feminists are accused of being the agents of degradation by postulation that such degradation exists.

It's as if every crack in the sidewalk is an open door to somewhere; you can go between the cracks to the hidden world but regular people never even see the cracks.

Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.

Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.

You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.

People want me to shut up, but I won't. I believe social change is possible; that's why I'm an activist.