Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Rita Dworkinwas an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women. Although a radical, she said there was a need for liberals, but was widely criticized by liberal feminists. At the same time, she maintained a dialogue with political conservatives and wrote a topically-related book, Right-Wing Women. After suffering abuse from her first husband, she was introduced to radical feminist literature...
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth26 September 1946
CityCamden, NJ
Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
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.
Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?
Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.
The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.
Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.
By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air; it is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it.
We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist - marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil.
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.
The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.
Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
Men use the night to erase us.
Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.