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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.

Andrea Dworkin

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Andrea Dworkin
Age: 58 †
Born: 1946
Born: September 26
Died: 2005
Died: April 9
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Camden
New Jersey
Andrea Rita Dworkin
Choices
Superior
Superiors
Oppression
Define
Defined
Essence
Choice
Outside
Criteria

More quotes by Andrea Dworkin

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Feminist art may... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme... should we call it 'joy'?
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Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.
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The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this--since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it.
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Feminist art... will take the great human themes – love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself – and render them fully human.
Andrea Dworkin
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I never met a man who wasn't stupider than me.
Andrea Dworkin
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If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.
Andrea Dworkin
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Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.
Andrea Dworkin
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Touch is the meaning of being human.
Andrea Dworkin
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The argument between wives and whores is an old one each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.
Andrea Dworkin
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Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.
Andrea Dworkin
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I have to ask you to resist, not to comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to refuse to accept it, to abhor it and to do whatever is necessary despite its cost to you to change it.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.
Andrea Dworkin
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Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.
Andrea Dworkin
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Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.
Andrea Dworkin
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No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin