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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
Outside
Criteria
Choices
Superior
Superiors
Oppression
Define
Defined
Essence
Choice

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If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving?
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One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man.
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Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.
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For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for.
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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.
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Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who use to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with any more. It doesn't matter who the individual women are.
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Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.
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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.
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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 are an enslaved population - the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses. Women are forced into committing sexual acts with men that violate integrity because the universal religion - contempt for women - has as its first commandment that women exist purely as sexual fodder for men.
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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.
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I love books the way I love nature. ... I can imagine now that a time will come, that it is almost upon us, when no one will love books ... It is no accident, I think, that books and nature (as we know it) may disappear simultaneously from human experience. There is no mind-body split.
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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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Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
Andrea Dworkin
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Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.
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One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible.
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Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free.
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Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny it is the political defense of women hating.
Andrea Dworkin
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Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.
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