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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
Choice
Outside
Criteria
Choices
Superior
Superiors
Oppression
Define
Defined
Essence

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Touch is the meaning of being human.
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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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Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny it is the political defense of women hating.
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Feminism exists so that no woman ever has to face her abuser in isolation, alone.
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We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent-see, he's jealous, he cares-a woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt by how much she will take how much she will endure how suicidal she's prepared to be.
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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.
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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.
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The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.
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When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.
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I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.
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Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.
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I dream that love without tyranny is possible
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In her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to become, to act, to change self and society. And each year she is stronger and there are more of her.
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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.
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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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Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however inspired,can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is not a dreadful form of dying.
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We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.
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If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving?
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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.
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Violation is a synonym for intercourse.
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