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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.

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
Standards
Beyond
Becomes
Freedom
Force
Convey
Language
Imposed
Power
Standard
Women
Tragedy

More quotes by 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.
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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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Violation is a synonym for intercourse.
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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.
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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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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.
Andrea Dworkin
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There is nothing as dangerous as an unembodied principle: no matter what blood flows, the principle comes first. The First Amendment absolutists operate precisely on unembodied principle.
Andrea Dworkin
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Feminism exists so that no woman ever has to face her abuser in isolation, alone.
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The hurting of women is . . . basic to the sexual pleasure of men.
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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.
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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One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.
Andrea Dworkin
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Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species.
Andrea Dworkin
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Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.
Andrea Dworkin
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Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin