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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.

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
Familiar
Air
Elements
Fear
Women
Exhale
Live
Inhale
Even
Element
Time
Notice

More quotes by Andrea Dworkin

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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.
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A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
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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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Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.
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Men characterize pornography as something mental because their minds, their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies, are more real to them than women's bodies or lives in fact, men have used their social power to characterize a $10-billion-a-year trade in women as fantasy.
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Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.
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I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.
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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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Remember: Resist do not comply.
Andrea Dworkin
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The hurting of women is . . . basic to the sexual pleasure of men.
Andrea Dworkin
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In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.
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And on that day, the day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing, because it is nothing It is not real It is not true.
Andrea Dworkin
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All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.
Andrea Dworkin
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Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy of sadism, of dominance.
Andrea Dworkin
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The universal religion - contempt for women.
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.
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