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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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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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Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity by money, admiration, recognition, respect, and the genuflection of others honoring their sacred and proven masculinity. In male culture, police are heroic and so are outlaws males who enforce standards are heroic and so are those who violate them.
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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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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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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'?
Andrea Dworkin
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Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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We as women know that there are no disembodied processes that all history originates in human flesh that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.
Andrea Dworkin
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Violation is a synonym for intercourse.
Andrea Dworkin
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Can women make use of men's vulnerability not to marry but instead to destroy male power?
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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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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Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men this is the essential truth of pornography.
Andrea Dworkin
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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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Touch is the meaning of being human.
Andrea Dworkin