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One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available.

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
Economic
State
Keep
Degradation
Women
Sexually
States
Feminist
Best
Kept
Reason
Reasons
Way
Available

More quotes by Andrea Dworkin

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Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role.
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One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.
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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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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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Men use the night to erase us.
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The man takes a body that is not his, claims it, sows his so-called seed, reaps a harvest - he colonizes a female body, robs it of its natural resources, controls it.
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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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.
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Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?
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...In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
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Can women make use of men's vulnerability not to marry but instead to destroy male power?
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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.
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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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The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations-for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right-these institutions are real and they must be destroyed.
Andrea Dworkin
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Erotica is simply high-class pornography better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.
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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Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.
Andrea Dworkin
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On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle Authors, statesmen, thieves so-called humanists and self-declared fascists the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.
Andrea Dworkin