Quote

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.

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
Made
Graves
Cadavers
Flowers
Consecrated
Traditional
Violated
Victim
Courtship
Eternity
Delivered
Kill
Dressed
Flower
Laid
Ritually
Used
Grave
Cadaver

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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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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.
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Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men this is the essential truth of pornography.
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Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy of sadism, of dominance.
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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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Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.
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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.
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Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.
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Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
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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.
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To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is.
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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.
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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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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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The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.
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There is no place on earth, no day or night, no hour or minute, when one is not a Jew or a woman.
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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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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.
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I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will.
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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