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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.

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
Politely
Accounting
Asked
Called
Woman
Give
Giving
Asserts

More quotes by Andrea Dworkin

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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.
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.
Andrea Dworkin
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We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent-see, he's jealous, he cares-a woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt by how much she will take how much she will endure how suicidal she's prepared to be.
Andrea Dworkin
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While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
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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The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.
Andrea Dworkin
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Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.
Andrea Dworkin
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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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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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Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who use to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with any more. It doesn't matter who the individual women are.
Andrea Dworkin
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No woman needs intercourse few women escape it.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.
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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Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.
Andrea Dworkin
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Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.
Andrea Dworkin
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Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.
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.
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