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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
Called
Woman
Give
Giving
Asserts
Politely
Accounting
Asked

More quotes by Andrea Dworkin

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Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.
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.
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Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.
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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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Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?
Andrea Dworkin
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To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is.
Andrea Dworkin
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The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.
Andrea Dworkin
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If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.
Andrea Dworkin
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I also had nightmares. Somehow all the feelings I didn't feel when each thing had actually happened to me I did feel when I slept.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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Violation is a synonym for intercourse.
Andrea Dworkin
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Any man will follow any feminine looking thing down any dark alley I've always wanted to see a man beaten to a shit bloody pulp with a high-heeled shoe stuffed up his mouth, sort of the pig with the apple it would be good to put him on a serving plate but you'd need good silver.
Andrea Dworkin
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Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.
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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Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
Andrea Dworkin
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Touch is the meaning of being human.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
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