Quote

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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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
Cost
Comply
Accepting
Abhor
Asks
Resist
Whatever
Despite
Change
Destroy
Power
Refuse
Women
Accept
Men
Necessary

More quotes by 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
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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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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
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Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.
Andrea Dworkin
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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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The universal religion - contempt for women.
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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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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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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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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Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?
Andrea Dworkin
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In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.
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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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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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.
Andrea Dworkin
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The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.
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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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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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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One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible.
Andrea Dworkin