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No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.

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
Courage
Gives
Phallic
Woman
Matches
Another
Existential
Doe
Solitary
Ever
Hero
Matter
Prove
Giving
Birth

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Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.
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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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The hurting of women is . . . basic to the sexual pleasure of men.
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We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist - marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil.
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The new pornography is left-wing and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love.
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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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...In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
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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.
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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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If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving?
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Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.
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