You are on page 1of 7

"I have spent 20 years writing these

books. Had I wanted to say men are


beasts and scream, that takes 30
seconds."
[1]
Andrea Dworkin
From Wikiquote
Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 April 9, 2005) was an
American radical feminist and writer.
Contents
1 Sourced
1.1 Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)
1.2 Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's
Liberation (2000)
2 About
3 Notes
4 External links
Sourced
I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind.
"Dworkin on Dworkin," an interview originally published in Off Our Backs, reprinted in Radically
Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed Ed. by Renate Klein and Diane Bell.
The nature of women's oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race;
some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be
found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them,
sleep with them, have their children we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and
way of life which is ruinous to us.
Woman Hating, ch. 9, p. 23, E.P. Dutton, New York (1974)
Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of
another woman.
Our Blood (1976)
By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we
exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it. Instead of "I am afraid", we say, "I don't want to", or
"I don't know how", or "I can't."
Speech at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of
Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976)
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.
Speech at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of
Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976)
For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as
a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions,
and values or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose
life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy
is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be
to be through her son, to live through her son.
Speech, first delivered at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The
Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976)
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy
mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and
analytically; or because he is "sensitive"; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so
does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and
has a mythic rendering in the culture in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.
Speech at Queen's College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of
Fear and Courage", ch. 5, published in Our Blood (1976)
Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is
defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation.... The proof of love is that she is willing to be
destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice
of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.
Speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (September 26, 1975). "The Root
Cause", ch. 9, Our Blood (1976)
Q: People think you are very hostile to men.
A: I am.
Q: Doesn't that worry you?
A: From what you said, it worries them.
Nervous Interview (http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIA.html) (1979)
Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape. The fact is that rape and prostitution caused
and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and
prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and
prostitution of women.
Pornography and Male Supremacy
(http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIVH.html) (1981), Letters from a
War Zone, p 230.
I want to see this men's movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful
commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk
seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are
we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to
exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don't make a commitment to ending the
practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to
be public. It can't be self-indulgent.
"I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape"
(http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html) (1983)
Anti-feminism is also operating whenever any political group is ready to sacrifice one group of women, one
faction, some women, some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to pornography, to
rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all
along the male-defined political spectrum, including both extreme ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women,
usually not themselves, to the brothels or the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly anti-feminist; it is also
profoundly immoral...
"Anti-feminism," Right Wing Women (1983), pp. 230-231.
Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of contempt for womens bodies.
Intercourse (1987) chapter 7, "Occupation/Collaboration"
(On prostitution:) Incest is boot camp. Incest is where you send the girl to learn how to do it. So you don't,
obviously, have to send her anywhere, she's already there and she's got nowhere else to go. She's trained.
And the training is specific and it is important: not to have any real boundaries to her own body; to know that
she's valued only for sex; to learn about men what the offender, the sex offender, is teaching her.
"Prostitution and Male Supremacy"
(http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MichLawJourI.html) (1993), Michigan Journal of
Gender and Law 1(1):112. Reprinted in Life and Death (1997), p 13951.
Often paraphrased as "Incest is boot camp for prostitution".
I'm going to ask you to remember the prostituted, the homeless, the battered, the raped, the tortured, the
murdered, the raped-then-murdered, the murdered-then-raped; and I am going to ask you to remember the
photographed, the ones that any or all of the above happened to and it was photographed and now the
photographs are for sale in our free countries. I want you to think about those who have been hurt for the
fun, the entertainment, the so-called speech of others; those who have been hurt for profit, for the financial
benefit of pimps and entrepreneurs. I want you to remember the perpetrator and I am going to ask you to
remember the victims: not just tonight but tomorrow and the next day. I want you to find a way to include
them -- the perpetrators and the victims -- in what you do, how you think, how you act, what you care
about, what your life means to you.
Now, I know, in this room, some of you are the women I have been talking about. I know that. People
around you may not. I am going to ask you to use every single thing you can remember about what was done
to you -- how it was done, where, by whom, when, and, if you know -- why -- to begin to tear male
dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it, to mess it up, to get in its way, to fuck it
up. 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.
Remember, resist, do not comply (http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/remember.html)
(1995)
Michael Moorcock: Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven't found
a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?
Dworkin: No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say that, then or ever. My point was that as long as the law
allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from
rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse it was
compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual
intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman.
Interview in New Statesman & Society (21 April 1995), discussing her books Intercourse and
Right Wing Women
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. In the home the question will be couched in a million cruelties, some
subtle, some so egregious they rival the injuries of organized war. ... It must be admitted that those who want
me to account for myself are intrigued in hostile, voyeuristic ways, and their projections of me are not the
usual run-of-the-mill rudeness or arrogance to which writers, especially women writers, become
accustomed. The work would be enough, even for the unfortunate sad sacks mentioned above. So here's the
deal as I see it: I am ambitious God knows, not for money; in most respects but not all I am honorable;
and I wear overalls: kill the bitch. But the bitch is not yet ready to die. Brava, she says, alone in a small room.
"Preface," Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002)
Pornography is used in rape - to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to
commit the act.
Testimony before the New York Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in 1986
The pornographers actually use our bodies as their language. We are their speech. . . . Protecting what they
'say' means protecting what they do to us, how they do it. It means protecting their sadism on our bodies,
because that is how they write: not like a writer at all; like a torturer.
Women Transforming Communications
I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30
seconds.
Modern Times Interview of Andrea Dworkin With Larry Josephson, on "Modern Times"
(American Public Radio, 1992) (radio program) (transcript of tape (end of tape missing))
(http://www.andreadworkin.com/audio/moderntimes.html), as accessed Sep. 5, 2010.
(Dworkin's statements quoted:) Her own experiences - as a rape victim, a prostitute and a battered wife -
only added to the trenchancy of her views, but she reacted with fury to suggestions that such traumas had
made it difficult for her to be objective. "I've never heard Solzhenitsyn asked if he can be objective about the
gulag," she snarled. "As if not paying attention to rape and wife battery were some kind of objectivity."
Andrea Dworkin, in The Telegraph, April 13, 2005, 12:02 a.m. (section "News", subsection
"Obits", subsubsection "Culture") (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-
obituaries/1487683/Andrea-Dworkin.html), as accessed February 15, 2013 (obituary)
Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)
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.
Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of
dominance.
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.
...pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and
prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on
dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience
of her own life that pornography is captivitythe woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped
wherever he's got her.
Introduction (http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/PornIntro2.html), p xxvii
[I]n the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography:
better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of
consumer. As with the call girl and the streetwalker, one is turned out better but both are produced by the
same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service.
p 10.
Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity by money,
admiration, recognition, respect, and the genuflection of others honoring their sacred and proven masculinity.
p 53.
Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun
and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history.
The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image
of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male
experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.
p 69.
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.
p 167.
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.
p 209 (http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/PornWhores.html).
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000)
N.Y.: Free Press, 2000, ISBN 0-684-83612-2
Berlin says: "... You cannot combine full liberty with full equalityfull liberty for the wolves cannot be
combined with full liberty for the sheep...." .... Are women sheep ("led like sheep to the slaughter")? Must
women become wolves? Is violence against women a direct result of the fact that there is no inevitable,
painful, retaliatory consequence for hurting women?
pp. 245246.
Do women need sovereigntynot only over their own bodies as currently understood in the United States
...; but control of a boundary further away from their bodies, a defended boundary? Do women need land
and an army ...; or a feminist government in exile ...? Or is it simpler: the bed belongs to the woman; the
house belongs to the woman; any land belongs to the woman; if a male intimate is violent he is removed from
the place where she has the superior and inviolate claim, arrested, denied parole, and prosecuted. .... Could
women "set a high price on our blood"? Could women set any price on our blood? Could women manage
self-defense if not retaliation? Would self-defense be enough? Could women execute men who raped or beat
or tortured women? .... [] .... Could the acts of women in behalf of women ... have a code of honor
woman-to-woman that weakens the male-dominant demands of nationalism or race-pride or ethnic pride?
Could women commit treason to the men of their own group: put women first, even the putative enemy
women? Do women have enough militancy and self-respect to see themselves as the central makers of legal
codes, ethics, honor codes, and culture?
p. 246.
Can women make use of men's vulnerability not to marry but instead to destroy male power?
p. 248.
Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?
p. 248.
One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.
p. 336.
About
"Andrea presented herself as a street fighter intellectual, a bohemian freedom fighter, and someone who
wanted to get to the bottom of things. That quote about Malcolm X is apt. Malcolm pointed out The
problem is WHITE PEOPLE. Dworkin said, The problem is MEN. And for all the holes that can be
poked in that cloth, there is something about that grain that is absolutely true, when you are the short end of
the bolt."
"Andrea Dworkin Has Died
(http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2005/04/andrea_dworkin_.html)" by Susie Bright,
Susie Bright's Journal (blog), April 11, 2005.
"Im sorry Andrea Dworkin started a sexual revolution that she ended up repudiating. She never got to see
people like me, Carol, and the rest of us little protges who took her inspiration and flew to a new
dimension. She got stuck, and then she got sick, and when youre famous for one thing, no one wants to see
you change unless you reject it all, like a pathetic sinner seeking redemption. She was too stubborn and too
old-fashioned for that. Andrea Dworkin never would have admitted that she was a SuperStar. She was the
animator of the ultimate porno horror loop, where the Final Girl never gets a chance to slay the monster, she
only dies, dies, dies, with the cries of the angry mourners to remember her."
"Andrea Dworkin Has Died
(http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2005/04/andrea_dworkin_.html)" by Susie Bright,
Susie Bright's Journal (blog), April 11, 2005.
So now we come to what Andrea Dworkin wants and it is this: she wants women to have their own country.
But that's mad, I said to her. Why bother discussing it? It isn't going to happen. To which she has a reply --
didn't they say that about Israel? And didn't the world think that Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist
movement, was a crank? The Jews got a country because they had been persecuted, said that enough was
enough, decided what they wanted and went out and fought for it. Women should do the same. And if you
don't want to live in Womenland, so what? Not all Jews live in Israel, but it is there, a place of potential
refuge if persecution comes to call. Furthermore, Dworkin says, as the Jews fought for Israel so women have
the right to execute -- that's right, execute -- rapists and the state should not intervene. I couldn't really
believe she was serious, but she is.
"Take no prisoners" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,220099,00.html), interview
by Linda Grant, The Guardian (13 May 2000)
Notes
1. The statement and the image are not from the same time or place. The attribution for the statement is on
this page. The attribution for the image may be found by clicking on the image.
External links
Andrea Dworkin Web Site (http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Andrea_Dworkin&oldid=1709739"
Categories: Americans Activists Feminists Jews Non-fiction authors Novelists 2000s deaths
Anarchists LGBT people New Jerseyans
This page was last modified on 9 April 2014, at 01:45.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

You might also like