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If you have a favorite quote of Andrea Dworkin's that you would like to see on this site, please send it in to us.
Laura Colbert's favorite Andrea Dworkin quote from *LIFE & DEATH*
It occurs to me that we have to deal here--at the heart of the double standard--with the impact of orgasm on our perception of what hatred is and is not.... ... ...I am struck by how hate speech, racist hate speech, becomes more sexually explicit as it becomes more virulent--how its meaning becomes more sexualized, as if the sex is required to carry the hostility. In the history of anti-Semitism, by the time one gets to Hitler's ascendance to power in the Weimar Republic, one is looking at anti-Semitic hate speech that is indistinguishable from pornography--and it is not only actively published and distributed, it is openly displayed. What does that orgasm do? That orgasm
says, I am real and the lower creature, that thing, is not, and if the annihilation of that thing brings me pleasure, that is the way life should be; the racist hierarchy beomes a sexually charged ideal. There is a sense of biological inevitability that comes from the intensity of a sexual response derived from contempt; there is biological urgency, excitement, anger, irritation, a tension that is satisfied in humiliating and belittling the inferior one, in words, in acts. We wonder, with a tendentious ignorance, how it is that people believe bizarre and trasparently false philosophies of biological superiority. One answer is that when racist ideologies are sexualized, turned into concrete scenarios of dominance and submission such that they give people sexual pleasure, the sexual feelings in themselves make the ideologies seem biologically true and inevitable. The feelings seem to be natural; no argument changes the feelings; and the ideologies, then, also seem to be based in nature. People defend the sexual feelings by defending the ideologies. They say: my feelings are natural so if I have an orgasm from hurting you, or feel excited just by thinking about it, you are my natural partner in these feelings and events--your natural role is whatever intensifies my sexual arousal, which I experience as self-importance, or potency; you are nothing but you are *my* nothing, which makes me someone; using you is my right because being someone means that I have the power--the social power, the economic power, the imperial sovereignty--to do to you or with you what I want. This phenomenon of feeling superior through a sexually reified racism is always sadistic; its purpose is always to hurt. Sadism is a dynamic in every expression of hate speech. In the use of a racial epithet directed at a person, for instance, there is a desire to hurt--to intimidate, to humiliate; there is an underlying dimension of pushing someone down, subordinating them, making them less. When that hate speech becomes fully sexualized--for instance, in the systematic reality of the pornography industry--and a whole class of people exists in order to provide sexual pleasure and a synonymous sense of superiority to another group, in this case men, when that happens, we dare not tolerate that being called freedom.Thank you Andrea Dworkin.With Love and Gratitude,
Laura
Sometimes the sun is covered by dense layers of dark clouds. A person looking up would swear that there is no sun. But still the sun shines. At night, when there is no light, still the sun shines. During rain or hail or hurricane or tornado, still the sun shines.
Does the sun ask itself, "Am I good? Am I worthwhile? Is there enough of me?" No, it burns and it shines. Does the sun ask itself, "What does the moon think of me? How does Mars feel about me today?" No, it burns, it shines. Does the sun ask itself, "Am I as big as other suns in other galaxies?" No, it burns, it shines.
In this country in the coming years, I think that there will be a terrible storm. I think that the skies will darken beyond all recognition. Those who walk the streets will walk them in darkness. Those who are in prisons and mental institutions will not see the sky at all, only the dark out of barred windows. Those who are hungry and in despair may not look up at all. They will see the darkness as it lies on the ground in front of their feet. Those who are raped will see the darkness as they look up into the face of the rapist. Those who are assaulted and brutalized by madmen will stare intently into the darkness to discern who is moving toward them at every moment. It will be hard to remember, as the storm is raging, that still, even though we cannot see it, the sun shines. It will be hard to remember that still, even though we cannot see it, the sun burns. We will try to see it and we will try to feel it, and we will forget that it warms us still, that if it were not there, burning, shining, this earth would be a cold and desolate and barren place.
As long as we have life and breath, no matter how dark the earth around us, that sun still burns, still shines. There is no today without it. There is no tomorrow without it. There was no yesterday without it. That light is within us--constant, warm, and healing. Remember it, sisters, in the dark times to come.
-- from Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, 1976
Every woman who has had experience with sexual violence of any kind has not just pain, and not just hurt, but has knowledge. Knowledge of male supremacy. Knowledge of what it is. Knowledge of what it feels like. And can begin to think strategically about how to stop it. We are living under a reign of terror. Now what I want to say is that I want us to stop accepting that that's normal. And the only way that we can stop accepting that that's normal is if we refuse to have amnesia everyday of our lives -- if we remember what we know about the world we live in and get up in the morning determined to do something about it.
--"Terror, Torture, and Resistance", Life and Death.
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships. It is as if our oppression were cast in lava eons ago andnow it is granite, and each individual woman is buried inside the stone. Women try to survive inside the stone, buried in it. Women say, I like this stone, its weight is not too heavy for me. Women defend the stone by saying that it protects them from rain and wind and fire. Women say, all I have ever known is this stone, what is there without it?
For some women, being buried in the stone is unbearable. They want to move freely. They exert all their strength to claw away at the hard rock that encases them. They rip their fingernails, bruise their fists, tear the skin on their hands until it is raw and bleeding. They rip their lips open on the rock, and break their teeth, and choke on the granite as it crumbles into their mouths. Many women die in this desperate, solitary battle against the stone.
But what impulse to freedom were to be born in all of the women buried in the stone? What if the material of the rock itself had become so saturated with the stinking smell of women's rotting bodies, the accumulated stench of thousands of years of decay and death, that no woman could contain her repulsion? What would those women do if, finally, they did want to be free?
I think that they would study the stone. I think that they would use every mental and physical faculty available to them to analyze the stone, its structure, its qualities, its nature, its chemical composition, its density, the physical laws which determine its properties. They would try to discover where it was eroded, what substances decompose it, what kind of pressure was required to shatter it.
The investigation would require absolute rigor and honesty. Any lie that they told themselves about the nature of the stone would impede their liberation. Any lie that they told themselves about their own condition inside the stone would perpetuate the very situation that had become intolerable to them.
I think that we do not want to be buried inside the stone anymore. I think that the stench of decaying female carcasses has at last become so vile to us that we are ready to face the truth -- about the stone, and about ourselves inside it.
-- from Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, 1976
Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.
Everything that didn't happen to you -- I apply this to myself as part of the way that I survive -- everything that didn't happen to you is a little slack in your leash. You weren't raped when you were three, or you weren't raped when you were 10. Or you weren't battered, or you weren't in prostitution, whatever it is that you managed to miss is the measure of your freedom. And the measure of your strength. And what you owe to other women. I'm not asking you to be martyrs. I'm not asking you to give up your lives. I'm asking you to live your lives, honorably and with dignity. I'm asking you to fight. I'm asking you to do things for women that women do all the time in political struggle for men...I'm not asking you to get caught. I'm asking you to escape. I'm asking you to run for your life. If you need to run through a brick wall, run through it. If you get some bruises on your arms, it's better than having him give the bruises to you because you were standing still. None of us has the right to stand still.
-- from Life and Death.
Silence is not speech. We have silence, not speech. We fight rape, battery, incest, and prostitution with it. We lose. But someday someone will notice: that people called women were buried in a long silence that meant dissent and that the pornographers -- with needles set in like the teeth of a harrow - chattered on.
-- from "Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality" in Feminist Jurisprudence.
We can't keep sticking women together who have been broken up into little pieces. So what I think is that fighting back is as close to healing as we are going to come.
-- from "Terror, Torture, and Resistance" in Life and Death.
Among prostituted women, one finds the toughest, if not...the best. If prostituted women worked together to end male supremacy, it would end.
-- from Heartbreak.
The First Amendment, it should be noted, belongs to those who can buy it. Men have the economic clout. Pornographers have empires. Women are economically disadvantaged and barely have token access to the media....The growing power of the pornographers significantly diminishes the likelihood that women will ever experience freedom of anything -- certainly not sexual self-determination, certainly not freedom of speech.
-- from "For Men, Freedom of Speech; for Women, Silence Please" in Take Back the Night, Women on Pornography.
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.
-- from Women Transforming Communications: Global Intersections.
Whores exist only within a framework of male sexual domination.
-- from Pornography: Men Possessing Women
I never met a man who wasn't stupider than me.
-- from Mercy
People talk about pornography as a form of fantasy. They actually talk about prostitution as if it were an exercise in fantasy. And it is part of the pornographers' effort to hide what they really do in real life--to encourage the word fantasy in place of actual behavior that really happens in the real world. I mean, a fantasy is something that happens in your head. It doesn't go past your head. Once you have somebody acting out whatever that scenario might be in your head, it is an act in the world, it is real. It is real behavior with real consequences to real people. And so it has been a very brilliant part of the pornographers' propaganda campaign to protect pornography by characterizing the industry as an industry of fantasy. In fact when you have that Asian woman hanging from a tree, you have a real Asian woman and she is really hanging from a real tree. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with fantasy. It has to do with a human being actually having happen to them what we see has happened to them. And I think it is just the most extraordinary insult to the human conscience to continue to characterize these real acts to real people as if they only exist in the head of the male consumer. And what that means is: his head, his psychology, is more important than her life.
-- from the video Against Pornography: The Feminism of Andrea Dworkin produced by the BBC, 1992.
...our honor and our hope is in our ability to name integrity the essential reality of revolution; our future will bring that integrity to realization only if we put it first; we put it first by keeping our relationship to real life immediate and by respecting our capacity to understand experience ourselves, not through the medium of male ideology, male interpretation, or male intellection.
-- from "Look Dick Look. See Jane Blow it" in Letters from a War Zone.
The discovery is, of course, that "man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both.... We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.... Sex as the power dynamic between men and women, its primary form sadomasochism, is what we know now. Sex as community between humans, our shared humanity, is the world we must build....
-- from Women Hating.
In the United States, there is a feminst establishment, twenty years in the making, media-created and media-controlled, that is fairly corrupt, bought out by the privilege of its own prominence. There is also a grassroots feminism in every nook and cranny of this vast and diverse country with its complex physical and ethnic geography. This grassroots feminism is strong, brave, militant, enduring, creative, economically impoverished, and socially dispossessed. At this point in time, this is the feminism of moral and political significant out of which comes action, truth and hope.
-- from Letters from a War Zone.
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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."
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"The woman using the Ordinance will be saying, I am someone who has endured, I have survived, I matter, I know a lot, and what I know matters; it matters, and it is going to matter here in court, you pimp, because I am going to use what I know against you; and you Mr. Consumer, I know about you, and I am going to use what I know even about you, even when you are my teacher, even when you are my father, even when you are my lawyer, my doctor, my brother, my priest. I am going to use what I know."
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“Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.”
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"We will never be free unless women are not any longer treated as objects which includes sexual objects. We are human beings, we are the center of our own lives. We are not things for men to act out on. We will never be free unless we stop the notion that we have in the United States that violence is okay."
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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."
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"The governing reality for women of all races is that there is no escape from male violence, because it is inside and outside, intimate and predatory. While race hate has been expressed through forced segregation, woman hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare. For this reason, no matter how many women are battered--no matter how many football stadiums battered women could fill on any given day--each one is alone."
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"I learned to confront it [male power] in life from living feminists, writers and activists both, who lived political lives not bounded by either female frailty or male ruthlessness; instead animated by the luminous self-respect and militant compassion I still hope to achieve."
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"And on that day, the day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing, because it is nothing; It is not real; It is not true."
