Andrea Dworkin Feminist Quotations

In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.

I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind.

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.

Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized, made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire.

One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available.

...In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.

Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role.

Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.

Feminist art... will take the great human themes – love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself – and render them fully human.

On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.

To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is.

The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.

Men use the night to erase us.

Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.