[image is copyrighted 2006, by the Estate of Andrea Dworkin, and was found here. I hope John Stoltenberg doesn't mind me using it here, where Andrea's speeches have been gathered by Nikki Craft. Thank you, Nikki.]All quotes are by Andrea Dworkin, civil and human rights activist, writer, speaker, and one of the most wonderful, warm, caring, decent, ethical human beings I've ever had the pleasure to know.
• 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."
• Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.
• Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.
• Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.
• 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 is used in rape - to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act. [Andrea testimony before the New York Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in 1986]
• 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.
• Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.
(source: here)
END OF POST.
hey julian
ReplyDeletethanks for these quotes. really good stuff.
i'm reading 'pornography' by Dworkin at the moment and it's frequently been quite devastating. i can't remember the last book i read where every single word was as necessary, as precise and as effective as the words in this book are. great writing.
as a middle class white male, it's been a revealing and confrontational read for me, which i am grateful for.
not sure if you're familiar with the work of Carol J. Adams who links pornography/oppression of women with similar oppression of non-human animals (particularly female animals), specifically in her books 'the sexual politics of meat' and 'the pornography of meat', among others. worth a look, imho.
her website: http://www.caroljadams.com/
'the sexual politics of meat' on amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/y8e4map
anyway, thanks heaps for your blog, it is truly wonderful that voices like yours exist.
A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
ReplyDeleteAndrea Dworkin
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.
Andrea Dworkin
Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.
Andrea Dworkin
"I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig." -- Andrea Dworkin
"Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies." -- Andrea Dworkin
i could go on... but i have the feeling that it´s invane since idolize her twisted views...
Hey Max, you MRAsshole,
ReplyDeleteSo how about this, smart man. You tell me which book each of those quotes is from--are they from fiction or non-fiction? If non-fiction, in what chapters, in what context, and also please tell me what does each of those quotes mean. What is she saying, in each of those quotes. How do you "interpret" them? Or are you some sort of fundamentalist MRAsshole, who thinks YOUR interpretation of them is also a white male God's?
Thanks. When you do that I'll know you have a brain, and perhaps the signs of a heart as well.
I look forward to your thorough response to my questions HERE, and just answer those and spare me any of your antifeminist/anti-woman/"poor men" bullshit, ok?
But I'll bet you can't even accurately answer my questions. I could be wrong. Prove me wrong.
Hello bk!
ReplyDeleteYes, Dworkin's book on pornography is amazing. And it's not even my favorite Dworkin book. Please write in and let us know what you're learning from it, ok? What is she saying that really resonates with you, that opens you to things you weren't aware of consciously prior to reading that book?
I hope you will do that here. And thanks for the link to Carol J. Adams work. I know of her work.
The link between how women are treated and how non-human animals are treated goes back a ways, in recent decades. See, for example, Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature.
Also to bk,
ReplyDeleteThe connection is most evident, in my view, in how white men have treated women of color in this country (and elsewhere). From mass slaughter to forced sterilisation, the list is endless that shows that white men, historically, could not conceive that women of color are human. And therefore could not really come to terms with their (white men's) own inhumanity. I'd prefer it if white men got to their own humanity through acknowledging and respecting women's.
max's Dworkin quotes do sound a bit suspect to me. So he has to come up with the page numbers, the sources-- actual quotes from her books, articles and where to find them. Dworkin always struck me as a non-violent highly intellectual and compassionate woman. She would stop everything she was doing if some woman needed to talk to her about the attrocites no one wants to listen to. That part of her always made a big impression on me.
ReplyDeleteHer brilliant mind is well over the heads of 99.999% of the men out there, but women instantly get what she has to say. Most women instantly get the evil of porn, men just want women to exploit sexually any way they can. Men are inherently animals, with no control or discipline, they have no compassion or even the ability to understand the meaning of that word. Whether they be MRAs or christian fundamentalist men, it's always Me God, you inferior, I get to dictate everything. That is the essense of the male soul, but I think that since Aquinas did not believe women have souls, we can reverse this and say that inwardly he was projecting onto women his own souless status.
Remember the key tenant of white male supremacy... white men are entitled to sex, are entitled to use women's bodies, and entitled to controlling women. Limit their sex, take away their porn, well, them's fighting words. They need their first amendment to protect their rights to use and abuse women, and that's the long and short of it.
Hi v,
ReplyDeleteCould you send me a comment marked "DO NOT POST" that includes your email address.
I can fill you in some on the AD quotes Max put in his comment.
I assure you, of course, that I won't publish you email address ANYWHERE, and will reply to you by email.
Thanks!