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Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin Quotes

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Famous Andrea Dworkin Quotes

“She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.”

WomenGeniusIntelligenceSexismDouble Standard
Author:Andrea Dworkin
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“Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing it’s realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself. [...] The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way.”

LanguageWomenFeminismSexismMisogyny
Book:Pornography: men possessing women
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“One may discover integrity in the companionship of others, but one does not ever discover integrity by bowing to the demands of peer pressure. The heavier the pressure is toward conformity— no matter how lofty the proposed final goal— the more one must be suspicious of it and antagonistic to it. History has one consistent lesson in it: one by one, people give up what they know to be right and true for the sake of something loftier that they do not quite understand but should want in order to be good; soon, people are the tools of despots and atrocities are committed on a grand scale. And then, it is too late. There is no going back. Women are especially given to giving up what we know and feel to be right and true for the sake of others or for the sake of something more important than ourselves. This is because the condition in which women live is a colonized condition. Women are colonized by men, in body, in mind. Defined everywhere as evil when we act in our own self-interest, we strive to be good by renouncing self-interest altogether.”

FeminismIntegrityConformitySexism
Book:Letters from a War Zone
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“She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obedient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her. She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary Christian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a perfect fidelity. The males rarely keep their part of the bargain as she understands it: protection from male violence against her person. But the militant conformist has given so much of herself […] that this betrayal is akin to nailing the coffin shut; the corpse is beyond caring.”

FeminismIdentityConformitySexismPatriarchyRight WingGender Based Violence
Book:Right-Wing Women
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“I lived in the present, slowly, except for tremors of terror, physical memories of the beatings, the blood. I took drugs. I took who I wanted, male or female. I was alert. I read books. I listened to music. I was near the water. I had no money. I watched everyone. I kept going. I would be alone and feel happy. It frightened me. Coitus is the punishment for the happiness of being alone. One can't face being happy. It is too extreme.”

SexismRadfem
Book:Ice and Fire
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