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.

Andrea Dworkin

Categorized in : Art Men Hero

Any man will follow any feminine looking thing down any dark alley; I've always wanted to see a man beaten to a shit bloody pulp with a high-heeled shoe stuffed up his mouth, sort of the pig with the apple; it would be good to put him on a serving plate but you'd need good silver.

Andrea Dworkin

high-heels hate men

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.

Andrea Dworkin

hate expression inspiring

Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

Andrea Dworkin

daughter mother children

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

Andrea Dworkin

radical-feminism feminist expression

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.

Andrea Dworkin

unique sleep children

Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power

Andrea Dworkin

feminism males bravery

In her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to become, to act, to change self and society. And each year she is stronger and there are more of her.

Andrea Dworkin

will-to-survive warrior heart

I never met a man who wasn't stupider than me.

Andrea Dworkin

mets men

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.

Andrea Dworkin

learning struggle inspiring

Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.

Andrea Dworkin

sadism males hate

I don’t believe rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.

Andrea Dworkin

knives believe country

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

Andrea Dworkin

gossip women ideas

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

manhood femininity knows

If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.

Andrea Dworkin

coward class people

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

Andrea Dworkin

dynamics uprising reality

Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.

Andrea Dworkin

foundation abuse peace

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic non-identity in women--that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know them so that this division of human flesh into two camps--one an armed camp and the other a concentration camp--is no longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.

Andrea Dworkin

real men two

Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.

Andrea Dworkin

discrimination political class

Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.

Andrea Dworkin

essentials men sex

Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.

Andrea Dworkin

able ignorance self