Additional Information on Andrea Dworkin

Additional Information on Andrea Dworkin

Overview


● Dworkin many times articulated her deep contempt for men. Some examples:

  • “… [W]omen and men are distinct species or races … men are biologically inferior to women; male violence is a biological inevitability; to eliminate it, one must eliminate the species/race itself … in eliminating the biologically inferior species/race Man, the new Ubermensch Womon will have the earthly dominion that is her true biological destiny.” (Letters From a War Zone)
  • “Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.” (Letters From a War Zone)
  • “Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.” (Letters From a War Zone)
  • “Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake — it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it.” (Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics)
  • “As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic nonidentity 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.” (Our Blood: Prophecies And Discourses On Sexual Politics)
  • “The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations — for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right — these institutions are real and they must be destroyed. If they are not, we will be consigned as women to perpetual inferiority and subjugation.” (Our Blood: Prophecies And Discourses On Sexual Politics)
  • “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.” (Our Blood: Prophecies And Discourses On Sexual Politics)
  • “… [T]he prisons for women are our homes. We live under martial law. We live in places in which a rape culture exists…. Men have to be sent to prison, to live in a culture that is as rapist as the normal home in North America. We live under what amounts to a military curfew. Enforced by rapists.… In the United States, violence against women is a major pastime. It is a sport. It is an amusement. It is a mainstream cultural entertainment…. It saturates the society.” (First published in Canadian Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme, Vol. 12, No. 1, Fall 1991)
  • “The annihilation of a woman’s personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.” (Letters From a War Zone)
  • “Rape is the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating. Rape is the primary emblem of romantic love. Rape is the means by which a woman is initiated into her womanhood as it is defined by men.” (Letters From a War Zone)
  • “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.” (Ice and Fire)
  • “Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers.” (Pornography: Men Possessing Women)
  • “Like prostitution, marriage is an institution that is extremely oppressive and dangerous for women.” (Letters From a War Zone)
  • “[M]en are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into murder and rape.” (Letters From a War Zone)

● In addition to Woman Hating, Dworkin also authored such books as: Our Blood: Prophesies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1976); The New Woman’s Broken Heart (1980); Pornography — Men Possessing Women (1981); Right-Wing Women (1983); Ice and Fire (1987); Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (1988); Intercourse (1988); Letters from a War Zone (1989); The Politics of Domesticated Females (1991); Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation (2000); and Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002).

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