Andrea Dworkin
Any man who has enough money to spend degrading a woman's life in prostitution has too much money. He does not need what he's got in his pocket. But there is a woman who does.
...approximately one out of three women in the United States is in some way sexually abused before she becomes an adult.
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.
Depicting women as whores and the sexuality of women as sluttish is what pornography does. Its job in the politically coercive and cruel system of male supremacy is to justify and perpetuate the rape and prostitution from which is springs.
Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.
The heavier the pressure 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.
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.
Pornography can only develop in a society that is viciously male-supremacist, one in which rape and prostitution are not only well-established but systematically practiced and iseologically endorsed. 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.
I live in a country where if you film any act of humiliation or torture, and if the victim is a woman, the film is both entertainment and it is protected free speech. Now that tells me something about what it means to be a woman citizen in this country, and the meaning of being second class.
Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.
We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent - see, he's jealous, he cares - a woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure; how suicidal she's prepared to be.
We need to end rape. We need to end incest. We need to end battery. We need to end prostitution and we need to end pornography. That means that we need to refuse to accept that these are natural phenomena that just happen because some guy is having a bad day.
When you see pornography, you see male supremacy; and if you look around you and you see male supremacy, you had better believe that you're seeing pornography even if you don't know where it is in the room.
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.
Today's
Educational
Pleasure:
Books and Gifts 
