Life and Death Quotes

“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, Life and Death

“It was the pornographers, not feminists, who punished women in the public square, as puritans had, for being sexual.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

“One thing should be clear, but apparently it is not: if this were indeed our nature, we would be living in paradise.

If pain, humiliation, and physical injury made us happy, we would be ecstatic.

If being sold on street corners were a good time, women would jam street corners the way men jam football matches.

If forced sex were what we craved, even we would be satisfied already.

If being dominated by men made us happy, we would smile all the time.

Women resist male domination because we do not like it.

Political women resist male domination through overt, rude, unmistakable rebellion. They are called unnatural, because they do not have a nature that delights in being debased.

Apolitical women resist male domination through a host of bitter subversions, ranging from the famous headache to the clinical depression epidemic among women to suicide to prescription-drug tranquilization to taking it out on the children; sometimes a battered wife kills her husband. Apolitical women are also called unnatural, the charge hurled at them as nasty or sullen or embittered individuals, since that is how they fight back. They too are not made happy by being hurt or dominated.

In fact, a natural woman is hard to find. We are domesticated, tamed, made compliant on the surface, through male force, not through nature. We sometimes do what men say we are, either because we believe them or because we hope to placate them. We sometimes try to become what men say we should be, because men have power over our lives.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

“The only fiction in pornography is the smile on the woman's face.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

“The questions now really are: why is pornography credible in our society? how can anyone believe it? And then: how subhuman would women have to be for the pornography to be true? To the men who use the pornography, how subhuman are women?”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

“I want to bring us back to basics. Prostitution: what is it? It is the use of a woman's body for sex by men, he pays money, he does what he wants. The minute you move away from what it really is, you move away from prostitution into the world of ideas. You will feel better; you will have a better time; it is more fun; there is plenty to discuss, but you will be discussing ideas, not prostitution. Prostitution is not an idea. It is the mouth, the vagina, the rectum, penetrated usually by a penis, sometimes hands, sometimes objects, by one man and then another and then another and then another and then another. That's what it is.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

“The appeals judge said that pornography did all the harm we claimed--it promoted insult and injury, rape and assault, even caused women to have lower wages--and that these effects proved its power as speech; therefore, it had to be protected.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

“My fiction is not autobiography. I am not an exhibitionist. I do not show myself. I am not asking for forgiveness. I do not want to confess. But I have used everything I know—my life—to show what I believe must be shown so that it can be faced. The imperative at the heart of my writing—what must be done—comes directly from my life. But I do not show my life directly, in full view; nor even look at it while others watch.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

“I'd like to take what I know and just hand it over. But there is always a problem for a woman: being believed. How can I think I know something? How can I think that what I know might matter? Why would I think that anything I think might make a difference to anyone, anywhere?”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death