Andrea Dworkin

In a woman-hating culture, it is particularly difficult to make credible the claim that a crime committed against a woman must matter. The belief that women exist to be used by men is so old, so deep set, so widely accepted, so commonplace in its everyday application, that it is rarely challenged, even by those who pride themselves on and are recognized for their intellectual acumen and ethical grace.

Violence against prostitutes, regardless of its ferocity, is nothing less than an acceptable fact of life.

Freedom, that hallowed word, is valued only when used in reference to male desire. For women, freedom means only that men are free to use them.

even Sade’s biographers seem to recognize that their hero did do something very mean indeed— unless Rose Keller was a whore or a liar, in which case Sade's use of her was of no consequence. So they set out to prove that she was both, a task made easy not by the truth (she was neither) but by the power of the biographers to define their own terms within the accepted bounds of a woman-hating society.

both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service. Intellectuals, especially, call what they themselves produce or like “erotica, ” which means simply that a very bright person made or likes whatever it is.

Finally, this is not a liberal book about how pornography hurts all of us. As militant feminist Christabel Pankhurst wrote concerning the trade in women in 1913: “Men have a simple remedy for this state of things. They can alter their way of life.”

For freedom is always relative to power, and the kind of freedom which at any moment it is most urgent to affirm depends on the nature of the power which is prevalent and established.
R. H. Tawney, Equality

The second tenet of male supremacy is that men are physically stronger than women and, for that reason, have dominion over them. Physical strength in women that is not directly harnessed to “women’s work” becomes an abomination, and its use against men, that is, as power, is anathema, forbidden, horribly punished. The reality of male physical strength in an absolute sense is less important than the ideology that sacralizes and celebrates it. In part, the physical strength of men over women is realized because men keep women physically weak.

Even women who are physically strong must pretend to be weak to underline not only their femininity but also their upwardly mobile aesthetic and economic aspirations. Physical incapacity is a form of feminine beauty and a symbol of male wealth: he is rich enough to keep her unable to labor, useless, ornamental. Women are also often mutilated, physically or by fashion and custom, so that whatever physical strength they may have is meaningless.

Third, power is the capacity to terrorize, to use self and strength to inculcate fear, fear in a whole class of persons of a whole class of persons. The acts of terror run the gamut from rape to battery to sexual abuse of children to war to murder to maiming to torture to enslaving to kidnapping to verbal assault to cultural assault to threats of death to threats of harm backed up by the ability and sanction to deliver.