I think as feminists we have a way of looking at problems that other people appear not to understand. To name names, the right and theleft appear not to understand what it is that feminists are trying to do. Feminists are trying to destroy a sex hierarchy, a race hierarchy, aneconomic hierarchy, in which women are hurt, are disempowered, and in which society celebrates cruelty over us and refuses us the integrity of our own bodies and the dignity of our own lives.. So feminists look at the society we live in and try to understand how we are going to fight male power. And in order to try to figure outhow we're going to fight it, we have to figure out how it's organized, how it works. How does it survive? How does it work itself out? Howdoes it maintain itself as a system of power?.. So feminists come along, and we say: Well, we are going to understand how it is that these people do what they do. We are going toapproach the problem politically. That means that we are going to try to isolate and describe systems of exploitation as they work on us, from our point of view as the people who are being hurt by them. It means that even though we're on the bottom and they're on the top, we are examining them for points of vulnerability. And as we find those points of vulnerability–and you might locate them anatomically, as well as any other way–we are going to move whatever muscles we have, from whatever positions we are in, and we are going to get that bastard in his collective manifestation off of us. And that means we are politically organizing a resistance to male supremacy. Andrea Dworkin
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248) - Simone De Beauvoir
  2. Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you..it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our... - Adrienne Rich
  3. One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying. - Jeanne DArc
  4. I'm not going to limit myself just because people won't accept the fact that I can do something else. - Dolly Parton
  5. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought... - Virginia Woolf
More Quotes By Andrea Dworkin
  1. It is not in becoming a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man's world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her seperateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not...
  2. Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, sell cunt; racism is not...
  3. When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold...
  4. The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.
  5. Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.
Related Topics