“Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice...
Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise us?”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or
circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise
perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial
inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but
(frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view”
that some people with soft skins find “ offensive. ” It is the deep
and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth
and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from
even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority
puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by
insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates
a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments—
scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never
be made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what is
normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt
her—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as a
consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a
piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently
loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences
and perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferior
in the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologically
pejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she is
needy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in and
of itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Her
personal experiences or perceptions are never credited as having
a hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never loved
enough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never loved
enough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible to
feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior.
” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely
learns them all, even in one’s native language.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation. Woman have been chattels to man as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of woman. He owns you - he fucks you. The fucking conveys the quality of ownership - he owns you inside out.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are “sex-negative” without qualification or examination, perhaps because so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid, and without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“With the possible exception of the Shakers, it is difficult to think of an American movement that has failed more spectacularly than antipornography feminism.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
“The spread of religious fundamentalism throughout the world right now is men retrenching to undo the civil and social advances of women; to reestablish male power as a fundamental reality by reestablishing gender as an absolute. This requires rigorous tightening of restraints on male sexual behavior as well as intensifying civil and sexual controls on women.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Intercourse
Andrea Dworkin
Born place: in Camden, New Jersey, The United States
Born date September 26, 1946
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“And tell me, who will be more successful in life? The kid who knows all the chemical formulae or the one who knows teamwork, passion, discipline and focus?”
― Chetan Bhagat, quote from The 3 Mistakes of My Life
“Everyone knows that the teenage years are a time of
profound emotion. The moody, exuberant, passionate,
lethargic teen is a figure that has a special place in the hall of fame of clichés—and for good reason. It’s all true. When we ourselves are teenagers, we are living life as it comes. There is no point in reflection. We are so inexperienced, there is very little to reflect on. If we fail a big test, we just move on. We win an award and we smile and say thank you. We fall in love and it’s a thrill. We get our hearts broken and we suffer.And we feel all of these highs and lows in our absolute core; it feels as if it’s never happened to anyone else because it’s never happened to us before. Only later can we look back in the comfort that perspective brings.”
― Rob Lowe, quote from Stories I Only Tell My Friends
“Simple, informal UML diagrams can anchor a discussion.”
― quote from Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
“The ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy-tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle, and conclude sadly like a love story ending in separation.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The White Castle
“The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about ‘what is true for me’ is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, quote from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
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