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Let’s not have the porn = ‘freedom of speech’ argument this one time okay?
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 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.When your rape is entertainment, your worthlessness is absolute. You have reached the nadir of social worthlessness. The civil impact of pornography on women is staggering. It keeps us socially silent, it keeps us socially compliant, it keeps us afraid in neighborhoods; and it creates a vast hopelessness for women, a vast despair. One lives inside a nightmare of sexual abuse that is both actual and potential, and you have the great joy of knowing that your nightmare is someone else’s freedom and someone else’s fun.”
— Andrea Dworkin
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.
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Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
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“Women, under separate masters, are the most divided of oppressed groups. And men prefer a willing slave to a forced slave, hence the necessity to enslave the mind. When one considers the natural attraction between the sexes, the dependence of the woman on the husband, her achievement of identity only through him ‘it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar feminine education and formation of character’. Resignation of will and meekness become part of sexual attractiveness. What is now called the nature of women is eminently an artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others…no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relations with their masters.”—Charnie Guettell, from Marxism & Feminism (1974)
A couple of feminist quote of the day just for my AVFM friends who might be lurking around in the shadows waiting to explain how oppressed being (usually) white and male is.
“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 – Intercourse
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“Like revolutionaries working to change the lot of colonized people globally, it is necessary for feminist activists to stress that the ability to see and describe one’s own reality is a significant step in the process of self-recovery, but it only a beginning. When women internalized the idea that describing their own woe was synonymous with developing a critical political consciousness, the progress of feminist movement was stalled. Starting form such incomplete perspectives, it is not surprising that theories and strategies were developed that were collectively inadequate and misguided. To correct this inadequacy past analysis we must now encourage women to develop a keen, comprehensive understand of women’s political reality. Broad perspectives can only emerge as we examine both the personal that is political, the politics of society as a whole, and global revolutionary politics. […] By repudiating the popular notion that the focus of the feminist movement should be social equality of the sexes and by emphasizing eradication of the cultural basis of group oppression, our own analysis would require an exploration of all aspects of women’s political reality. This would mean that race and class oppression would be recognized as feminist issues with as much relevance as sexism.”
“When we point out that there is a rape every three minutes, that a woman is beaten every eighteen seconds in this country, that’s very bad for women because it makes them feel victimized. And we’re not supposed to be bad and make women feel bad. This is the ultimate mind fuck. It takes away all the ground that we can stand on to say: “We have a political problem. We are going to find a political solution. And we are going to have to change the society that we live in to find it.” If you take a bunch of people and suddenly you find out that one is being beaten every eighteen seconds, that one is being raped every three minutes, that ten billion dollars a year now is being spent on watching them being raped for fun, watching them being exploited and objectified and violated for fun, and you don’t feel a little bit put upon, I mean a little bit frazzled around the edges by that, it seems to me that one would be not only a victim but half dead, totally numb, and a true fool.”
— Andrea Dworkin – Woman Hating, Right and Left
The word whore is incomprehensible unless one is immersed in the lexicon of male domination. Men have created the group, the type, the concept, the epithet, the insult, the industry, the trade, the commodity, the reality of woman as whore.
Another quote of the day? You betcha. Our culture is toxically pornsick and Andrea Dworkin realized that in 1979. 1979!! So talk about prescience –
Contemporary pornography strictly and literally conforms to the word’s root meaning: the graphic depiction of vile whores, or, in other language, sluts, cows (as in sexual cattle, sexual chattel), cunts.
The word has not changed its meaning and the genre is not misnamed. The only change in the meaning of the word is with respect to its second part, graphos: now there are cameras – there is still photography, film and video. The method of graphic depiction have increased in number and in kind: the content is the same; the meaning is the same; the purpose is the same; the status of the women depicted is the same; the sexuality of the women depicted is the same; the value of the women is the same.
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The word pornography does not have any other meaning that the one cited here, the graphic depiction of the lowest whores. Whores exist to serve men sexually. Whores only exist within a framework of male sexual domination. Indeed, outside that framework, the notion of whores would be absurd and the usage of women as whores would be impossible.
Woman as whore exists within the objective and real system of male sexual domination. The pornography itself is objective and real and central to the male sexual system. The valuation of women’s sexuality in pornography is objective and real because women are so regarded and valued. The force depicted in pornography is objective and real because force is so used against women. The debasing of women depicted in pornography and intrinsic to it is objective and real in that women are also debased. The uses of women depicted in pornography are objective and real because women are so used.[…]
The definition of women articulated systematically and consistently in pornography is objective and real in that real women exist within and must live with constant reference to the boundaries of this definition. The fact that pornography is widely believed to be “sexual representations” or “depictions of sex” emphasizes only that the valuation of women as low whores is widespread and that the sexuality of women is perceived as low and whorish in and of itself. The fact that pornography is widely believed to be “depictions of the erotic” means only that debasing of women is held to be the real pleasure of sex. As Kate Millett wrote, women’s sexuality is reduced to the one essential: “cunt… our essence, our offense”.
The idea that pornography is “dirty” originates in the conviction that the sexuality of women is dirty and is actually portrayed in pornography; that women’s bodies (especially women’s genitals) are dirty and lewd in themselves. Pornography does not, as some claim, refute the idea that female sexuality is dirty: instead, pornography embodies and exploits this idea; pornography sells and promotes it.
-Andrea Dworkin:Pornography – Men Possessing Women. pp. 200-201
“The most terrible thing about pornography is that it tells male truth. The most insidious thing about pornography is that it tells
male truth as if it were universal truth. Those depictions of women in chains being tortured are supposed to represent our deepest erotic aspirations. And some of us believe it, don’t we? The most important thing about pornography is that the values in it are the common values of men. This is the crucial fact that both the male Right and the male Left, in their differing but mutually reinforcing ways, want to keep hidden from women. The male Right wants to hide the pornography, and the male Left wants to hide its meaning. Both want access to pornography so that men can be encouraged and energized by it. The Right wants secret access; the Left wants public access.”
— Andrea Dworkin, Pornography and Grief
“With a disgust common to all feminists who have tried to be participants in the so-called humanism of men, only to discover through bitter experience that the culture of males does not allow honest female participation, Virginia Woolf wrote: “I detest the masculine point of view, I am bored by his heroism, virtue and honour. I think best that these men can do is not to talk about themselves anymore”. Men have claimed the human point of view, they author it, they own it. Men are humanists, humans, humanism. Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers, these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it Her. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination. Men battle each other and Her; women battle to be let in to the category “human” in imagination and reality. Men battle to keep the category “human” narrow, circumscribed by their own values and activities; women battle to change the meaning that men have given the word, to transform its meaning by suffusing it with female experience.”
— Andrea Dworkin, Pornography, Men Possessing Women
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