Being female in this world is having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One 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.
Writers need to be damned hard to kill. So do women, of course. I have never believed in suicide, the female poet’s alternative to standing her ground and facing down the power of men. I don’t like it that Plath and Sexton wrote strong and beautiful poems capturing the horror and meanness of male dominance but would not risk losing socially conventional femininity by sticking around to fight it out in the realm of politics, including the politics of culture. I always wanted to live. I fought hard to live. This means I did something new. I have been bearing the unbearable, and facing men down, for a long time now.
—-andrea dworkin, life and death
Oppression meant the U. S. in Vietnam, or apartheid in South Africa, or legal segregation in the U. S. Even though I had been tortured and was fighting for my life, I could not see women, or myself as a woman, as having political significance. I did know that the battery was not my fault. I had been told by everyone I asked for help the many times I tried to escape— strangers and friends— that he would not be hitting me if I didn’t like it or want it. I rejected this outright. Even back then, the experience of being battered was recognizably impersonal to me. Maybe I was the only person in the world this had ever happened to, but I knew it had nothing to do with me as an individual. It just never occurred to me that I was being hit because I was a woman.
Andrea Dworkin, from Life and Death
The feminist is the woman who is there not because she is his woman, but because she is the sister of the woman he is being a weapon against. Feminism exists so that no woman ever has to face her oppressor in a vacuum, alone. It exists to break down the privacy in which men rape, beat, and kill women.
Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death
I would like to see us stop trying to be so damn civil to the people who
are hurting us. I would like for us to stop thinking we need to prove anything to them. They need to prove to us that they can respect our lives enough to make social policy that stops battery. And as long as battery is going on, the woman who is being battered is also being raped. That is the truth from my point of view, and I would like to see us not gloss it over, because every time we do, we tell a lie about what is happening to the woman. And we also make stronger the unspoken assumptions that the sex may be fine, but the battery is something different. The battery is not something different. Possession is the way they’re related.
Little Bristling Soul 