The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the fellowship of predators.
Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.
I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.
Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.
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.
Women’s liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.
Women have accepted their own inferiority for so long that it is impossible for us to conceive of ourselves as potentially superior.
In my world, a woman does not ask for freedom. She takes it.
Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of woman hating.
Pornography is used in rape — to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act.
The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.
Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation.
Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.
Being a Jew has contributed to my struggle with displacedness, displacement, a sense of unreality some of the time.
Why, when women get together in groups, do they so often end up like morons?
In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man’s identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man’s worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus.
Change is the same for everyone yet different for everyone.
Virginity is an overrated virtue.
Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence.
The power men possess of deciding whether or not a child shall be born.
For hundreds of years men have been made the tools of their own oppression.
Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.
The most basic form of male sexual aggression is masturbation, which is a way of subsuming women into one’s self rather than recognizing them as separate human beings. Anything that can be done alone — without collaboration with women — is male; anything that can only be done with women belongs to women.
Feminism … is not only a commitment to women’s liberation; it is a commitment to freeing all oppressed people from domination.
Our strength is not in our arms; it is in our stories.
Every woman knows what I’m talking about when I mention the tug of wanting to be chosen for a particular kind of attention, the desperate instinct that tells us that it is possible to change everything with one persistent beguiling movement, a promise of willingness.
The media expresses the consciousness of our society and therefore has a powerful influence on the way people perceive the world and themselves.
Men have the power and will to commit rape, and generally, in the culture I discuss in this book, they have the will to rape any woman.
Liberal does not mean feminine, and feminist does not mean not feminine.
Being a Jew has contributed to my struggle with displacedness, displacement, a sense of unreality some of the time.
Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.
Women, for centuries not been supposed to know what men know about war, power, politics, violence, and authority. We’re supposed to know what they can’t know about sex, love, childcare, protection, and nurture.
When we impose judgments of any kind upon another, we create our own guillotines and guillotine ourselves.
When a man tells me he’s into S&M, I assume he’s either a naive closet liberal or a closet Nazi.
When a man tells me he’s into S&M, I assume he has issues with power and control and is probably not someone I want to be alone with.
Desire consumes you. It is a fire that can’t be put out without burning everything down.
Women themselves have bought into these stereotypical notions – this is what girls wear, this is the female look, this is how girls behave – so that they freeze themselves into these personalities.
Freedom begins in the mind. If you believe you are a slave, no one can free you.
If you believe in your own oppression, you might try to make others believe in it too.
Understanding that porn is not an equivalent to sexual freedom – it is a means of control and domination – is essential to dismantling it.
Women are not crazy. Women are not stupid. Women are not animals. Women are not lesser beings.
Asserting yourself is not inherently aggressive; it is a necessary act of self-preservation.
Patriarchy is a system of male dominance, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious symbols, in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.
To be identified as having been raped, as a survivor, is to be publicly identified as a victim.
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