Mark Durham

“The very power to make the photograph (to use the model, to tie her in that way) and the fact of the photograph (the fact that someone did use the model, did tie her in that way, that the photograph is published in a magazine and seen by millions of men who buy it specifically to see such photographs) evoke fear in the female observer unless she entirely dissociates herself from the photograph: refuses to believe or understand that real persons posed for it, refuses to see the bound person as a woman like herself.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity—the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he’s got her.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“Women are brought up to conform: all the rules of femininity—dress, behavior, attitude—essentially break the spirit. Women are trained to need men, not sexually but metaphysically. Women are brought up to be the void that needs filling, the absence that needs presence. Women are brought up to fear men and to know that they must please men and to understand that they cannot survive without the help of men richer and stronger than they can be themselves, on their own. Women are brought up to submit to intercourse—and here the strategy is shrewd—by being kept ignorant of it. The rules are taught, but the act is hidden. Girls are taught “love, ” not “fuck. ” Little girls look between their legs to see if “the hole” is there, get scared thinking about what “the hole” is for; no one tells them either. Women use their bodies to attract men; and most women, like the little girls they were, are astonished by the brutality of the fuck. The importance of this ignorance about intercourse cannot be overstated: it is as if no girl would grow up, or accept the hundred million lessons on how to be a girl, or want boys to like her, if she knew what she was for.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women