Pornography Quotes

“Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Becoming a man requires that the boys learn to be indifferent to the fate of women. Indifference requires that the boy learn experience women as objects. The poet, the mystic, the prophet, the so-called sensitive man of any stripe, will still hear the wind whisper and the trees cry. But to him, women will be mute. He will have learned to be deaf to the sounds, sighs, whispers, screams of women in order to ally himself with other men in the hope that they will not treat him as child, that is, as one who belongs with the women.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“The object, the woman, goes out into the world formed as men have formed her to be used as men wish to use her. She is then a provocation. The object provokes its use. It provokes its use because of its form, determined by the one who is provoked. The carpenter makes a chair, sits on it, then blames the chair because he is not standing. When the object complains about the use to which she is put, she is told, simply and firmly, not to provoke.”
― 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

“The new pornography is left-wing; and the new
pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing it’s realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself. [...] The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“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

“The new pornography industry is held, by leftist males, to be inherently radical. Sex is claimed by the Left as a leftist phenomenon; the trade in women is most of sex. The politics of liberation are claimed as indigenous to the Left by the Left; central to the politics of liberation is the mass-marketing of material that depicts women being used as whores.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Des Pres says it is easier to kill if “the victim exhibits self disgust; if he cannot lift his eyes for humiliation, or if lifted they show only emptiness... ” There is some pornography in which women are that abject, that easy to kill, that close to being dead already.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Woman is not born; she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“The symbols of terror are commonplace and utterly familiar: the gun, the knife, the bomb, the fist, and so on. Even more significant is the hidden symbol of terror, the penis.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“The women trapped in the pictures continue to be perceived as the free speech of the pimps who exploit them.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“One cannot turn one's back on the women or on the burden of memory they carry. If one values women as human beings, one will not turn one's back on the women who are being hurt today and the women who will be hurt tomorrow.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“And what is the value of this sexual object to men, since it is they who form her, use her, and give her what value she has? The pioneering male masochist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who spent most of his life bullying bewildered women into wearing furs and halfheartedly whipping him, candidly wrote in his diary that “my cruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which I terrorise myself.” The nature of the act does not change the nature of the act: the female is the instrument; the male is the center of sensibility and power. Roland Barthes, with himself as the lover, essentially endorses the same view of the object’s value and purpose: “Enough that, in a flash, I should see the other in the guise of an inert object, like a kind of stuffed doll, for me to shift my desire from this annulled object to my desire itself; it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“In Sade, the authentic equation is revealed: the power of the pornographer is the power of the rapist/batterer is the power of the man.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“If she wants him sexually he names her slut; if she does not want him he rapes her and says she does; if she would rather study or paint he names her repressed and brags he can cure her pathological interests with the apocryphal “good fuck.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Would we have to be so grandiose, so arrogant, so unfeminine, as to believe that the streets we walk on, the homes we live in, the beds we sleep in, are ours— belong to us— really belong to us: we decide what is right and what is wrong and if something hurts us, it stops. It is, of course, gauche to be too sincere about these things, and it is downright ridiculous to be serious. Intelligent people are well mannered and moderate, even in pursuing freedom. Smart women whisper and say please.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Man-the-Aggressor is at the apex of the evolutionary struggle, king of the earth because he is the most aggressive, the cruelest.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“For those who remain devout, God endowed man with what, by any standard, must be considered a universally bad disposition, fortunately put to good use in subduing women.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“...οι άντρες της χώρας έχουν ανάγκη το Hustler. Αισθάνονται κατώτεροι και είναι πράγματι. Οι γυναίκες είναι φύσει ανώτερες: αποτελούν τη μόνη μας ελπίδα. ...Ειναι σωστό πως δεν ευθύνονται οι ίδες για τον φόβο που προκαλούν στους άνδρες. Γιατί νομίζεις υπάρχει τόση αμφισεξουαλικότητα στα πανεπιστήμια; Γιατί νομίζεις οι άντρες κακοποιούν παιδιά; Διότι φοβούνται να δημιουργήσουν σχέσεις με απελευθερωμένες γυναίκες.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women