Nocturn

“Antifeminism breaks down into contempt for particular kinds of women—as men envision the kinds of women there are. There is a spectrum of insult. Lesbians, intellectuals, and uppity women are hated for their resumption, their arrogance, their masculine ambition. Prudes, spinsters, and celibates may not
want to be like men but they seem able to live without them; so they are treated with contempt and disdain. Sluts, “nymphos, ” and tarts are hated because they are cheap, not expensive, and because they are their sex raw or sex itself.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“Women are consistently and systematically denied the respect creative intelligence requires to be sustained: painfully denied it, cruelly denied it, sadistically denied it.
Women are not supposed to have creative intelligence, but when
they do they are supposed to renounce it. If they want the love of
men, without which they are not really women, they had better
not hold on to an intelligence that searches and that is action in the
world; thought that has consequences is inimical to fettered femininity.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing 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

“The survivor who was raped at knifepoint feels guilty she has taken up the space of a survivor who was raped at gunpoint.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture