Nocturn

“If sex oppression is real, absolute, unchanging, inevitable, then the views of right-wing women are more logical than not. Marriage is supposed to protect them from rape; being kept at home is supposed to protect them from the caste-like economic exploitation of the marketplace; reproduction gives them what value and respect they have and so they must increase the value of reproduction even if it means increasing their own vulnerability to reproductive exploitation (especially forced pregnancy); religious marriage—traditional, correct, law-abiding marriage—is supposed to protect against battery, since the wife is supposed to be cherished and respected. The flaws in the logic are simple: the home is the most dangerous place for a woman to be, the place she is most likely to be murdered, raped, beaten, certainly the place where she is robbed of the value of her labor. What right-wing women do to survive the sex-class system does not mean that they will survive it: if they get killed, it will most likely be at the hands of their husbands; if they get raped, the rapists will most likely be their husbands or men who are friends or acquaintances; if they get beaten, the batterer will most likely be their husbands—perhaps 25 percent of those who are beaten will be beaten during pregnancy; if they do not have any money of their own, they are more vulnerable to abuse from their husbands, less able to escape, less able to protect their children from incestuous assault; if abortion becomes illegal, they will still have abortions and they are likely to die or be maimed in great numbers; if they get addicted to drugs it most likely be to prescription drugs prescribed by the family doctor to keep the family intact; if they get poor—through being abandoned by their husbands or through old age—they are likely to be discarded, their usefulness being over. And right-wing women are still pornography just like other women whom they despise; and what they do—just like other women—is barter. They too live inside the wall of prostitution no matter how they see themselves.”
― 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

“Long before he had touched a woman, this depravity, this exploitation, was rooted in his mind, a form of torment. He was tormented by “woman, not some particular woman but woman as something to be desired, woman, every woman, woman’s nudity” . . . This impersonal something was at the heart of his desire: objectlike, not human and individual; not someone in particular but a body...something to have.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

“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