emily

“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

“For some, measuring porn’s real-world effects boils down to one extreme and ultimately misleading question: “Does it lead to rape?” What is overlooked here is the more subtle question of how porn shapes the culture and the men who use it. No anti-porn feminist I know has suggested that there is one image, or even a few, that could lead a nonrapist to rape; the argument, rather, is that taken together, pornographic images create a world that is at best inhospitable to women, and at worst dangerous to their physical and emotional well-being. In an unfair and inaccurate article that is emblematic of how anti-porn feminist work is misrepresented, Daniel Bernardi claims that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon believed that “watching pornography leads men to rape women.”³ Neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon, pioneers in developing a radical feminist critique of pornography, saw porn in such simplistic terms. Rather, both argued that porn has a complicated and multilayered effect on male sexuality, and that rape, rather than simply being caused by porn, is a cultural practice that has been woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society. Pornography, they argued, is one important agent of such a society since it so perfectly encodes woman-hating ideology, but to see it as simplistically and unquestionably leading to rape is to ignore how porn operates within the wider context of a society that is brimming with sexist imagery and ideology.”
― Gail Dines, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality

“I am trapped inside a part of me I hate. A hard, masculine part of myself that has surfaced to fight, after small memories and scars come out of me with a suddenness that is sobering as well as horrifying-and I fight to save the Laura I wish I could be again. The one everyone thinks is still around. Me in a sundress, hair in the wind, and a smile engraved into my cheeks by the sharp fear that a man may visit me at any moment this evening and try to kill me.”
― Jennifer Lynch, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer

“I'm so afraid of death.
I'm so afraid that no one will believe me until after I have taken the seat that I fear has been saved for me in the darkness. Please don't hate me.”
― Jennifer Lynch, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer