Eden

“One thing should be clear, but apparently it is not: if this were indeed our nature, we would be living in paradise.

If pain, humiliation, and physical injury made us happy, we would be ecstatic.

If being sold on street corners were a good time, women would jam street corners the way men jam football matches.

If forced sex were what we craved, even we would be satisfied already.

If being dominated by men made us happy, we would smile all the time.

Women resist male domination because we do not like it.

Political women resist male domination through overt, rude, unmistakable rebellion. They are called unnatural, because they do not have a nature that delights in being debased.

Apolitical women resist male domination through a host of bitter subversions, ranging from the famous headache to the clinical depression epidemic among women to suicide to prescription-drug tranquilization to taking it out on the children; sometimes a battered wife kills her husband. Apolitical women are also called unnatural, the charge hurled at them as nasty or sullen or embittered individuals, since that is how they fight back. They too are not made happy by being hurt or dominated.

In fact, a natural woman is hard to find. We are domesticated, tamed, made compliant on the surface, through male force, not through nature. We sometimes do what men say we are, either because we believe them or because we hope to placate them. We sometimes try to become what men say we should be, because men have power over our lives.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

“I also had nightmares, somehow all the feelings I didnt feel when each thing had actually happened to me I did feel when I slept. I hated going to sleep because then I had to feel. I felt him hit me, and
I felt what it felt like, and christ it felt awful. I would sleep, some times with my eyes open, and I would feel it all over, and most of it for the first time. I didnt understand how I had not felt it when it was happening, but I hadnt, I had felt something else. I had felt almost nothing, which was something else, when I was sleeping each thing would happen to me as it had happened and I would feel what I had not felt.”
― Andrea Dworkin, The New Woman's Broken Heart: Short Stories

“I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I am free.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

“I`m tired, very weary, and I cry for my sisters. Tears get the nothing, of course. One needs a generation of warriors who can`t be tired out or bought off. Each woman needs to take what she endures and turn it into action. With every tear, accompanying it, one needs a knife to rip a predator apart; with every wave of fatiguem one needs another platoon of strong, tough women coming up over the horizon to take more land, to make it safe for women. I`m willing to count the inches. The pimps and rapists need to be dispossessed, forced into a mangy exile; the women and children - the world`s true orphans - need to be empowered, cosseted with respect and dignity”
― Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant