Danny

“In that moment, I was struck by how profoundly a scene was changed by the removal of a masculine element. It felt very sweet and fantastical: a world of lambs with no wolves. At the same time, it was oddly reminiscent of a rebel encampment on the eve of a raid.”
― Sandra Newman, The Men

“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

“The whore, in defending the pimp, finds her own worth in the light reflected from his gaudy baubles. The wife, in defending the husband, screams or stammers that her life is not a wasteland of mur­dered possibilities. The woman, in defending the ideologies of men who rise by climbing over her prone body in military formation, will not publicly mourn the loss of what those men have taken from her: she will not scream out as their heels dig into her flesh because to do so would mean the end of meaning itself; all the ideals that motivated her to deny herself would be indelibly stained with blood that she would have to acknowledge, at last, as her own. So the woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine, but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons, institutions, and values that demean her, degrade her, glorify her powerlessness, insist upon constraining and paralyzing the most honest expressions of her will and being. She becomes a lackey, serving those who ruthlessly and effectively aggress against her and her kind.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“The brilliance of objectification as a strategy of dominance is that it gets the woman to take the initiative in her own degradation (having less freedom is degrading). The woman herself takes one kind of responsibility absolutely and thus commits herself to her own continuing inferiority: she polices her own body; she internalizes the demands of the dominant class and, in order to be fucked, she constructs her life around meeting those demands. It is the best system of colonialization on earth: she takes on the burden, the responsibility, of her own submission, her own objectification.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse