Ergo

“One may discover integrity in the companionship of others, but one does not ever discover integrity by bowing to the demands of peer pressure. The heavier the pressure is toward conformity— no matter how lofty the proposed final goal— the more one must be suspicious of it and antagonistic to it. History has one consistent lesson in it: one by one, people give up what they know to be right and true for the sake of something loftier that they do not quite understand but should want in order to be good; soon, people are the tools of despots and atrocities are committed on a grand scale. And then, it is too late. There is no going back.

Women are especially given to giving up what we know and feel to be right and true for the sake of others or for the sake of something more important than ourselves. This is because the condition in which women live is a colonized condition. Women are colonized by men, in body, in mind. Defined everywhere as evil when we act in our own self-interest, we strive to be good by renouncing self-interest altogether.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone

“No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing it’s realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself. [...] The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“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