A Quote by Andrea Dworkin
Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.
Related Quotes
Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.
Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.
Pornography is not egalitarian and gender-free. It is predicated upon the inequality of women and is the propaganda that makes that inequality sexy. For women to find passive, objectified men sexy in large enough numbers to make a pornography industry based upon such images viable, would require the reconstruction of women's sexuality into a ruling-class sexuality. In an egalitarian society objectification would not exist and therefore the particular buzz provided by pornography, the excitement of eroticised dominance for the ruling class, would be unimaginable.
In short, pornography is not about sex. It's about an imbalance of male-female power that allows and even requires sex to be used as a form of aggression. ... But until we finally untangle sexuality and aggression, there will be more pornography and less erotica. There will be little murders in our beds - and very little love.
Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.
I think women don't see themselves and their sexuality as wholesome. And yet men's sexuality is everywhere. We experience it as a culture in stadiums, thousands of raging fans of male sexuality, screaming, "Kick the ball over the goal post. Get the ball in the hoop. Score a home run." Male sexuality lives in that prowess of the scoring, of conquering, of getting, of that beautiful male energy of domination, aggression, and the competition.
All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.
Should one be for or against pornography? I prefer to propose images of sexuality rather than to analyze the pros and the cons of pornography. Women are interested in erotics and sexuality, so I want to use my energy to propose images about that.
Things like pornography perpetuates this idea that women are just there as objects of male desire and are not complex people with their own sexuality and humanity.
The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gyn/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behaviour, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power… Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women.
Female sexuality is presented in our culture as a male fantasy, which doesn't include the reality of the abuse, the pleasure, the pain, the power, the complexity of women's sexuality.
Women are networkers, women hate hierarchy and especially entrepreneurs hate hierarchy because when they see hierarchy structured in they see rules and regulations are commonplace, and they want to tear it down.
Each country makes a different decision on adult pornography, but the good news is that even governments you hate, hate child pornography.
The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.
For example, I'm a great fan of pornography, but I don't see any reason not to restrict it so that people walking down the street who hate pornography don't have full color pictures outside of movie theaters. Let them be in a different district. I'm kidding about pornography, but you get the point.
Because pornography is a tool of Satan that exploits and distorts our God-given sexuality, women - especially Christian women - need to understand the increasing threat of online pornography.
Related Authors
bell hooks Quotes
American
Critic
Charles Lamb Quotes
English
Critic
Charlie Brooker Quotes
English
Critic
Chuck Klosterman Quotes
American
Critic
Elvis Mitchell Quotes
American
Critic
Henry Giroux Quotes
American
Critic
Henry Louis Gates Quotes
American
Critic
Howard Rheingold Quotes
American
Critic
Jerry Saltz Quotes
American
Critic
Kimberly Guilfoyle Quotes
American
Critic
Mike Gallagher Quotes
American
Critic
Roger Ebert Quotes
American
Critic
Roland Barthes Quotes
French
Critic
Terry Eagleton Quotes
English
Critic
Walter Benjamin Quotes
German
Critic
William Hazlitt Quotes
English
Critic