Andrea Dworkin

both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service. Intellectuals, especially, call what they themselves produce or like “erotica, ” which means simply that a very bright person made or likes whatever it is.

Finally, this is not a liberal book about how pornography hurts all of us. As militant feminist Christabel Pankhurst wrote concerning the trade in women in 1913: “Men have a simple remedy for this state of things. They can alter their way of life.”

For freedom is always relative to power, and the kind of freedom which at any moment it is most urgent to affirm depends on the nature of the power which is prevalent and established.
R. H. Tawney, Equality

The second tenet of male supremacy is that men are physically stronger than women and, for that reason, have dominion over them. Physical strength in women that is not directly harnessed to “women’s work” becomes an abomination, and its use against men, that is, as power, is anathema, forbidden, horribly punished. The reality of male physical strength in an absolute sense is less important than the ideology that sacralizes and celebrates it. In part, the physical strength of men over women is realized because men keep women physically weak.

Even women who are physically strong must pretend to be weak to underline not only their femininity but also their upwardly mobile aesthetic and economic aspirations. Physical incapacity is a form of feminine beauty and a symbol of male wealth: he is rich enough to keep her unable to labor, useless, ornamental. Women are also often mutilated, physically or by fashion and custom, so that whatever physical strength they may have is meaningless.

Third, power is the capacity to terrorize, to use self and strength to inculcate fear, fear in a whole class of persons of a whole class of persons. The acts of terror run the gamut from rape to battery to sexual abuse of children to war to murder to maiming to torture to enslaving to kidnapping to verbal assault to cultural assault to threats of death to threats of harm backed up by the ability and sanction to deliver.

Even more significant is the hidden symbol of terror, the penis. The acts and the symbols meet up in all combinations, so that terror is the outstanding theme and consequence of male history and male culture, though it is smothered in euphemism, called glory or heroism.

But first, there is the legend of terror, and this legend is cultivated by men with sublime attention. In epics, dramas, tragedies, great books, slight books, television, films, history both documented and invented, men are giants who soak the earth in blood.

Within the legend, women are booty, along with gold and jewels and territory and raw materials. The legend of male violence is the most celebrated legend of mankind and from it emerges the character of man: he is dangerous.

The third tenet of male-supremacist ideology, in a secular society where biology has replaced God (and is used to buttress anachronistic theology whenever necessary), is that men are biologically aggressive, inherently combative, eternally antagonistic, genetically cruel, hormonally prone to conflict, irredeemably hostile and warring.