"The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist" [Ti-Grace Atkinson, "Amazon Odyssey" (p. 86)] ------- "No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." [Simone de Beauvoir, author of _The Second Sex_, the book credited with launching the mainstream of the modern feminist movement, Saturday Review June 14, 1975] ------- "Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire, and the first crude stone ax." [Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, p. 5] ------- "[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" [Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, p. 6)] ------- "A good part - and definitely the most fun part - of being a feminist is about frightening men" [Julie Burchill] ------- "Most mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children." [Phyllis Chesler, "Women and Madness"] ------- "Heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of semen...[Lesbianism is] an ideological, political and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny... " [Cheryl Clarke, "Lesbianism, An Act of Resistance," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga (Women of Color Press,1983), pp.128-137.] ------- "Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometime gain from the experience." [Catherine Comins, Vassar College Assistant Dean of Student Life in Time, June 3, 1991, p. 52] ------- "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage." [Sheila Cronan] ------- "If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males." [Mary Daly, former Professor at Boston College, 2001] ------- "While overtly promoting the oppressive ideal of the nuclear family, this space spectacular subliminally appealed to erotic fantasies allegedly taboo in heterosexist society." [Mary Daly describing the Apollo Moon landings in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.63] ------- "How will the family unit be destroyed? ...[T]he demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare." [Roxanne Dunbar, "Female Liberation"] ------- "One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible," [Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 21] ------- "The fact is that the process of killing - both rape and battery are steps in that process- is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination," [Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 22] ------- "The newest variations on this distressingly ancient theme center on hormones and DNA: men are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into murder and rape," [Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 114] ------- "All men benefit from rape, because all men benefit from the fact that women are not free in this society; that women cower; that women are afraid; that women cannot assert the rights that we have, limited as those rights are, because of the ubiquitous presence of rape." [Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 142] ------- "One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available." [Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 145] ------- "In everything men make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, still their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives," [Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 214] ------- "Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire," [Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 265] ------- "Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman," [Andrea Dworkin, Liberty, p. 58] ------- "Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks." [Andrea Dworkin in the Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 1995] ------- "Intercourse with men as we know them is increasingly impossible. It requires an aborting of creativity and strength, a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death. It means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect. It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity which are central to it." [Andrea Dworkin, Women Hating, p. 184] ------- "Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies." [Andrea Dworkin] ------- "...[W]omen and men are distinct species or races ... men are biologically inferior to women; male violence is a biological inevitability; to eliminate it, one must eliminate the species/race itself ... in eliminating the biologically inferior species/race Man, the new Ubermensch Woman (prophetically foreshadowed by the lesbian separatist * herself) will have the earthly dominion that is her true biological destiny. (from a panel on "Lesbianism as a Personal Politic" that took place in New York City, Lesbian Pride Week 1977)" [Andrea Dworkin, "Letters From A War Zone" Part III, "Take Back The Day Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea." 1977] ------- "I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig." [Andrea Dworkin, "Ice And Fire"] ------- "Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free." [Andrea Dworkin. "The Root Cause," speech, 26 Sept. 1975, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (published in Our Blood, ch. 9, 1976).] ------- "The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations--for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right--these institutions are real and they must be destroyed." [Andrea Dworkin] ------- "Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive... women didn't go to Vietnam and blow up things up. They are not Rambo." [Jodie Foster in The New York Times Magazine] ------- "All men are rapists and that's all they are," [Marilyn French in People, February 20, 1983] ------- "My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter." [Marilyn French, "The Women's Room"] ------- "If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based." [Betty Friedan, speech, New York City, January 20, 1974] ------- "The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together.... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.... No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children...." [Linda Gordon, "Functions of the Family," in "Women: A Journal of Liberation," Fall, 1969" ------- "Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that." [Vivian Gornick, feminist author, University of Illinois, "The Daily Illini"] ------- "And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual [male], it may be mainly a quantitative difference." [Susan Griffin "Rape: The All-American Crime"] ------- "Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica is a "rape manual" because "science is a male rape of female nature"; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony expresses the "throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release." [Quotes by Sandra Harding of University of Delaware and Susan McClary, "who applies feminist theories to music,"respectively. Quoted in John Leo, "PC: Almost dead. Still funny," US. News & World Report, December 5, 1994, p. 24.) -- From: Robert H. Bork (1996): Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, Regan Books/HarperCollins NY (pp.193-225)] ------- "I call it the Noah Ark Syndrome. The perception lingers that human beings should go two by two. Someone who is not married-either by choice or by chance- is somehow regarded as abnormal." [Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in Glamour, February 1997] ------- "When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression..." [Sheila Jeffrys] ------- "I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which a man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it." [Former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan] ------- "*MALE: ... represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. The first males were mutants... the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female.' *MAN: ... an obsolete life form... an ordinary creature who needs to be watched ... a contradictory baby-man ... *TESTOSTERONE POISONING: ... 'Until now it has been though that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from "testosterone poisoning." ['A Feminist Dictionary', ed. Kramarae and Treichler, Pandora Press, 1985] ------- "We have long known that rape has been a way of terrorizing us and keeping us in subjection. Now we also know that we have participated, although unwittingly, in the rape of our minds." [Gerda Lerner, historian, in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, p. 55] ------- "Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is, if you don't like it, bad luck - and if you get in my way I'll run you down." [Letter to the Editor: "Women's Turn to Dominate" Signed: Liberated Women, Boronia. Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia, 9 February 1996] ------- "In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent." [Catherine MacKinnon in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies, p. 129] ------- "Compare victims' reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They look a lot alike....[T]he major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it." [Catherine MacKinnon, quoted in Christina Hoff Sommers, "Hard-Line Feminists Guilty of Ms.-Representation," Wall Street Journal, November 7, 1991] ------- "Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare-up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. ... The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. ... The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and industry and labor." [Karl Marx/Frederich Engels, "The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848] ------- "I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them." [Robin Morgan, Ms. Magazine Editor] ------- "I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." [Robin Morgan] ------- "And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism--the lie that there can be such a thing as 'men's liberation groups.' Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group, specifically because of a 'threatening' characteristic shared by the latter group--skin color, sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters, but those masters are not OPPRESSED. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism--the oppressed have no alternative-- for they have no power--but to fight. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men--but in the short run it's going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is NOT the fault of women--kill your fathers, not your mothers." [Robin Morgan] ------- "Women's Liberation . in the short run it's going to cost men a lot of privilege... Sexism is NOT the fault of women -- kill your fathers, not your mothers" [Robin Morgan, Editor of Ms. Magazine] ------- "We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage. " [Robin Morgan, "Sisterhood Is Powerful," (ed), 1970, p. 537] ------- "The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist." [National NOW Times, Jan.1988] ------- "Our culture, including all that we are taught in schools and universities, is so infused with patriarchal thinking that it must be torn up root and branch if genuine change is to occur. Everything must go - even the allegedly universal disciplines of logic, mathematics, and science, and the intellectual values of objectivity, clarity, and precision on which the former depend." [Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, quote from "Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies" (New York, Basic Books, 1994), p. 116] ------- "Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex." [Valerie Solana, SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men)] ------- "Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home." [Gloria Steinem in Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, pp. 259-61] ------- "If the classroom situation is very heteropatriarchal- a large beginning class of 50 to 60 students say, with few feminist students- I am likely to define my task as largely one of recruitment...of persuading students that women are oppressed." [Professor Joyce Trebilcot of Washington University in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, p. 92] ------- "All men are good for is f&%$ing, and running over with a truck" [Statement made by A University of Maine Feminist Administrator, quoted by Richard Dinsmore, who brought a successful civil suit against the University in the amount of $600,000. Richard had protested the quote; was dismissed thereafter on the grounds of harassment; and responded by bringing suit against the University. 1995 settlement] ------- "Our research and most other studies show that wife-battering occurs in 50 percent of families throughout the nation." [Lenore Walker, speaking at a Laguna Beach conference, as reported in the SF Chronicle, which commented: "Only the most crazed man-hater could believe that."] ------- "The dating system is a mutually exploitative arrangement of sex-role expectations, which limit and direct behavior of both parties and determine the character of the relationship. Built into the concept of dating is the notion that the woman is an object which may be purchased." [Kurt Weis and Sandra S. Borges, Rape Victimology, p. 112] ------- "Our culture is depicting sex as rape so that men and women will become interested in it." [Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 138] ------- "Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete." [Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 55] ------- "AIDS education will not get very far until young men are taught how not to rape young women and how to eroticize trust and consent; and until young women are supported in the way they need to be redefining their desires," [Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 168] -------