Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how male dominance in society often leads to the subjugation of women in private settings.
Andrea Dworkin's quote underscores the relationship between societal structures of male dominance and the sexual domination of women in private spaces. It suggests that the power dynamics prevalent in public life are mirrored in intimate interactions between men and women, revealing deeper issues of gender inequality and control that persist away from the public eye.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion on gender roles at a women's rights conference.
Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation.... The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.
I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will.
We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.
Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.
In her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to become, to act, to change self and society. And each year she is stronger and there are more of her.
Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
I think that the same kind of openness and fluidity and willingness to interrogate power that we, as feminists, expect from men in alliance on questions of class should also be the expectation that women of colour can rely upon with our white feminist allies.
I will never have a photograph of her to carry around in my pocket. I will never have a letter in her handwriting, or a scrap-book of everything we've done. I will never share an apartment with her in the city. I will never know if we are listening to the same song at the same time. We will not grow old together. I will not be the person she calls when she's in trouble. She will not be the person I call when I have stories to tell. I will never be able to keep anything she's given to me.
I don't go on that many dates, because the truth is, anytime you go out in public with a girl when you're well-known, there are pictures of you everywhere, and it's like you're a thing.
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard: women's, that when it is dead it stays dead.
I'm not lonely, and I think that has a lot to do with what's on my bedside table rather than what's in my bed.
Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness.
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