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.
Tragically, one of the rarest commodities in our culture is empathy. People are hungry for empathy, They don't know how to ask for it.
Iβve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself
Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.
Marriage is like a three-speed gearbox - affection, friendship, love. It is not advisable to crash your gears and go right through to love straightaway. You need to ease your way through. The basis of love is respect, and that needs to be learned from affection and friendship.
One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected.
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