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.
Andrea DworkinRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote explores the concept of romantic love as a self-sacrificial act for women, often leading to the loss of their identity.
Andrea Dworkin's quote critiques the social constructs of romantic love, particularly how it is depicted in society and pornography. She suggests that for women, love often entails a profound sacrifice of their own identity, autonomy, and even existence, for the sake of their partner's masculinity. This perspective raises important questions about the dynamics of power, gender roles, and the nature of love itself, proposing that the idealization of love may sometimes come at the cost of female selfhood and integrity.
Themes
LoveSacrificeIdentityFemininityMasculinity
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about gender roles in relationships.
More from Andrea Dworkin
All quotes →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.
Andrea DworkinRead
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.
Andrea DworkinRead
Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.
Andrea DworkinRead
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.
Andrea DworkinRead
Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
Andrea DworkinRead
Similar quotes
No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts.
Mark NepoRead
Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.
Franz KafkaRead
The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, And in the taste confounds the appetite: Therefore love moderately— long love doth so.
William ShakespeareRead
Well had Solomon said,'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
Charlotte BronteRead
I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.
Leo TolstoyRead
So hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair that ever since in love's embraces met -- Adam, the goodliest man of men since born his sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve.
John MiltonRead