Wealth & Money Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin writes like someone trying to grab your collar before you wander back into polite theory. “Sexual equality with males” sounds, in liberal parlance, like an unqualified good. She flips it into an accusation: equality, as commonly imagined, is less about dismantling a hierarchy than gaining admission to it. The line is engineered to be unbearable, because she wants the reader to feel how “equal” can quietly mean “equally capable of domination.”

The sentence is built on a brutal substitution. “Rich instead of the poor” frames patriarchy as class structure, not merely personal prejudice. Then she escalates to bodily stakes: “rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.” That jump is the point. Dworkin is arguing that gender, under patriarchy, isn’t just a distribution of opportunities; it’s a distribution of vulnerability. If male power is anchored in the credible threat of sexual and physical violence, then aspiring to be “equal to men” can read as aspiring to inherit that threat-making capacity.

The subtext is a warning against assimilationist feminism: the version that treats liberation as individual mobility (women in boardrooms, women in the military, women in pornography’s “choice” rhetoric) while leaving the underlying economy of coercion intact. Written out of the late-20th-century feminist battles over pornography, sexual violence, and the limits of “sex-positive” celebration, the provocation is strategic. Dworkin isn’t saying women want to be rapists; she’s saying that a society organized around rapists produces “equality” offers that are structurally poisoned.