War & Peace Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin doesn’t argue that rape is one injustice among many; she treats it as the load-bearing beam of a whole social order. The repeated “as long as” frames sexual violence as a structural condition, not a scandal that can be handled with better manners, harsher sentencing, or a new awareness campaign. Her claim is deliberately maximal: no peace, no justice, no equality, no freedom. That accumulation works like a legal brief and a curse. It refuses the comfort of compartmentalization, the liberal habit of imagining “progress” continuing everywhere else while this one atrocity lingers at the margins.

The second-person address is the knife twist. “You are not going to…” converts what can sound like an abstract feminist diagnosis into a personal foreclosure. Dworkin is indicting a culture that sells self-actualization as an individual project while leaving intact the background terror that shapes where bodies go, what they risk, what they’re allowed to desire. The subtext is that rape doesn’t only harm victims in the moment; it disciplines everyone, producing compliance, narrowing ambition, shrinking the imaginable. “Who you want to become” points to identity itself as contested terrain, not a private possession.

Context matters: Dworkin wrote in the heat of late-20th-century feminist battles over pornography, sexual “liberation,” and the state’s failure to protect women without policing them. Her absolutism is strategic. By making rape the boundary condition for democracy, she dares listeners to stop treating it as a tragic exception and start seeing it as a political fact that invalidates the promises of modern life.