Politics & Power Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin doesn t ask for a seat at the table; she kicks the table over. Her line is built like a trap for polite disagreement: if feminism is hated because women are hated, then anti feminist arguments about tradition, biology, or civility are not alternative opinions but cover stories. The intent is to collapse the distance between rhetoric and motive, to force readers to see hostility to feminist politics as a proxy battle over whether women count as fully human.

The subtext is accusatory and strategic. By framing anti feminism as "the political defense of women hating", she reframes backlash as a power project rather than a misunderstanding. It is a refusal to grant the opposition moral complexity. That is why the sentence lands with such blunt force and why it infuriates: it denies the comforting idea that misogyny is just a few bad men and instead treats it as a public philosophy with talking points.

Context matters. Dworkin wrote in the wake of second wave feminism, during a period when fights over pornography, domestic violence, and sexual coercion were moving from private suffering to public argument. She came out of an era that specialized in dismissing women s testimony as hysteria, then branding feminist anger as the real extremism. Her phrasing anticipates that recoil and turns it into evidence.

As a piece of political language, it works because it is uncompromisingly diagnostic: hatred is not a side effect of feminism, she argues, but the thing feminism reveals.