Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin goes for the throat by treating language not as a neutral tool but as an infrastructure project: built, maintained, and quietly policed. “Fused” is the operative verb. Male supremacy isn’t merely expressed through a few slurs or sexist idioms; it’s melted into the grammar of daily life, hardened into default settings. The line refuses the comforting fantasy that we can just “choose better words” and be done with it. If every sentence “heralds and affirms,” then ordinary speech becomes a low-grade propaganda system, the kind you don’t notice precisely because it sounds like common sense.

The subtext is accusatory and strategic. Dworkin isn’t only critiquing men; she’s challenging everyone who treats language as a transparent mirror. Even well-meaning talk can smuggle hierarchy, because the problem is structural: who gets named as the norm, who becomes the exception, who is the subject of verbs versus their object. Think of generic “he,” titles that mark women as marital property, metaphors that equate power with penetration, or legal and medical language that flattens women’s experience into casework.

Context matters: Dworkin wrote in the late-20th-century feminist battles over pornography, sexual violence, and institutional misogyny, when “speech” was often defended as harmless expression. Her provocation insists that speech is a material force; it trains perception. The brilliance - and the discomfort - is that she makes complicity ordinary. You can’t opt out by being polite. The sentence is the system.