Wit & Attitude Quote by Andrea Dworkin

A cold joke with a blade in it: Dworkin’s line mimics the swagger it condemns. The piling hyphens feel like an unstoppable rant, the kind you can’t politely interrupt because politeness is part of the trap. “Men know everything” isn’t a factual claim; it’s an indictment of a social pose - a permission slip men are often handed to speak with authority by default, even when they haven’t earned it. The absolutism (“all of them - all the time”) is deliberate overreach, less sociology than courtroom strategy: exaggeration as a way to make a pattern undeniable.

The subtext is about epistemic power, not trivia. Dworkin is pointing at how confidence can function as a gendered resource, how ignorance is insulated by being taken seriously, how arrogance gets misread as leadership. The string of descriptors (“stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant”) matters because it refuses the usual escape hatches. It’s not just the uneducated man, or the bad man, or the young man. It’s the system that lets any of them stroll into certainty.

Context sharpens the attack. Writing in the heat of second-wave feminist argument, Dworkin wasn’t trying to sound “balanced”; she was trying to name the everyday humiliation of being explained to, overridden, corrected, dismissed - and to connect that daily posture to larger structures of male dominance. The line works because it sounds like the very thing it’s critiquing: totalizing, unbothered, certain. That mimicry is the point.