Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrea Dworkin

A blunt provocation like this is designed to detonate the comforting story that sex is a neutral, mutually desired act. Dworkin flips a culturally sacrosanct assumption: that intercourse is a “need” on par with hunger, and that women’s participation is naturally voluntary. By declaring it unnecessary for women yet difficult to avoid, she spotlights not biology but power - the quiet coercions, expectations, and risks that make “choice” feel compulsory.

The phrasing matters. “No woman needs” denies the usual justification for male entitlement: the idea that someone, somewhere, must provide sex because someone else “needs” it. Then comes the trapdoor: “few women escape it.” Escape from what? Not pleasure, but a system. The verb makes intercourse sound like weather, a draft notice, a predatory environment - something that happens to you rather than something you do. It’s an intentionally chilling grammatical shift that reframes heterosexual norms as an architecture women are routed through.

Context is everything. Dworkin was writing amid second-wave feminism’s battles over pornography, rape law, marital consent, and the social script that treated women’s sexual availability as baseline. Her argument, at its hardest edge, insists that intercourse under patriarchy can’t be cleanly separated from domination, because the surrounding conditions (economic dependence, male violence, social punishment for refusal) press on the act itself.

The intent isn’t to be “anti-sex” in a simple sense; it’s to refuse euphemism. She’s trying to make readers feel the asymmetry that politeness, romance, and “sex-positive” language can sometimes smooth over: the difference between desire and compliance, between consent and inevitability.