Life & Mortality Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin’s line lands like a prophecy delivered through clenched teeth: freedom, she argues, is structurally incompatible with “manhood” as patriarchy has built it. The sentence is engineered to corner the reader. “Only when” repeats like a gavel strike, denying easy reformist fantasies; liberation isn’t a tweak to masculinity, it’s an extinction event. Calling for “manhood” to be “dead” is less a literal wish for men to vanish than an indictment of a social role defined by dominance, entitlement, and sexual hierarchy.

The crucial turn is the parasitic logic in the middle clause: manhood “will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it.” Dworkin isn’t romanticizing femininity; she’s exposing how it’s manufactured through injury. “Ravaged” is doing blunt political work: it refuses euphemisms about “traditional roles” and points toward coercion, violence, and the everyday grinding-down of women into support systems for male power. In that framing, patriarchy isn’t merely something men do to women; it’s something women are forced to keep servicing, often through socialization, economic dependence, and fear.

Context matters: Dworkin wrote amid second-wave feminism’s fiercest internal and external battles, especially around sexuality, pornography, and the liberal promise that consent alone can sanitize unequal conditions. The line’s subtext is a challenge to that liberal comfort. If gender is a power arrangement, then “freedom” can’t be a private feeling or individual choice; it has to be the collapse of the arrangement itself. The quote works because it makes the reader sit with an unnerving idea: what we call “manhood” may be less an identity than a regime.