Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin lands the line like a slap because it’s structured as a joke and delivered as an indictment. The “often difficult to distinguish” clause mimics the detached language of legal or campus-tribunal debate, then the second sentence detonates that neutrality: seduction, in her framing, is rape with better PR. The bottle of wine isn’t romance; it’s a receipt. A small purchase that converts coercion into courtship, violence into a story both parties are pressured to repeat.

The intent is not to claim that all sex is assault, but to expose how consent gets socially laundered. Dworkin’s target is the cultural machinery that treats persistence as passion, treats “setting the mood” as an entitlement, and treats women’s hesitation as a hurdle rather than an answer. By calling the “seducer” a rapist, she refuses the comforting category split that lets men imagine themselves as good guys because they followed the ritual: dinner, drinks, ambience, plausible deniability.

The subtext is about power and narrative control. Wine is symbolic theater: it’s not only intoxication but obligation, the unspoken ledger of “I spent, therefore you owe.” The line also anticipates the way “grey area” talk can function as a refuge for predation, focusing on ambiguity rather than accountability.

Context matters: Dworkin wrote in a feminist moment furious at how law, pornography, and everyday heterosexual scripts normalized women’s compliance. Her rhetoric is deliberately abrasive because she’s attacking not individual awkward encounters but a culture that rewards men for disguising force as charm.