Aging & Wisdom Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin lands the line like a slap because it refuses the polite fiction that “respectability” is a neutral status. She frames “wives” and “whores” not as natural opposites but as roles in a single economy of male access, where women are sorted into categories that make men’s power feel orderly. The bite is in the rhythm: “an old one” shrugs at how ancient and routine the fight is, then the punch comes with “at least,” the tiny phrase that exposes the whole emotional engine - relief through distance. Whatever pain comes with your position, you can still purchase a shred of safety by disidentifying from the other woman.

The intent is less to scold individual women than to indict a system that trains them to compete for legitimacy inside constraints they didn’t design. “Argument” suggests a moral debate, but the subtext is scarcity: status, protection, and social belonging are treated as limited resources, and the easiest way to secure them is to point downward. That’s why “thinking” matters; it’s about internalized policing, the way ideology becomes self-management.

Contextually, Dworkin is writing from within second-wave feminism’s hardest edge, suspicious of any story that prettifies heterosexual institutions. The “wife/whore” split is the classic patriarchal binary: one woman sanctified through domesticity, the other stigmatized as the outlet for forbidden desire. Dworkin’s provocation is to show how both figures are made legible primarily through men’s needs - and how the system stays stable precisely because the women are encouraged to hate each other instead of the structure that named them.