"Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do"
About this Quote
Dworkin writes like someone kicking in a locked door: urgent, accusatory, and deliberately unwilling to soothe. The first move is historical and tactical. By framing women as “for centuries not having access to pornography,” she’s not just describing a market shift; she’s describing an epistemic shock. Men have long been steeped in a visual curriculum about women, while women were largely excluded from it. When pornography becomes publicly visible - “the muck on the supermarket shelves” - the private fantasy economy is suddenly legible as mass culture.
The engine of the passage is the word “believe.” Dworkin isn’t claiming men merely consume porn; she argues they treat it as knowledge. That’s the subtext: pornography operates less like entertainment and more like ideology, rehearsing a story about women’s bodies, consent, and personhood until it feels like common sense. The astonishment she attributes to women is a recognition gap: women assume men know it’s fiction, while men experience it as permission.
Her rhetoric is intentionally absolutist: “From the worst to the best of them.” It’s a provocation aimed at liberal exceptions - the “good men” who want moral distance from misogyny while still living inside the same sexual mythology. Dworkin collapses that alibi, suggesting the problem isn’t individual depravity but a culture that mass-produces a template for how to see women.
Context matters. Writing in the late-20th-century “sex wars,” Dworkin is pushing against a rising, commodified porn mainstream and against feminist currents that framed porn as liberatory. This is polemic designed to force a choice: treat porn as harmless taste, or as a political text with consequences.
The engine of the passage is the word “believe.” Dworkin isn’t claiming men merely consume porn; she argues they treat it as knowledge. That’s the subtext: pornography operates less like entertainment and more like ideology, rehearsing a story about women’s bodies, consent, and personhood until it feels like common sense. The astonishment she attributes to women is a recognition gap: women assume men know it’s fiction, while men experience it as permission.
Her rhetoric is intentionally absolutist: “From the worst to the best of them.” It’s a provocation aimed at liberal exceptions - the “good men” who want moral distance from misogyny while still living inside the same sexual mythology. Dworkin collapses that alibi, suggesting the problem isn’t individual depravity but a culture that mass-produces a template for how to see women.
Context matters. Writing in the late-20th-century “sex wars,” Dworkin is pushing against a rising, commodified porn mainstream and against feminist currents that framed porn as liberatory. This is polemic designed to force a choice: treat porn as harmless taste, or as a political text with consequences.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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