Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrea Dworkin

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.