Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin’s line lands like a scalpel because it treats a supposedly neutral category - “women’s fashion” - as a linguistic cover story. By calling it a euphemism, she’s arguing that the phrase doesn’t merely describe clothing; it sanitizes a power arrangement. “Women’s” reads like ownership or authorship, but in her framing it functions more like a label slapped onto a product designed elsewhere, under different incentives, then sold back as self-expression.

The subtext is classic Dworkin: consent and choice are not dismissed, but put under pressure. If men control the design houses, the magazines, the cameras, the standards of “flattering,” then women’s participation can still be real while the menu of options is pre-decided. The sentence is intentionally blunt, almost prosecutorial, because it’s trying to short-circuit the comforting idea that consumer preference equals autonomy. Her target isn’t a hemline; it’s the pipeline that turns women’s bodies into a public project, then calls the results “taste.”

Context matters. Dworkin wrote in the aftermath of second-wave feminism’s battles over objectification, pornography, and the social scripting of femininity. Fashion, in that world, isn’t a cute diversion; it’s a daily discipline, a wearable set of instructions about sexual availability, class respectability, and acceptable womanhood. The aphorism works because it weaponizes grammar: it takes a possessive noun and asks, possessive of what - identity, or control?