Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin detonates the comforting myth that sex is sealed off from politics. The opening move - "You think" - is a direct challenge to liberal privacy talk, the idea that consent alone turns everything in the bedroom into a personal preference. For her, intercourse is a social act because it arrives preloaded with scripts: power, entitlement, fear, bargaining, and the gender training that makes those feel "natural". She's not describing two quirky personality types; she's sketching a system that teaches men to take and women to manage risk, attention, and survival. "Predatory" and "manipulative" are intentionally abrasive words, designed to make the reader feel the moral dirtiness of what polite culture calls romance.

The mid-sentence pivot matters. After painting gender as a battlefield, she offers a conditional escape hatch: leaving gender "outside the bedroom door". That's not a cute metaphor; it's an almost impossible demand. Dworkin's subtext is that "making love" isn't a synonym for intercourse, it's an achievement - a rare act that requires dismantling roles that usually structure desire itself. The quote works because it refuses sentimentality while still making room for intimacy, but only on radical terms.

Context sharpens the edge. Dworkin wrote in the wake of second-wave feminism's fights over rape, pornography, and domestic violence, when "sex positivity" was consolidating and the culture was eager to label her anti-sex. This line shows the opposite: she isn't condemning pleasure; she's indicting the conditions under which pleasure is routinely negotiated.