| Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics | Andrea Dworkin | The Women’s Press | 1982 |
In this fierce and beautiful book, Andrea Dworkin confronts our most profound social disgrace: the sexual, cultural, and political subjugation of women to men, and with rare eloquence examines the systematic crimes of our male-dominated society against women.
Women, looking into the mirror of Our Blood, will feel anguish for our past suffering and enslavement—and outrage at our present condition. Men, if they dare to look into this mirror, will turn away in shame and horror at what they have done.
Karla Jay
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia
Chapter 2: Renouncing Sexual “Equality”
Chapter 3: Remembering the Witches
Chapter 4: The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door
Chapter 5: The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage
Chapter 6: Redefining Nonviolence
Chapter 7: Lesbian Pride
Chapter 8: Our Blood: The Slavery of Women in Amerika
Chapter 9: The Root Cause
The real core of the feminist vision, its revolutionary kernel if you will, has to do with the abolition of all sex roles – that is, an absolute transformation of human sexuality and the institutions derived from it. In this work, no part of the male sexual model can possibly apply. Equality within the framework of the male sexual model, however that model is reformed or modified, can only perpetuate the model itself and the injustice and bondage which are its intrinsic consequences.
Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics.
I suggest to you that transformation of the male sexual model under which we now all labor and “love” begins where there is a congruence, not a separation, a congruence of feeling and erotic interest; that it begins in what we do know about female sexuality as distinct from male – clitoral touch and sensitivity, multiple orgasms, erotic sensitivity all over the body (which needn’t – and shouldn’t – be localized or contained genitally), in tenderness, in self-respect and in absolute mutual respect. For men I suspect that this transformation begins in the place they most dread – that is, in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together. I am saying that men will have to renounce their phallocentric personalities, and the privileges and powers given to them at birth as a consequence of their anatomy, that they will have to excise everything in them that they now value as distinctively “male.” No reform, or matching of orgasms, will accomplish this.