“There is a global trafficking in women; as long as women are being bought and sold in a global slave traffic we are not free.
There is a pornography crisis in the United States. Women in the United States live in a society saturated with sexually brutal, exploitative material that says: rape her, beat her, hurt her, she will like it, it is fun for her.
We need to put women first.
Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.
We need to do anything that will interrupt the colonizing of the female body.
We need to refuse to accept the givens.
We need to ask ourselves what political rights we need as women.
Do not assume that in the eighteenth century male political thinkers answered that question and do not assume that when your own Charter was rewritten in the twentieth century the question was answered.
The question has not been answered.
What would freedom be for us?
What principles are necessary for our well-being?
Why are women being sold on street corners and tortured in their homes, in societies that.claim to be based on freedom and justice?
What actions must be taken?
What will it cost us and why are we too afraid to pay and are the women who have gotten a little from the women’s movement afraid that resistance or rebellion or even political inquiry will cost them the little they have gotten?
Why are we still making deals with men one by one instead of collectively demanding what we need?
I am going to ask you to remember that as long as a woman is being bought and sold anywhere in the world, you are not free, nor are you safe.
You too have a number; some day your turn will come.
I’m going to ask you to remember
and I am going to ask you to remember the photographed, the ones that any or all of the above happened to and it was photographed and now the photographs are for sale in our free countries.
I want you to think about those
who have been hurt for the fun, the entertainment, the so-called speech of others;
those who have been hurt for profit, for the financial benefit of pimps and entrepreneurs.
I want you to remember the perpetrator and I am going to ask you to remember the victims: not just tonight but tomorrow and the next day.
I want you to find a way to include them - the perpetrators and the victims - in what you do, how you think, how you act, what you care about, what your life means to you.
Now, I know, in this room, some of you are the women I have been talking about.
I know that. People around you may not.
I am going to ask you to use every single thing you can remember about what was done to you -
to begin to tear male dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it, to mess it up, to get in its way, to fuck it up.
I have to ask you to resist, not to comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to refuse to accept it, to abhor it and to do whatever is necessary despite its cost to you to change it.”
- Andrea Dworkin, Remember; resist; do not comply.
(Speech at the Massey College Fifth Walter Gordon Forum, Toronto, Ontario, in a symposium on “The Future of Feminism,” April 2, 1995. First published by Massey College in the University of Toronto, May 2, 1995. Copyright ©1995, 1996 by Andrea Dworkin. Reprinted from Life and Death.)
