Elizabeth Matz's First Favorite Andrea Dworkin Quote

"People talk about pornography as a form of fantasy. They actually talk about prostitution as if it were an exercise in fantasy. And it is part of the pornographers' effort to hide what they really do in real life--to encourage the word fantasy in place of actual behavior that really happens in the real world. I mean, a fantasy is something that happens in your head. It doesn't go past your head. Once you have somebody acting out whatever that scenario might be in your head, it is an act in the world, it is real. It is real behavior with real consequences to real people. And so it has been a very brilliant part of the pornographers' propaganda campaign to protect pornography by characterizing the industry as an industry of fantasy. In fact when you have that Asian woman hanging from a tree, you have a real Asian woman and she is really hanging from a real tree. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with fantasy. It has to do with a human being actually having happen to them what we see has happened to them. And I think it is just the most extraordinary insult to the human conscience to continue to characterize these real acts to real people as if they only exist in the head of the male consumer. And what that means is: his head, his psychology, is more important than her life."

--from the video Against Pornography: The Feminism of Andrea Dworkin produced by the BBC, 1992.

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