Thread by @DrMeaganTyler

Something else I try to do every year on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women is to tweet parts of Dworkin's "I Want a 24 Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape." Read it in full here: rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/learn/resource… #MVAW #EndVAW #VAW #VAWG #16Days

Dworkin, addressing male allies: "We don't have forever. Some of us don't have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something." #MVAW #EndVAW #16Days

"We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist...But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me." #MVAW #EndVAW #16Days

"There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body...in public and in private. It is the sum and substance of women's oppression."

"The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy." [And oh how apt this seems right now] #MVAW

"It is an extraordinary thing to try to understand and confront why it is that men believe...they have the right to rape. Men may not believe it when asked. Everybody raise your hand who believes you have the right to rape. Not too many hands will go up..."

"...men believe they have the right to force sex, which they don't call rape...And it is an equally extraordinary thing to try to understand that men really believe that they have the right to buy a woman's body for the purpose of having sex: that that is a right." #16Days #MVAW

"That is the way the power of men is manifest in real life. That is what theory about male supremacy means. It means you can rape. It means you can hit. It means you can hurt. It means you can buy and sell women." #MVAW #EndVAW #16Days

[Men] "You damn well better believe that you're involved in this tragedy and that it's your tragedy too. Because...everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the...world in which you live." #MVAW #16Days

"But I think that if you want to look at what this system does to you, then that is where you should start looking: the sexual politics of aggression; the sexual politics of militarism." #MVAW #EndVAW #16Days

"As long as sex is full of hostility and expresses power over and contempt for the other person, it is very important that men not be...stigmatized as female, used similarly. The power of men as a class depends on keeping men sexually inviolate and women sexually used by men."

"Homophobia helps maintain that class power...If you want to do something about homophobia, you are going to have to do something about the fact that men rape, and that forced sex is not incidental to male sexuality but is in practice paradigmatic."

"If you are afraid of the ascendancy of fascism in this country--and you would be very foolish not to be right now--then you had better understand that the root issue here has to do with male supremacy and the control of women..." [scarily relevant even though this is from 1984]

"I want to talk to you about equality, what equality is and what it means. It isn't just an idea. It's not some insipid word that ends up being bullshit...That is not the equality we are struggling for."

"Equality is a practice...It is a social practice. It is an economic practice. It is a sexual practice. It can't exist in a vacuum. You can't have it in your home if, when the people leave the home, he is in a world of his supremacy based on the existence of his cock..." #EndVAW

"The things the men's movement has wanted are things worth having. Intimacy is worth having. Tenderness is worth having. Cooperation is worth having. A real emotional life is worth having. But you can't have them in a world with rape." #MVAW #EndVAW #16Days

"And by rape you know what I mean...We're talking about any kind of coerced sex, including sex coerced by poverty. You can't have equality or tenderness or intimacy as long as there is rape, because rape means terror." #VAW #EndVAW #16Days

"I came here today because I don't believe that rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is..."

"Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It's not because there's a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence." [one of my favourite lines of all time] #MVAW #EndVAW #16Days

"I speak for many feminists...when I tell you that I am tired of what I know and sad beyond any words I have about what has already been done to women...I want one day of respite, one day off, one day in which no new bodies are piled up...and I am asking you to give it to me."

"Even in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape." #MVAW #VAW #VAWG #EndVAW #16Days

"And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day." #MVAW #VAW #VAWG #EndVAW #16Days #MeToo