Susan Brownmiller Quotes

Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.

I'm no expert on pornography. The core element of it, I think, is degradation of women, whatever else goes on. I don't think it should be outlawed, but I'm not in favor of the degradation of anybody.

I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.

I especially don't like the graphic violence against women and children often depicted in novels such as 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' and others. I'm not sure if it's being done just to entertain or whether it really is necessary for the characters involved.

Rape and other forms of sexual violence were used in Kosovo in 1999 as weapons of war and instruments of systematic "ethnic cleansing." Rapes were not rare and isolated acts committed by individual Serbian or Yugoslav forces, but rather were used deliberately as an instrument to terrorize the civilian population, extort money from families, and push people to flee their homes. Rape also furthered the goal of forcing ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process on intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.

Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work …. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men.

Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.

Regarding Jean-Francois Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, we declare him convicted of having taught to sing and sung impious, execrable and blasphemous songs against God; of having profaned the sign of the cross in making blessings accompanied by foul words which modesty does not permit repeating; of having knowingly refused the signs of respect to the Holy Sacrament carried in procession by the priory of Saint-Pierre … he will be taken …by the executioner who will attach before and behind him a sign on which will be written, in large letters impious one; and there, being on his knees, will confess his crimes...; this done, will have the tongue cut out and will then be taken … to the public marketplace of this city to have his head cut off on a scaffold; his body and his head will then be thrown on a pyre to be destroyed, burnt, reduced to ashes and these thrown to the wind.

Women have long found themselves grieving for the dead and caring for the wounded during and after war, but … as more and more women become war fighters themselves, they too face danger and see horrors, often with the added burden if sexual harassment and worse at the hands of their fellow warriors—burdens aggravated by official indifference.

Every kind of atrocity was inflicted upon their captives. They hung up the noblest and best-looking women naked, cutting off their breasts and stitching them to their mouths, so that the women appeared to be eating them and after this they impaled them on sharp stakes, run up the body.

I'm against suppression of pornography. If you suppress guns - yes; if you want to suppress poverty - yes. These are the obscenities, the real brutalization of people. I am almost more outraged by ads for blue jeans or cars that sort of blatantly depict women not only as sex objects, but women that look younger than the age of consent, looking like they've just been raped or asking to be raped-utterly passive sex objects.

If you want to know who is being hurt in this society, go see what is being done and to whom in pornography and then go look for them other places in the world.

Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.

It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

I know the most terrible thing that can happen to a woman. That is the gang-up. Men put you to sleep with their drops and one man after another goes in and takes you.

Women are raped and coerced into sex.

Playboy exploits sex the way Sports Illustrated exploits sports.

Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.

Bring me a girl, they're always the best. You put 'em on stage, and you have 'em undress.

When a guy writes a scene where a woman does a deviant sex act on camera, it's objectifying. But when a woman writes it, it's feminism.

It's true that in reading an interview, I have a little critique of the objectification of women in a [Playboy] magazine that is perceived to doing that.

For women in my lifetime things have changed quite a bit, but not enough. They have only changed for women that have education and access to health care in the Western world. But look at the rest of the world. Still in many places, women are sold into premature marriages, prostitution, forced labor; they are forced to have children that they cannot support or that they don't want. They are abused, tortured, exploited and even killed with impunity.