# Quote — Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

> Laws creates male dominance, and maintain it, as a social environment. Male dominance is the environment we know, in which we must live. It is our air, water, earth. Laws shape our perceptions and knowledge of what male dominance is, of how it works, of what it means to us. Laws shape the experiences the experiences we have before we have them Laws significantly predetermine how we will feel, will understand, what will happen to us in life. Laws establish or humans the terms of our symbiosis with male dominance: what it takes from us to sustain itself as an overall environmental system.

- Author: [Andrea Dworkin](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andrea-dworkin.md)
- Book: [Intercourse](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andrea-dworkin/intercourse.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin#Intercourse_(1987)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/andrea-dworkin/intercourse/laws-creates-male

## More from this book

> In Amerika, there is the nearly—or so it appears—that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right: morally right; a sign of human health; nearly a standard for citizenship. Even those who believe in original sin and have a theology of hellfire and damnation express the Amerikan creed, an optimism that glows in the dark: sex is good, healthy, wholesome, pleasant fun; we like it, we enjoy it, we want it, we are cheerful abut it; it is as simple as we are, the citizens of this strange country with no memory and no mind.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andrea-dworkin/intercourse/in-amerika-there.md)

> Life can be better for women—economic and political conditions improved—and at the same time the status of women can remain resistant, in deed impervious, to change: so far in history this is precisely the paradigm for social change as it relates to the conditions of women. Reforms are made, important ones' but the status of women relative to men does not change. Women are still less significant, have less privacy, less integrity, less self-determination. This means that women have less freedom.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andrea-dworkin/intercourse/life-can-be-better.md)

> Can intercourse exist without the woman herself turning herself into a thing, which she must do because men cannot fuck equals and men must fuck: because one price of dominance is that one impotent in the face of equality?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/andrea-dworkin/intercourse/can-intercourse-exist.md)