I Want A Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape

“I have thought a great deal about how a feminist, like myself, addresses an audience primarily of political men who say that they are antisexist. And I thought a lot about whether there should be a qualitative difference in the kind of speech I address to you. And then I found myself incapable of pretending that I really believe that that qualitative difference exists. I have watched the men’s movement for many years. I am close with some of the people who participate in it. I can’t come here as a friend even though I might very much want to. What I would like to do is scream: and in that scream I would have the screams of the raped, and the sobs of the battered; and even worse, the deafening sound of women’s silence, that silence into which we are born because we are women and in which most of us die. And if there would be a plea or a question or a human address in that scream, it would be this: why are you so slow? Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those. The simple things. The clichés. Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are… I don’t believe rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, my political practice would be different from what it is. Have you ever wondered why we [women] 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.”

(Andrea Dworkin, “I Want A Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape,” speech given to a group of men at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men, 1983, St Paul, Minnesota, in Dworkin, 1988, p. 163, 169-170)