Frankly, No

Unchecked feminist quotes: a list for MRAs, feminists, and anyone who likes factual accuracy

There are a lot of web pages around the internet toting hateful and shocking quotes from allegedly well-known and influential feminists. While many are true, some have been taken out of context, misattributed, or are otherwise inaccurate in the woozle effect gone out of control. Here’s a list of the ones I was able to catch. For some independently verified and accurate quotes from feminists, see my infographics here and here. Remember, even if there’s a source cited, the only way to know for sure if it’s true is to check it yourself. A few great sites for checking quotes for free are Google Books, Open Library and ebrary Discover.

Side Notes:

• Links to Open Library require an account and for you to “check out” the book before you can view the page (all free and without any catches). If a book doesn’t have a link to an independent source, it means I couldn’t find an online version. You’ll have to check your local library to verify it.
• Feel free to repost the debunkings here where you wish, but please leave a link back to this page if you use more than a couple of them at once.

➤ Taken Out of Context

Quotes from works of fiction, works of humor, and different time periods.

Marilyn French

"My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter." — Marilyn French

"All men are rapists and that’s all they are." — Marilyn French

Both taken from The Women’s Room (1977) [1] [2], a work of fiction. While French stated much of the book was taken from her life, and critics have accused it of being anti-male, French has denied she holds these beliefs herself and expressed frustration opponents were using it as such.

Andrea Dworkin

"I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig." — Andrea Dworkin

Paraphrased from Mercy (1990), also a work of fiction. Here’s the full quote for the record:

While Dworkin maintained in Life and Death (1997) that none of her fiction is autobiographical, the events in Mercy are extremely similar to her official autobiography Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002), and her peers have described it as “autobiographical fiction”. It’s hard to tell if the quote accurately represents her views; she could have just been expressing her emotions at the time with extreme language - the character, aka Dworkin, was molested at age 9. The important thing to keep in mind here is that she was presenting it as fiction, not as her personal view. Reposts of this quote should at least mention it was from fiction.

Side note: You can access all her books in their entirety by downloading them through Radfem Archive, although I’m suspicious of its legality so download at your own risk.

Sharon Stone

"The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men." — Sharon Stone

"Number 10: Regularly beat him on the head with your shoe." — Sharon Stone, On David Letterman, presenting the top-ten list of keeping your man

The first quote had no source anywhere, the closest I got was that it was from a nondescript interview. The second is paraphrased from her appearance on Late Night with David Letterman in 1994 in a parody of Cosmopolitan, which often has articles on “how to X your man” (she had just posed for the magazine). As for her being a feminist, she’s made very little mention of feminist beliefs in her career. According to Look To The Stars, none of the 25+ charities and events she’s supported over the years were dedicated to women’s issues (most of her work has been in AIDS awareness and research), with the exception of a charity auction for ovarian cancer. Also notable is her topless photoshoot in 1990 for Playboy, a magazine compared to a “nazi manual” by Gloria Steinem, and Cosmopolitan, which is criticized by feminists for exploiting women’s insecurities. On the other hand, Stone recently made mention of her views on women’s issues in a 2013 interview for a feminist themed movie called Lovelace, whose main character (ironically for Stone) posed in Playboy. Despite this, her overall impact on the feminist movement is minimal, and her impact as a misandrist is nonexistent.

Jilly Cooper

"The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness…can be trained to do most things." — Jilly Cooper, SCUM (Society For Cutting Up Men)

From Men And Super Men (1972). This one’s probably the most dishonest in this article, starting with the ellipsis. Here’s the unedited quote with the part they cut out:

"The male—I have found—is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.” (emphasis mine)

The book is simply deprecating jokes about the male gender, and while you’re free to take offense at it, presenting it as serious remarks or feminist philosophy is highly misleading. Also very relevant to the context is how on the same page she makes fun of the Women’s Liberation Movement (part of second-wave feminism), describing it as “a storm in a B-Cup, and the biggest bore of the century, only rivalled by the Common Market”. Lastly, there’s no mention in the book or on the internet of her being a SCUM member. This part appears to have been entirely fabricated (and if it wasn’t, it was probably a joke too). There’s no doubt whoever started this had no regard for intellectual honesty. This is why you always check your source, people.

Cheris Treichler and Paula Kramarae

"Man: …an obsolete life form… an ordinary creature who needs to be watched… a contradictory baby-man…"

"Misandry: …a refusal to suppress the evidence of one’s experience with men… A woman’s defense against fear and pain… An affirmation of the cathartic effects of justifiable anger."

"Strangers: Unknowns who, if male, are not to be trusted. Knowns are not to be trusted either."

"Testosterone Poisoning: … Until now it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’"

From A Feminist Dictionary (1985) [1] [2] [3] [4], a book of quotations from a wide variety of authors and contexts. Sources of the ones above include radical feminists, a suffragist, a playwright (NSFW magazine) and a Ms. magazine guest editor. It’s meant to be a ‘thought-provoking work of humor’ and a catalogue of feminist-related thoughts on various subjects, rather than a formal dictionary about feminism. A couple of the quotes above were actually paraphrases/summaries written by the authors of the book instead of direct quotes. They’re supposed to be jokes, but the book has much less redeeming value than the other out-of-context quotes of jokes in this article.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men." — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

From an 1890 entry in her diary, found in Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary and reminiscences, Volume 2 (1922). To place the quote in proper context, it’s important to remember that a) she was living in the 1800s with drastically different social standards; b) this single blatantly supremacist view was expressed in private and not intended to be part of any widely published or vocalized feminist philosophy; and c) her activism as an early feminist was primarily towards issues like women’s suffrage, property rights and birth control, as opposed to female supremacy. You could argue that the quote being published at all was still an influence on misandry, but given the influence of her accomplishments, consider giving her the benefit of the doubt.

"When women can support themselves, have entry to all the trades and professions with a house of their own over their heads and a bank account, they will own their bodies and be dictators in the social realm." — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

From the same passage as the previous quote. An authoritarian fascist is what typically comes to mind when we read ‘dictator’, but she was likely using the more moderate definition of the time: “One who dictates; one who prescribes rules and maxims for the direction of others.”

➤ Misattributed/Misquoted

Quotes attributed to the wrong author, or with words mixed up or added. Some were likely innocent mistakes, others intentional.

Catharine MacKinnon

"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent." — Catharine MacKinnon

Mistakenly attributed to MacKinnon by conservative pundit Cal Thomas from the book Professing Feminism (1994), a critique of Women’s Studies in the US. The book was merely explaining MacKinnon’s beliefs, not quoting anything she actually said. MacKinnon’s actual views can be quoted as how heterosexuality “institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission”, that “Sexual access is regularly forced or pressured or routinized beyond denial”, and that sex and rape are “difficult to distinguish…under conditions of male dominance”.

Catherine Comins

“Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometime gain from the experience.” — Catherine Comins, Vassar College Assistant Dean of Student Life in Time, June 3, 1991, p. 52

This was the TIME article’s summary of her statement. The actual quote she was making is even worse:

“They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women?’ ‘If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’ ‘Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?’ Those are good questions.”

Andrea Dworkin

"Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies." — Andrea Dworkin

Only a few words were mixed up from the real quote, but one might argue the changes alter the context. Here’s the original from Dworkin’s Intercourse (1987):

"Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of contempt for women." — Andrea Dworkin

Note that Dworkin rejects interpretations of the quote as “all sex is rape”, but her explanation is hardly any better:

"Penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent. But I’m not saying that sex must be rape. What I think is that sex must not put women in a subordinate position. It must be reciprocal and not an act of aggression from a man looking only to satisfy himself. That’s my point."

Judith Levine

"Men’s sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can "reach within women to fuck/construct us from the inside out." Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women’s own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, even if she does not feel forced." — Judith Levine

From My Enemy, My Love: Women, Masculinity, and the Dilemmas of Gender (1992). It wasn’t outright fabricated, but the full passage ruins its inculpability. First let’s put the quote itself in proper context. Here’s the previous paragraph from the book:

"In the spring of 1987, a friend gave me six photocopied, stapled-together pages from a group calling itself A Southern Women’s Writing Collective: Women Against Sex (WAS). It was a manifesto, written in hermetic language and tortuous syntax, as if transcribed from a middle-of-the-night brawl between pixilated philosophy students. But its tone was ferocious, and the world it depicted was one of terror and rage, male conquest and female surrender.

In WAS’s world, men’s sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can…” etc. etc.

In other words, the quote was from someone else’s work, not hers. However, she goes on to elaborate on the manifesto:

"But the crazy words of this missive began to mix with a voice of my own, a voice scratchy from disuse, holding back some long unacknowledged feelings. I realized that a part of me still looks at the world as I did back in 1971 - as Us and Them. It feels as wounded by men as the WAS woman do. It fears men and is threatened by their bodies. It suspects that heterosexuality is a golden trap, a pleasure compulsion somehow conditioned against women’s better interests … I feel what they feel: man-hating, that volatile admixture of pity, contempt, disgust, envy, alienation, fear and rage at men."

So she’s not that innocent despite the misquoting.

➤ Fabricated

Quotes outright invented by people other than their alleged authors. There’s no doubt their creator had malicious intent.

Catharine MacKinnon

"All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman." — Catharine MacKinnon

Allegedly originates from an October 1986 Playboy, believed to have been fabricated as backlash against MacKinnon’s anti-porn advocacy. MacKinnon has denied ever making the statement, but like her previously mentioned quotes, her other views come close to it.

Anita Sarkeesian

"Honestly? I don’t care about war. If you get murdered, it doesn’t matter because you were murdered, if you were raped it matters." — Anita Sarkeesian

"Buying 1,000 dollar shoes …." — @anitasarkeesian

"@femfreq say, you have gotten way more money than you’ve needed via kickstarter, so why are you still asking for donnations?" — @DerMarc42; "@DerMarc42 I need the money because males get paid more than I do" — @FeministFrequen

Fabricated by the angry nerd community. The first one has no source, the second was verified to be fabricated, and the third was just being lazy - the user DerMarc42 was tweeting at is different from the one who replied. (The first one is Sarkeesian’s real account, and the second is presently suspended.) C’mon people, are you even trying!?

➤ Insignificant

If you were looking for quotes from highly influential members of the feminist movement, these aren’t it. I left out quite a few of the quotes I found, as what’s considered “influential” can be subjective and some pages didn’t specify how influential all the feminists were. However, before you take a quote for granted I suggest looking up the name and judging for yourself whether they really are influential enough for the context they’re being portrayed in.

Author Unknown (Declaration of Feminism)

"The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men… All of history must be re-written in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft." — Declaration of Feminism, Nov 1971

According to reader submissions from Puzzles and Essays from “The Exchange” (2003) (The Exchange is a column in a journal for the American Library Association), the document was published in an unknown, out-of-print periodical called Gold Flower: A Twin Cities Newspaper for Women and was introduced to the mainstream by televangelist Pat Robertson. Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan also referred to it in his book The Death of the West (2010), describing it as “broadly reproduced and widely praised”, but both the document and its authors (Nancy Lehmann and Helen Sullinger) have little presence in books and on the internet outside conservative/traditionalist sources quoting the declaration.

David Angier

"If anyone is prosecuted for filing a false report, then victims of real attacks will be less likely to report them." — David Angier

By a Massachusetts assistant district attorney. The quote appears to have originated from an article in The Weekly Standard (Jan 31 2000), which was only paraphrasing his views and not quoting him directly. He’s not a prominent feminist activist, and may not even be a feminist in the first place, the only indication is that his decisions regarding false accusations are concurrent with feminist beliefs about them. The Boston Globe (Dec 9 1999) on the other hand has a verified quote by him that summarizes his viewpoint succinctly:

"A prosecution in this case would be counterproductive. Women don’t report rape for a variety of reasons, one of which is they feel they won’t be believed. A prosecution in this case may create the impression that women are not believed."

Heather Hart

"At Brandies I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert… writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages.”
— Heather Hart 7

From Who Stole Feminism (1994). The quote is by a graduate student of Brandeis University who later defected from feminism, not a (notable) feminist activist. Here’s the full quote:

"At Brandeis I discovered feminism. And I instantly became a convert. And I did well, writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy humanities class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages. I joined the women’s coalition, preached to anyone who would listen, and even came close to cutting men out of my life entirely."

She goes on to describe how she was condemned by her fellow feminists because she wouldn’t stop wearing lipstick, and eventually came to the conclusion that her peers had strong similarities with the ‘forces’ they were claiming to fight. With the full context, and without the misspelling of ‘Brandeis’ and the mysterious ‘7’, the quote would still stand on its own as a testimony of a women’s study class. It’s strange why the OP would choose to take it out of context.

➤ Unverifiable

Quotes whose legitimacy can’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. If you have more information on any of these, please share it and I’ll update the page. (Don’t forget sources!)

National NOW Times (Author Unknown)

“The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.” — (National NOW Times, January, 1988).

I was unable to find a copy of the pamphlet, so I am unable to confirm its authenticity. It sounds a little radical (even for NOW), so if it is true I imagine it was an editorial, as opposed to an official statement by the organization.

University of Maine Administrator

"All men are good for is fucking, and running over with a truck" — Statement made by a University of Maine feminist administrator, quoted by Richard Dinsmore, who brought a successful civil suit against the University in the amount of $600,000. Richard had protested the quote; was dismissed thereafter on the grounds of harassment; and responded by bringing suit against the University. 1995 settlement.

The Washington Post (Dec 23 1996) has an article on the harassment lawsuit, but nothing on the exact quote or the civil suit. However, it does quote him as having become a victim of “man-hating feminists”, giving credence to (but not proof of) the quote’s legitimacy. The ABA Journal (Nov 1994) also goes into detail about Dinsmore’s relationship with feminism, describing him as a “vocal critic of feminism in and out of the classroom”.

Sheila Jeffrys

“When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression.” — Sheila Jeffrys

Found in The Political Junkie Handbook (2004), but it was unsourced and included with French’s “all men are rapists” quote - without its context. It’s on a few mainstream quote sites as well, but none of them are sourced either; it’s likely they were all user submitted and nobody’s gotten around to fact-checking them. It’s possible the quote is true, but until more information comes forward it’s best to assume otherwise.

Author Unknown

"Women have their faults / men have only two: / everything they say / everything they do" — Popular Feminist Graffiti

The oldest source of this quote I could find is Men Are Lunatics, Women Are Nuts! (1996), a ‘witty collection of quotations’ (including quotes making fun of both genders) which cited the source as “Anonymous”. It’s possible the line originated from this alleged ‘popular feminist graffiti’, but I find the ‘popular’ part questionable since there’s simply no other trace of it on the internet today, and the ‘feminist’ part questionable since it’s dubious how they would’ve known the graffiti was painted by a feminist.

➤ End Notes

There were also quite a few quotes by feminists that I simply didn’t find that hateful (like Steinem’s ‘overthrowing the whole patriarch’), or who weren’t feminist theorists, and were just misinformed and presenting views based off the misinformation (Katha Pollitt’s ‘epidemic of male violence’). I didn’t include (or check) these as their worthiness is subjective, but I advise you to judge them independently and to avoid interpreting a quote as hateful or ill-intentioned just because it’s presented as such.

Many web pages included quotes about marriage and religion, I didn’t check those as they weren’t related enough to gender or misandry. I encourage you to look these up yourself before assuming their validity.

In an effort to rely solely on primary sources, I am currently looking for a picture, scan or link to a page by the original publishers containing the following quotes:

"Until now it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’" — Alan Alda, Ms. Magazine (October 1975), pages 15-16

"There are times when a woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual." — Gloria Steinem, McCall’s (October 1970)

In addition to the quotes in the “Unverifiable” section, I’m also looking for a source for the following Sharon Stone quote, which I suspect doesn’t exist:

"The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men." — Sharon Stone