sisters, give yourself some room while reading this one. youll be mad. itll happen.

At the age of 22, decades ago, I read this book, and was amazed. In particular, Dworkin's description of global woman hating cultural practices such as foot binding and witch hunting made a vivid impression upon me. She tied together history and culture to expose patriarchy as a negative anti-life power dedicated to its own perpetuation. Though I had read Millett, Freidan, de Beauvoir, Solanas, Morgan, Brownmiller, and many others during the early seventies, the force of Dworkin's arguments reac...

What first struck me while reading this was the realization that, despite what most people say about her, Andrea Dworkin was not "crazy" while writing it. It's hard to argue with her thesis: Western and Eastern civilization and culture, as a matter of course, operated on the degradation and villainization of women, from fairy tales to marrying off your daughters for money to impossible demands for beauty. Men needed women to fuck and make children, and a system was in place to keep them in their...

I wish I'd read this when I was sixteen. For that matter I wish every young woman could.

this was genuinely brilliant until she started advocating for incest, bestiality, children’s “erotic” expression or when she started arguing that intercourse with men is impossible because “it means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect” and a bunch of other bs that might as well be part of the SCUM manifesto :)

I agree with most of what Dworkin says here, and it has been important for my ideological and perceptive development. It's also great that she's at least one radical feminist who isn't transfobic. I agree with most of radical feminism beside that major point and a few others.Unfortunately, as with anyone, I have my disagreements. For one, she gets academic in one chapter, reminding me of what I disliked most about Intercourse. She made far too much reference to a couple of creepy and disgusting

This is essential radical feminist reading but also a really good example of how we have to look at second wave texts critically instead of treating them as gospel. Much of this book is illuminating, but the conclusions she draws in the last chapter are very troubling & underexplained, and I do not believe overall indicative of how her beliefs developed. I would recommend this book for baby radfems both as a ecstatic primer to the horror & reach of patriarchy and as a wake up call to the need fo...

What sort of crack was Dworkin smoking when she wrote this book? It was her first publication, but that's surely no excuse. She makes some valid points about how misogynist our American society has been/is/can be, then goes on to say we as humans should be so free that we should be able to have sex with anyone we want, regardless of their age or even species. A lot of random ideas thrown together that make absolutely no sense and are, many of which, utterly horrifying.

I like to read things espousing extreme ideologies and have found some of the radical feminist stuff to be up the there with craziest.In a nutshell she hates Fairy Tales and Christianity. Somehow Islam is not mentioned once in this tome of feminal oppression documentation. The chapters on Chinese foot binding and middle ages witch hunts from Christians were actually interesting and well written. The insanity of the foot binding reminds me of the insanity of mass plastic surgery among Asian women...

I loved the first 3/4 of the book and was impressed by Dworkin the literary critic and historian. The ending, while well intended, was a bit of a train wreck. I didn't need to read about Julian Beck's cross dressing hard on (why is she so obsessed with him?) nor to see child abuser John Money's discredited gender frameworks used in ernst. The statements on parthenogenesis are completely false. No viable fetus has ever resulted from one person alone.

I had this book forever and finally got around to reading it. Of course I wish I'd read it sooner. The most amazing thing about Woman Hating is that everything Dworkin has to say about women is just as true today, in 2008, as it was when the book was published in 1974. Sure, some things have gotten better for women but other things have remained the same. Sexism is rampant in U.S. society today. Entertainment, music, fashion and so much else contiue to fly whatever flag sells their product while...

Everything I even thought I knew about Andrea Dworkin was wrong. I read this book, intrigued to know more about this feminist who seemed to be either loved or hated by so many. What I found was a passionate and painful book about what women (and trans people even) suffer in this world. It was full of, not ridiculous or outlandish leaps, but a true love of women and a desire for their liberation. It was an honest and aggressive attack on the horrible things women experience in this world, radical...

The first half was amazing then the book completely broke down toward the end and she ended up defending beastiality and incest??? No thanks

Andrea Dworkin's first published work of nonfiction, "Woman Hating," (1974), is a concise study of a variety of topics. The misogyny of fairy tales, Chinese foot-binding, and the slaughter of innocent women accused of being "witches" by the Christian Church, are succinctly examined in this text. Dworkin also provides a literary analysis of some famous works of pornography, including "The Story of O."The last part of the book is an examination of androgyny, both in the scientific biology of human...

I was hesitant to read anything by Andrea Dworkin because people in liberal feminist circles talked about how she was a bad and mean radical feminist . . . and that was really dumb of me. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and it gave me a lot to think about. She really does not pull any punches when discussing the hatred of women in society. I will definitely be reading more of her books.

Mostly ok but then in the last chapter she says we have to get over incest??? OK WHY??????

This was a great eye-opener for me. I hadn't considered matters from this point of view - probably, I hadn't considered anything at all except in a most superficial way.

This book is awesome if you never read the last chapter of it. The last chapter makes no sense and is quite disturbing to be quite honest, but the rest of the book is brilliant.

I loved this and I'm glad I read it, it's really powerful to read a feminist book that doesn't back down and a direct response to all of the pseudo-feminist ideas floating around today. Dworkin is super smart and such a bad-ass, I really loved reading her. She really had me up until that very last section on taboos... that was really crossing the line, in my opinion and I'm confused by the purpose it served. It seems like her argument about androgyny/the social construct of gender would've come

Although I did like the first part of the book on porn, footbinding and the witchtrials but the last part was so utterly terrible I really can't give this more than 1 star. The excuses for bestiality and incest made my blood boil. No matter how many different interpretations i've seen on these excerpts it all just reeks of MAP/kink positivity from the person you'd least expect it from. The writing style was rambling and not structured. A big mess with some quotes thrown in here and there. This w...

one of the best books I have ever read. It is a damning expose of patriarchy and all its machinations. Those who are not interested in critical thinking will criticize the form (the repetition) and not really make an attempt to delve into why they therefore dislike the content. Hint: there's not as much repetition as they claim. It's an elegantly written book and very hard to put down.

Had I ended before the second half, I would have given this five stars. Her writing on pornography and how it feeds directly into the domination-subordination dynamic and the sadomasochistic culture that defines patriarchy and sex-based oppression as it is experienced by females was phenomenal. Her exposé on Chinese footbinding was both harrowing and fantastic; I learned so much. Her musings on fairy tales and witches were captivating and offered many "hell yes!" and "aha!" moments alike.But the...

This one's a real mixed bag, I thought. Her strengths definitely lie in literary analysis and interesting writing. She's spot on when she talks about witch hunts and foot-binding. What she often excels at is presenting horrific facts in quite a dispassionate fashion, which for me increases their impact. The "facts" about fairies... well, I'll have to read up on what was accepted at the time, but right now I have no idea where she got that from. I found the second half of the book started to brea...

Some relevant and powerful commentary on misogyny in our society and throughout history, but the concluding chapter is shockingly absurd.

Finally. I feel like my eyes are bleeding. There was one useful chapter, the one in which she criticized Greer and the sexual politics of her contemporary leftists. The rest was a) dated b) just flat out BAD. Badly researched, bad science, bad sources. Intercourse is worth reading if you're interested in Dworkin. This is most definitely not, unless you like being told about outdated myths about matriarchal neolithic religion surviving into the middle ages and virgin birth being actually being a

My feelings regarding this book are.. confused. I consider myself a feminist for many reasons, and the ideology behind this text is important to me, but the structure and arguments of this book were not very intriguing. I found her arguments weak and ill-refined, with some relation to her cause, but not much. A lot of the chapters made me feel uncomfortable (in all the wrong ways), such as her aggressive opinions of incest and bestiality. However, I support this text and its pursuit for a more e...

A lot of really fascinating ideas, commentary, and history. The first three parts of the book — on fairy tales, pornography, and footbinding / witch-burning were both gripping and horrifying. I love how clever and perfect Dworkin's prose is; in hardly any words, she is biting and exact. I was not such a fan of the last part of the book, on androgyny, and the pro-heterosexuality, pro-incest, and pro-zoophilia utopia she describes. Interesting thoughts on punctuation in the angry afterword.

Love her work and her thought, but the empirical arguments in this book are hopeless. Almost none of the facts are true; nor are they particularly necessary for the philosophy expressed. Read Intercourse instead.

Her best book. The language is amazing, a rhetorically powerful argument about how the myths and ideals of femininity are harmful.

Easy to read(huge Trigger Warning aside) but her analysis does not go deep enough.