This is Dworkin's battle cry, a direct appeal to the audience of women. She is reminding them that they are at a Take Back the Night march, an event in which they will literally form a bodily barricade as they move through the streets to protest violence against women. She contextualizes her speech with this call to action, bringing both activists and survivors of assault into the present moment.

In the "Diotima" excerpt of Plato's Symposium, Socrates and Diotima discuss the nature of love. The concepts of love and romance are often conflated, but Dworkin's rhetoric combats the notion that men are seeking out women for love. Rather, she argues that men use romance as a pretense for their sinister desires to abuse and take advantage of women.

Here, Dworkin lists the three supposed actions of women in the thralls of romance. The first phrase, "spread their legs", is a crude depiction of what she almost immediately goes on to describe as falling in love. Dworkin herself is not arguing that having sex is the equivalent of falling in love, but that women are coerced into sleeping with men, predators, with the hope or expectation that love and intimacy will follow.

It is significant to note that Dworkin was an activist during the second wave of feminism, in which one prevailing radical feminist notion was that all heterosexual sex was rape even if it seemed consensual, because there is an inherent power imbalance between men and women. In describing the victims of predators, vampires, as "submitting" to their death in an analogy to rape victims, perhaps Dworkin is referencing this idea that women who have sex with men are being raped, intrinsically.

Here, Dworkin purposefully acknowledges the members of the audience and uses "we" to align herself with them. In referring to the audience as "women" she is reminding them that the subject of her speech--rape and the predatory nature of men--applies to all of them, to the jeopardizing of their safety that is inherent in the night.

Dworkin dismisses male sexuality as intrinsically loathing of women, and of life in general. One might recognize this as her identifying the misogynistic nature of Plato's idea of love in "Diotima", who claims that the character of men's love is their impregnating of women, so that they may have children together who will carry on the men's bloodlines. Perhaps Dworkin is demonstrating that this inclination to impregnate women so that the men can achieve immortality through their descendants disregards the lives of the women, as their legacies and mortalities are seemingly of no concern to the men.

Dworkin's description of men using the night to make women disappear is reminiscent of Helene Cixous' argument that women are caught in the snare of silence, and therefore the feminine perspective is not present in writing. Both Dworkin and Cixous speak on the dire nature of the lack of female voice, particularly as a result of the dominance of men.

Helene Cixous, in "The Laugh of Medusa", calls women to bring themselves into history by writing, specifically by writing from the feminine perspective, as this is something men cannot and will not do. Here, Dworkin similarly calls women to use their voices, their words, to fight back against gender violence.

Dworkin's speech is especially interesting when considered through the lens of Sally Miller Gearhart's "The Womanization of Rhetoric", in which Gearhart argues that all rhetoric is inherently violent, and that this violence must be combatted by feminizing rhetoric and making it less about aggressive persuasion of the listener by the rhetor. This is ironic considering Dworkin's aim, like that of many if not all rhetors, is to persuade; in attempting to speak out against gender violence and persuade the audience of women to take a stand against sexual violence both outside at night and in the home, Dworkin is, Gearhart might argue, committing a rhetorical act of violence herself.

Her inclusion of herself in the "we" of women being afraid of the night because of the danger it poses to women and the advantage is provides men is meant to demonstrate Dworkin's own vulnerability. She reminds the audience that despite her use of vulgarities, she too is a woman at risk of being harmed by men. This lends her rhetoric a sense of personal sympathy.

Dworkin sets the audience, largely of women, in opposition to men. She reminds the audience of their vulnerability at night, and she directly accuses the guilty party: all men. She does not say "some men" or "dangerous men", but simply "men". There are no qualifiers. Dworkin declares to the audience that men are a direct threat, without exception.

By directly comparing men to vampires and arguing that men romancing women is synonymous with monsters hunting their prey, Dworkin instills a sense of fear in the audience. This appeal to pathos persuades readers that women in this society are subjugated by instilling in them the same fright that Dworkin claims the night itself instills in women.

It is interesting that this comparison of men to vampires holds up decades later, particularly with the rise of such literary phenomenons as Interview with a Vampire and Twlight.

Russian roulette is a game of chance, a gambling of one's life. Dworkin compares the life of a woman to this deadly game to force the audience of women to reckon with the inherent vulnerability of their very existence in a society in which they can be attacked and violated by men both outside at night and in their own homes.

Dworkin uses jarring language, such as pinned down and possessed, to shock the audience and to convey the violent and objectifying nature of the confinment of women indoors at night.

The "struggle" to which Dworkin refers could be either the figurative struggle of women to be free from the sexist boundaries of a society in which they fear gender violence, or the literal physical struggle of women who are attacked by the men who peretrate this gender violence.

This line is a sharp contrast to a previous line describing men as doing their "so-called lovemaking at night". While "fuck" and "making love" are phrases both used to say sexual intercourse, making love implies intimacy and sweetness, while fucking suggests an action that is rough, even brutal. Dworkin amends "lovemaking" to "fuck" to demonstrate that what may be percieved as an act of love by men is actually an act of violent oppression.

This is the earliest instance in which Dworkin uses coarse language to convey that women are poorly treated by this patriarchal society. She refers to women who go out alone at night as "sluts" and "bitches" to remind an audience of women marching against gender/domestic violence of how much of of world, particularly the men of the world, perceive them.