The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.
Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.
Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.
Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.
No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.
It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can see and so one can say, ‘There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty patch.
It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.
A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.
Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.
If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.
How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?
As long as there is rape… there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become. You are not going to live in the world you want to live in.
Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.
Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny it is the political defense of women hating.
While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.
Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.