Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.
Could women’s liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?
I dream that love without tyranny is possible.
Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.
The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.
Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more – also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.
Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their ‘true’ role.
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.
Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.
Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.
How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?
I’m a radical feminist, not the fun kind.
We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist – marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil.
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.
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.
The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.
Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
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.
Men often react to women’s words – speaking and writing – as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men – control, violence, insult, contempt – that no threat seems empty.
When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.