For a man to say, “I have to leave work now because I need to do something with my kids,” it’s sometimes viewed as a career killer. He doesn’t have the right drive. So when they depart from their gender roles, they face some of the same restrictions.
I can’t mate in captivity.
If you’re going to have a male dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.
The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men’s talk than against the expectation of female silence.
Obviously, untangling sex from aggression and violence or the threat of it is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality.
I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.
Men tend to gain wholeness by acquiring the qualities that are wrongly called feminine.
Sex and race, because they are easy and visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour on which this system still depends.
Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.
Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style.
It feels as if childhood sexual abuse or domestic abuse of women in the home has increased but actually if you ask women of 60 or 70 years old, the incidence is about the same. We just didn’t know it.
Feminism is about friends and sisters and community.
Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.
Patriarchy 101 would have you believe otherwise, but you know – that’s just not true. Those inequalities are recipes for resentment. And, yes, the formula isn’t perfect yet. We don’t all have that. But we’re trying.
Prejudice marks a mental landmine.
Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we’ve always wanted.
Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.
I haven’t been in a job situation in which I was competing with other women. As a writer, you’re more likely to be treated as an individual.
A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying.
I did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself. Far from feeling guilty, it was the first time that I had taken responsibility for my own life.