Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter.
Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you’re just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.
Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Women’s liberation did not see the female’s potential in terms of the male’s actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.
Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband’s fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained.
If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescapable destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the ay a man might work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked for.
The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.
Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women – and has become an option for men – while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character.
Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women’s bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art nouveau, they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female.
Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial.
Women’s work, married or unmarried, is menial and low paid. Women’s right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be.
In ‘The Female Eunuch’ I argued that motherhood should not be treated as a substitute career; now I would argue that motherhood should be regarded as a genuine career option, that is to say, as paid work and, as such, as an alternative to other paid work. What this would mean is that every woman who decides to have a child would be paid enough to raise that child in decent circumstances.
Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.
Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them.
Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.
We still make love to organs and not people.
Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty.
Probably the commonest form of non-criminal rape is rape by fraud – by phoney tenderness or false promises of an enduring relationship, for example.
If a man punches you in the eye, you are not expected to have pleaded with him not to for the crime to be accepted as assault. If you are sitting at your cash register and someone demands the cash in it, you will not be accused of consent if you simply hand it over. Only in the prosecution of rape is evidence of resistance an issue.
In ‘The Female Fear: The Social Cost of Rape’, Margaret T Gordon and Stephanie Riger say that fully one-third of the women in their study reported worrying about rape once a month or more. Others said the the fear of rape is just something lives in the back of their minds at all times, even when it wasn’t present in conscious thought. Another third of the participants claimed to never worry about rape but even so they took precautions to guard against it.