I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers-overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print and experience what they call "the street" at cocktail parties. vii
We are poorer than men in money and so we have to barter sex or sell it outright (which is why they keep us poorer in money). We are poorer than men in psychological well-being because for us self-esteem depends on the approval – frequently expressed through sexual desire – of those who have and exercise power over us. 127
I doubt if it is possible to feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior. 170
She seized his hair, hurled him to the ground, and placing her foot on his head, exclaimed: “Tremble, great enemy. You now lie under the foot of a woman.” (St. Margaret speaking to Lucifer) 93
When those who dominate you get you to take the initiative in your own human destruction, you have lost more than any oppressed people yet has ever gotten back. 143
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. 50
The illegal fuck, for instance, keeps the prostitute incarcerated in a ghetto hellhole of sexual subservience while the legal fuck keeps the wife used, controlled, sexually subservient, in the home. 167
The immorality of women is stressed: a woman would rather be convicted of any moral outrage – lying, cruelty, dissoluteness – in the presence of a man she wants than to be seen in an ugly dress. 15
The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets to close. 21
She learned from them the way a genius learns: she did not repeat them in form or in content; she invented new form, new content, a revolutionary resistance. 95
For the two people, touching each other naked, absolutely naked, and skinless absolutely skinless, is life itself; and when the touching stops, when the intercourse stops, when one person is no longer naked, it is as if the skin of the other had in fact been torn off. 32
Being naked does unnerve the men: it is an ordeal; and being looked at is nearly a terror. The men seem to distract themselves from their own nakedness by looking at women in an abstracting or fetishizing way; the voyeurism, the displaced excitement (displaced to the mind), puts the physical reality of their own nakedness into a dimension of numbed abstraction. 33
It is often pathetic, not noble, because the consequences to a human life of sex desired and had are often pathetic, reducing the person to pathos. Being marked by sexuality means that experience has effects – that one is marked where one has been touched, and the mark stays; that one is not new, nor is one plastic and rubber, a blow-up doll for sex. 40
There is indelible sorrow, perhaps a distinctly human incapacity to heal, because some kinds of pain do not lessen in the human heart. 42
Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart – and I have all those things – aren’t taken away, but grow! Increase with years! How strange that I should be called a destitute woman! When I have all of these treasures locked in my heart. 44
Remarkably, it is not the man who is considered possessed in intercourse, even he (his penis) is buried inside another human being; and his penis is surrounded by strong muscles that contract like a fist shutting tight and release with a force that pushes hard on the tender thing, always so vulnerable no matter how hard. 64
Intercourse may not cause women’s orgasm or even have much of a correlation with it – indeed, we rarely find intercourse and orgasm in the same place at the same time – but intercourse and women’s inequality are like Siamese twins, always in the same place at the same time pissing in the same pot. 128
We take oaths to truth all right, on the holy penis before entry. In so doing, we give up the most important dimension of what it means to be human: the search for the meaning of our real experience, including the sheer invention of that meaning – called creativity when men do it. If the questions make the holy penis unhappy, who could survive what the answers might do? 134
Male dominance does best, after all, when men do not generally speaking, fuck themselves to death by fucking whatever moves. Restraint is a key to power. 158
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex
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