 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. |
| 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. |
| Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it. |
| Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are. |
| No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it. |
| A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. |
| Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not. |
| Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine. |
| Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis. |
| Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do. |
| Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating. |
| The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable. |
| No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth. |
| Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact. |
| The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other. |
| Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. |
| All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men. |
| Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use. |
| You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love. |
| 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. |
