Book detail: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book delves into the complexities of sex and gender, examining the intersection of these concepts with feminism. It provides a comprehensive look at the historical and contemporary aspects of gender identity and its impact on society.
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“They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Mind is a captive of the body.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The Devil is a woman.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink . It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct -- unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendance. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Profanation and violation are part of the perversity of sex, which never will conform to liberal theories of benevolence. Every model of morally or politically correct sexual behavior will be subverted by nature's daemonic law.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“What is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature's daemonic ugliness will erupt.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Sex IS power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“In sex, man is driven into the very abyss which he flees. He makes a voyage to non-being and back.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.'”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“Woman was an idol of belly-magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law... Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature... from this ... has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.
Hence, the sexes are caught in a comedy of historical indebtedness. Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom. Woman, at first content to accept man's protections but now inflamed with desire for her own illusory freedom, invades man's systems and suppresses her indebtedness to him as she steals them.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism
“I consider it completely irresponsible that public schools offer sex education but no systematic guidance to adolescent girls, who should be thinking about how they want to structure their future lives: do they want children, and if so, when should that be scheduled, with the advantages and disadvantages of each option laid out. Because of the stubborn biological burden of pregnancy and childbirth, these are issues that will always affect women more profoundly than men. Starting a family early has its price for an ambitions young woman, a career hiatus that may be difficult to overcome. On the other hand, the reward of being with one's children in their formative years, instead of farming out that fleeting and irreplaceable experience to day care centres or nannies, has an inherent emotional and perhaps spiritual value that has been lamentable ignored by second-wave feminism.”
Source: Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism