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Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination

Book by Sheila Jeffreys · 11 quotes · Feminism, Misogyny, Radical Feminism

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Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination Quotes

“Under the guise that their predilections were about something biological - a misplaced female mind in a male body rather than sexual excitement - they have represented themselves as an oppressed minority akin to homosexuals. This has enabled them to infiltrate their fantasies and priorities into policy making at local and national levels, health policy, sports policy, education policy, prison policy.”

“Women and girls need single sex toilets to avoid men's sexual harassment and aggression. In the UK in 2018, it was reported that just under 90% of complaints regarding changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism and harassment were about incidents in unisex facilities, and two thirds of all sexual harassment in leisure centres and public swimming pools were in unisex changing rooms.”

“Men who practice transvestism as an expression of the male sex right have been turned into a rights-bearing category, an oppressed minority whose excitements have precedents over the dignity, safety, and civil and political freedoms of women, and even the existence of women as a social and biological category. This achievement has depending upon obscuring their sexual motivations in favour of the idea that they are somehow essentially female in their heads.”

“There can be no liberation of women without a complete transformation of the way that male sexuality is constructed. Whilst the eroticising of women's subordination remains the basis of what is seen as sex, women cannot escape coercion in the bedroom, sexual harassment on the streets and at work, and the requirement to service men's excitements in the way they dress and behave. Women's appearance, behaviour, body language, opportunities are shaped by this 'duty'.”

“The most obvious proof that male sexuality is constructed to be abusive is the fact that men do not rape women in the breakfast cereal isle of the local supermarket. They are not subject to forces beyond their control. Men's sex right is socially constructed and expressed only where there is likely to be no immediate sanction. Men's sexual violence towards women is a product of their minds and not their biology.”

“Men's sexual violence in all these forms ensures women's awareness of their second class status and constructs the way in which women interact with the world. However, many of the forms of men's sexual violence are not taken seriously, they are blamed on women, hidden, or compartmentalised so that the whole picture of how women's lives are affected cannot be grasped.”

“The forms of men's fetish behaviour that have been unleashed in recent decades are not private. They do not consist of fantasies that men keep to themselves but affect women profoundly. In some cases, as with contemporary men's transvestism, they threaten the whole understanding of what women are, attack the very basis of feminism and destroy women's human rights because the men actually claim to be women.”