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Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley

“I once commented that in the sword-and-sorcery story, the seamy underside is always rape; that where men seek adventure, one of the things they seem to seek is women to be distributed as prizes or objects.”

Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Work

Sword and Sorceress

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Author

Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Zimmer Bradley

Marion Zimmer Bradley was an influential American science fiction and fantasy author known for her feminist perspective and exploration of gender roles. Her works spanned a wide range of genres from science fiction to fantasy, with her most famous series being 'The Mists of Avalon' and 'The Darkover' series. more

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“Une porte fermé, quelque chose qui guette derrière. Elle ne s'ouvrira pas si je ne bouge pas. Ne pas bouger; jamais. Arrêter le temps et la vie. Mais je sais que je bougerai. La porte s'ouvrira lentement et je verrai ce qu'il y a derrière la porte. C'est l'avenir. La porte de l'avenir va s'ouvrir. Lentement. Implacablement. Je suis sur le seuil. Il n'y a que cette porte et ce qui guette derrière. J'ai peur. Et je ne peux appeler personne au secours. J'ai peur.”

“Whatever your opinion of frequent sexual congress, let us assume for the purpose of this study that sensual sex should provide an increase in personal happiness, which was a widely held belief during the era we are discussing. A visual expression of the data we compiled regarding the subject's sexual activity shows happiness decreasing as sexual activity increases.”

“In this hysterical phase, it was, so to speak, the femininity of man which projected itself on to woman and shaped her as an ideal figure in his image. In Romantic love, the aim was not now to conquer the woman, to seduce her, but to create her from the inside, to invent her, in some cases as achieved Utopian vision, as idealized woman , in others as femme fatale, as star - another hysterical, supernatural metaphor. The Romantic Eros can be credited with having invented this ideal of harmony, of loving fusion, this ideal of an almost incestuous form of twin beings — the woman as projective resurrection of the same, who assumes her supernatural form only as ideal of the same, an artefact doomed henceforth to l'amour or, in other words, to a pathos of the ideal resemblance of beings and sexes - a pathetic confusion which substitutes for the dual otherness of seduction. The whole mechanics of the erotic changes meaning, for the erotic attraction which previously arose out of otherness, out of the strangeness of the Other, now finds its stimulus in sameness - in similarity and resemblance. Auto-eroticism, incest? No . Rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same eyeing up the other, investing itself in the other, alienating itself in the other - but the other is only ever the ephemeral form of a difference which brings me closer to me. This indeed is why, with Romantic love and all its current spin-offs, sexuality becomes connected with death: it is because it becomes connected with incest and its destiny - even in banalized form (for we are no longer speaking of mythic, tragic incest here; with modern eroticism we are dealing with a secondary incestuous form - of the protection of the same in the image of the other - which amounts to a confusion and corruption of all images). We have here then, in the end, the invention of a femininity which renders woman superfluous. The invention of a difference which is merely a roundabout copulation with its double. And which, at bottom, renders any encounter with otherness impossible (it would be interesting to know whether there was not any hysterical quid pro quo from the feminine in the construction of a virile, phallic mythology; feminism being one such example of the hystericization of the masculine in woman, of the hysterical projection of her masculinity in the exact image of the hysterical projection by man of his femininity into a mythical image of woman).”