“We should treat our sexual partners with dignity. We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all of our sexual relationships, regardless of whether they are gay or straight. We should prioritise virtue over desire. We should not assume that any given feelings we discover in our hearts (or our loins) ought to be acted upon”
Source: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century
“The atmosphere of uncertainty, dissatisfaction and fear, though caused by larger crisis, becomes associated with the fact that women now have jobs or are no longer in the home as a warm and welcoming presence. Identified then with the bad feelings of change, women came to be seen as the cause of the badness. And not only to men - but to women too, these strains and dissatisfactions, and being made to take responsibility for being the cause of them, often seems too high a price to pay for their new freedoms.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“For women, the life choices (which by in large are made for them by their societies) come down to one of two evils - either the overloaded worker / wife / mother with her double burden, or the underoccupied housewife / drone with her half-life of deprivation and despair.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“Ich hatte mich immer darauf gefreut, alt zu werden, und das auch überall lauthals verkündet. Seit den Heldenanfängen hatte ich eine seltsame Sehnsucht nach dem Jenseits-Davon gehabt, mich auf Partys zielsicher neben Leute aus meiner Elterngeneration gesetzt und mein Alter auf Anfrage eher hoch- als runtergerechnet.
Womit ich nicht gerechnet hatte, war das Dazwischen, die uneindeutige, demütigend lange Zeit zwischen Fräuleinwunder und Lebenswerk. Denn das ist es, wofür der Pop keine Toleranz hat. Für Frauen, die ein kleines bisschen alt sind und nicht mehr ganz jung. So wie der Pop auch Frauen wie Beth Ditto und Lizzo feiert, als dickes Feigenblatt einer anorektischen Kultur, durchschnittliche mitteldünne Frauen mit runden Schultern und Hüften aber nicht mal mit der Zange angefasst.”
Source: Die Träume anderer Leute
“Garment makers are rarely in the business of making clothes that will work for actual people. Instead, they cater to a fantasy of who the customer hopes to be.”
Source: Butts: A Backstory
“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”
“Now knowledge became the high road to control, and for women the pen had one major advantage over the sword; it fitted neatly into a female fist of any size, age, creed or country in the word.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“While there was work to be done, women did it, and behind the vivid foreground activities of popes and kings, wars and discoveries, tyranny and defeat, working women wove the real fabric of the kind of history that has yet to receive its due.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“The feminist rejection of the low view of women that Christianity had imposed upon so many nations had an important consequence for another of the key issues of the women's rights campaign: the demands for education. The ignorance of women had been bound in with Christian dogma - Eve's sin consisted of reaching out for the tree of knowledge, so her punishment was to be forever deprived of it. Unchallenged for centuries, this attitude produced generations of women doomed to be brought up in mental darkness and then condemned as stupid: "We are educated to the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason," complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bitterly in the eighteenth century.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
“The rights that women had won through the long century and more of struggle were essentially rights of men. Women had had no option but to batter their way into the age-old fortress of male privilege, and storm the citadel where masculine supremacy still held out.”
Source: Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World