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The Traitor Baru Cormorant

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Seth Dickinson

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“When you sit down to write a book about sex, as we hope you one day will, you will discover that centuries of censorship have left us with very little adequate language with which to discuss the joys and occasional worries of sex. The language that we do have often carries implicit judgments: If the only polite way to talk about sexuality is in medical Latin—vulvas and pudendas, penes and testes—are only doctors allowed to talk about sex? Is sex all about disease? Meanwhile, most of the originally English words—cock and cunt, fucking, and, oh yes, slut—have been used as insults to degrade people and their sexuality and often have a hostile or coarse feel to them. Euphemisms—peepees and pussies, jade gates and mighty towers—sound as if we are embarrassed. Maybe we are.”

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Book:The ethical slut: a guide to infinite sexual possibilities
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“(...) psychologist Wilhelm Reich theorized that the suppression of sexuality was essential to an authoritarian government. Without the imposition of antisexual morality, he believed, people would be free from shame and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. They would be unlikely to march to war against their wishes, or to operate death camps. Perhaps if we were raised without shame and guilt about our desires, we might be freer people in more ways than simply the sexual.”

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Book:The ethical slut: a guide to infinite sexual possibilities
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“And so our tutorials descended, from the metaphysical to the merely physical... not so much down to earth as down to the carpet, do you remember? That was the year of 'The Concept of Knowledge', your masterpiece, and the last decent title left after Ryle bagged 'The Concept of Mind' and Archie bagged 'The Problem of Mind' and Ayer bagged 'The Problem of Knowledge' - and 'The Concept of Knowledge' might have made you if you had written it, but we were still on the carpet when an American with an Italian name working in Melbourne bagged it for a rather bad book which sold four copies in London, three to unknown purchasers and the fourth to yourself. He'd stolen a march while you were still comparing knowledge in the sense of having-experience-of, with knowledge in the sense of being-acquainted-with, and knowledge in the sense of inferring facts with knowledge in the sense of comprehending truths, and all the time as you got more and more acquainted with, though no more comprehending of, the symbolic patterns on my Persian carpet, it was knowing in the biblical sense of screwing that you were learning about and maybe there's a book in you yet”

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Book:Jumpers
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“Did the women feel like I was deserting them by deciding to live as the other gender? Maybe for Dad and Charlie, it didn't seem strange to want to be male, since that's what they were. But Mom and Laura—and, of course, Eve—acted like I was betraying them somehow. Would I have to give them up if I wasn't a girl anymore? I hoped not. I hoped that changing my gender wouldn't mean losing my entire past.”

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Book:Parrotfish
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“Our beliefs about traditional marriage date from agrarian cultures, where you made everything you ate or wore or used, where large extended families helped get this huge amount of work done so nobody starved, and where marriage was a working proposition. When we talk about “traditional family values,” this is the family we are talking about: an extended family of grandparents and aunts and cousins, an organization to accomplish the work of staying alive.”

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Book:The ethical slut: a guide to infinite sexual possibilities
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