Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Claire Dederer

Quote by Claire Dederer

“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.”

Quote by Claire Dederer

Book:Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning
Create image

Work

Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Claire Dederer
Claire Dederer

Claire Dederer is an American writer born on January 6, 1967. Her works are known for their profound psychological insights and portrayals of women's lives. more

You May Also Like

“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).”

FeminismRomanticismHysteriaSameness
Book:Screened Out
Create image

“The particular challenge to those of us who work within the feminist antiviolence movement is to confront and dispel the myths we have created about ourselves as women and as feminists. We need to challenge the notion of women’s shared experiences and accept specificities of women’s experiences in relation to the complex matrix of social institutions, not just the patriarchy. We need to challenge the notion that women do not have real power in this society, and address how all of us are capable of using our various powers and privileges lovingly or abusively. We need to acknowledge the limitation of our feminist consciousness and ethics, and pursue structural remedies to hold ourselves accountable to each other as women and as fellow human beings.”

Feminism
Book:The Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology
Create image

“We men benefit, all of us men benefit, from rape culture. We benefit from the pain it causes women because we sprint ahead obliviously; we benefit from the way it knocks them off circuit and opens space for us; we benefit from the way it dehumanizes them so that our own humanity can shine more greatly; and we benefit from the aura of power it gives us as perpetrators or as beneficiaries. And because we benefit, explicitly or implicitly, we are not vociferous enough in our opposition to it.”

Feminism
Author:Teju Cole
Create image

“เมื่อเป็นแม่ ชีวิตผู้หญิงจะถูกสะบั้นจากความสัมพันธ์ส่วนตัวอื่น เธอถูกกันออกห่างจากสังคม และถูกจองจำไว้แค่ในบ้าน เธอได้รับอนุญาตให้ทำกิจกรรมใดๆ เพื่อลูกเท่านั้น ต้องอุทิศเวลา อารมณ์ความรู้สึก พลังงาน และเงินทองเพื่อลูก ต้องสร้างมนุษย์สัมพันธ์ที่มีลูกเป็นสื่อกลาง หากเผยตัวตนด้านอื่นนอกเหนือจากบทบาทแม่เมื่อไหร่ สังคมจะเคลือบแคลงคุณสมบัติการเป็นแม่ของเธอทันที”

Feminism
Book:82년생 김지영
Create image