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The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

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Shannon Chakraborty

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“People have this idea of mothers, that we are soft and gentle and sweet. As though the moment my daughter was laid on my breast, the phrase I would do anything did not take on a depth I could have never understood before. This woman thought to come into my home and threaten my family in front of my child? She must not have heard the right stories about Amina al-Sirafi.”

FeminismMotherhood
Book:The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
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“[...] but back in grad school Annie told me that there are three types of attractive men. I don’t know if she came up with this taxonomy herself, if Aphrodite announced it to her in a dream, or if she stole it from Teen Vogue, but here they are: There is the cute type, which consists of guys who are attractive in a nonthreatening, accessible way, as a combination of their nice looks and captivating personalities. Tim falls into this group, just like Guy and most male scientists—including, I suspect, Pierre Curie. Come to think of it, all the guys who ever hit on me do, perhaps because I’m small, and dress quirky, and try to be friendly. If I were a dude, I’d be a Cute Guy™; Cute Guys™ recognize that at some elemental level, and they make passes at me. Then there’s the handsome type. According to Annie, this category is a bit of a waste. The Handsome Guy™ has the kind of face you see in movie trailers and perfume ads, geometrically perfect and objectively amazing, but there’s something inaccessible about him. Those guys are so dreamy, they’re almost abstract. They need something to anchor them to reality—a personality quirk, a flaw, a circumscribed interest—otherwise they’ll float away in a bubble of boredom. Of course, society doesn’t exactly encourage Handsome Guys™ to develop brilliant personalities, so I tend to concur with Annie: they’re useless. Last but not least, the Sexy Guys™. Annie would go on and on about how Levi is the epitome of the Sexy Guy™, but I’d like to formally object. In fact, I don’t even acknowledge the existence of this category. It’s preposterous, the idea that there are men you can’t help yourself from being attracted to. Men who give you the tingles, men you can’t stop thinking about, men who pop up in your brain like flashes of light after stimulation of the occipital cortex. Men who are physical, elemental, primordial. Masculine. Present. Solid. Sounds fake, right?”

RomanceFeminismRomance Book Quotes
Book:Love on the Brain
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“...man's love for woman, his sexual adoration of her, his human definition of her, his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation: physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That is the very nature of romantic love...he adores her deformity, annihilates her freedom, he will have her as sex object, even if he must destroy the bones in her feet to do it. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge as the substantive core of the romantic ethos.”

FeminismRadical Feminism
Book:Woman Hating
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“The brilliance of objectification as a strategy of dominance is that it gets the woman to take the initiative in her own degradation (having less freedom is degrading). The woman herself takes one kind of responsibility absolutely and thus commits herself to her own continuing inferiority: she polices her own body; she internalizes the demands of the dominant class and, in order to be fucked, she constructs her life around meeting those demands. It is the best system of colonialization on earth: she takes on the burden, the responsibility, of her own submission, her own objectification.”

FeminismObjectificationBeauty Standards
Book:Intercourse
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“And what is the value of this sexual object to men, since it is they who form her, use her, and give her what value she has? The pioneering male masochist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who spent most of his life bullying bewildered women into wearing furs and halfheartedly whipping him, candidly wrote in his diary that “my cruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which I terrorise myself.” The nature of the act does not change the nature of the act: the female is the instrument; the male is the center of sensibility and power. Roland Barthes, with himself as the lover, essentially endorses the same view of the object’s value and purpose: “Enough that, in a flash, I should see the other in the guise of an inert object, like a kind of stuffed doll, for me to shift my desire from this annulled object to my desire itself; it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.”

FeminismMasochism
Book:Pornography: men possessing women
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“In the turmoil of our time, we are being called to a new order of reality. Working toward that consciousness, we suffer, but our suffering opens us to the wounds of the world and the love that can heal. It is our immediate task to relate to the emerging feminine whether she comes to us in dreams, in the loss of those we love, in body disease, or in ecological distress. Each of us in our own way is being Brough face to face with Her challenge.”

FeminismGoddessJungianGoddess Spirituality
Book:Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
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“In the turmoil of our time, we are being called to a new order of reality. Working toward that consciousness, we suffer, but our suffering opens us to the wounds of the world and the love that can heal. It is our immediate task to relate to the emerging feminine whether she comes to us in dreams, in the loss of those we love, in body disease, or in ecological distress. Each of us in our own way is being brought face to face with Her challenge.”

FeminismJungian PsychologyGoddess Spirituality
Book:Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
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