Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Elizabeth Peters

Quote by Elizabeth Peters

“Nefret was still pouting when Emerson helped her into the carriage. Emerson did not observe the pout. He would not have observed it (men being what they are) even if something had not distracted him.”

Quote by Elizabeth Peters

Book:The Hippopotamus Pool
Create image

Work

The Hippopotamus Pool

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Elizabeth Peters

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Elizabeth Peters. more

You May Also Like

“I’m going to say this once here, and then—because it is obvious—I will not repeat it in the course of this book: not all boys engage in such behavior, not by a long shot, and many young men are girls’ staunchest allies. However, every girl I spoke with, every single girl—regardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance—had been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three. Who, then, is truly at risk of being “distracted” at school? At best, blaming girls’ clothing for the thoughts and actions of boys is counterproductive. At worst, it’s a short step from there to “she was asking for it.” Yet, I also can’t help but feel that girls such as Camila, who favors what she called “more so-called provocative” clothing, are missing something. Taking up the right to bare arms (and legs and cleavage and midriffs) as a feminist rallying cry strikes me as suspiciously Orwellian. I recall the simple litmus test for sexism proposed by British feminist Caitlin Moran, one that Camila unconsciously referenced: Are the guys doing it, too? “If they aren’t,” Moran wrote, “chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit.’” So while only girls get catcalled, it’s also true that only girls’ fashions urge body consciousness at the very youngest ages. Target offers bikinis for infants. The Gap hawks “skinny jeans” for toddlers. Preschoolers worship Disney princesses, characters whose eyes are larger than their waists. No one is trying to convince eleven-year-old boys to wear itty-bitty booty shorts or bare their bellies in the middle of winter. As concerned as I am about the policing of girls’ sexuality through clothing, I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others’ pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality. I recall a conversation I had with Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and perhaps the foremost expert on teenage girls’ sexual desire. In her work, she said, girls had begun responding “to questions about how their bodies feel—questions about sexuality or arousal—by describing how they think they look. I have to remind them that looking good is not a feeling.”

GirlsDress CodesSelf Objectification
Author:Peggy Orenstein
Create image

“Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana’s campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing “good sex.” “Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm,” Herbenick said. “Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men.” The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it’s become disproportionately common in porn—and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List—it’s also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old—and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?—found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being “naïve or flawed,” unable to “relax.” Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal “the new oral.” “Since all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she said, “anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’” And still, she added, “girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. “It’s a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don’t want to do it you’re suddenly not good enough, you’re frigid, you’re missing out, you’re not exploring your sexuality, you’re not adventurous.”

SexGirlsAnal SexSexual Pressure
Book:Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape
Create image

“Линн прекрасна в своей печали. Ее бойфренд годами будет гулять с ней по ночам, в надежде увидеть ее улыбку. Я всегда полагала, что ребятам нравятся веселые, контактные и остроумные девушки. Но, как правило, куда действеннее мрачно смотреть фильм о дикой природе и заставлять мужчину гадать, о чем ты думаешь после секса.”

LoveSexGirls
Book:Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Create image

“I didn’t see Danny come in or run towards me. He was just suddenly there, pulling me up by my arm so hard that I gasped. I felt his grip on my skin long after he let go. We ran down the steps where Mom met us, coughing. She was followed by a thick black cloud of smoke. I had never felt smoke that hot in my life. I tasted ash when I breathed in. “Go! Get out!” she choked, waving us towards the front door. We ran out into the night in our pajamas. “Run to Violet’s!” Mom called behind us. - The Stable House”

GirlsMiddle Grade90 S
Author:Laura Smith
Create image

“Did I ever tell you that we used to keep our horses where your house is?” “Yeah,” I mumbled. She continued her story, “My brothers used to get up early every morning and go across the street, well, there wasn’t a street there yet. It was just a dirt road, and they used to get up and clean the stables and feed the horses every morning. I would go over there once they had finished and give the horses a brush, even though none of those horses were mine. I had always wanted my own horse, but I never got one. When my father got older, he got rid of the horses and sold the land, all but this yard here." She spread her hand over the yard as she said this. "I grew up and got married and had to move away. My husband and I lived in an apartment above a bread store. And it was so cramped, let me tell you. There was nowhere to move around and no yard to take care of. It was terrible. I’m not saying I wanted my husband to die. I’d never have wished that in a million years. But I was so relieved to come home after two years, and I've lived here ever since." I had stopped raking, turned and looked at her. "I know why you don’t want to leave this street," she said, "You’ve been in that house your whole life, just like me. And no matter where you go it’s not going to seem like home. But just like me, you’re going to come back. You have to remind yourself of that. And I did hate being away from home, but it was the most memorable time in my life, being away. It was an adventure as much as it was scary. But when I came home, I learned to get out more. I went to beauty school and got a job at the salon and took trips with friends. I like to get away from the house so that I can come back and still appreciate it. And you will too after you come back.” I nodded at Violet. What she was saying made sense. “I’ll go,” I said, “Tell them I’ll go.” - The Stable House”

GirlsMiddle Grade90 S
Author:Laura Smith
Create image

“Hoarded things might easily become a menace; a mere fire-and-theft risk; a breeding-ground for destructive insects; a source of worry. Men would have plenty of anxieties, but there was no sense in accumulating worries over THINGS! That kind of worry destroyed your character. Even an unused coat, hanging in your closet—it wasn't merely a useless thing that did nobody any good; it was an active agent of destruction to your life. And your LIFE must be saved, at all costs. What would it advantage a man—Jesus had demanded—if he were to gain the whole world, and lose his own life?”

LifePhilosophyJesus ChristThings
Book:The Robe
Create image