The fundamental impulse of the movement is neither masturbatory nor concretely lesbian--although it of course offers warm houseroo...m to both these possibilities; it is an impulse to maidenhood--to that condition in which a woman might pretend to a false fear or loathing of the penis in order to escape from any responsibility for the pleasure and well-being of the man who possesses it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To the small naked children, running lightly in the sun beneath the palm-trees, the little girl's sex membership is as clear as he...r brother's, but there is less that she can do with it. When she trips and falls, she clutches at her head, or tries to fold her arms across her chest. Her femininity is concealed deep within her, nothing that she can touch and see, depend upon or flaunt. In those societies where children's sex membership is recognized by adults, in which the men treat the little girls with flirtatious attention and the women tease and challenge the small boys, the little girls respond with movements of the entire body, which undulates and postures in delicious indulgence of feminine response. The small boy struts, sometimes with emphasis on his penis, more often carrying hatchet, knife, stick, pole, in upward positions as he marches, parries, performs. His behaviour, however symbolic, is to the extent that it is male a concentrated phallic exaggeration, while his sister's is more diffuse and involves the whole body. The little boy is sure about his specific maleness, but seems not to be so sure of his adequacy to operate it. He supplements with various symbolic objects. Very often he shouts, adding the vigour of his voice to the vigour of his posturing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in ...it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Surrealism ... is the forbidden flame of the proletariat embracing the insurrectional dawn--enabling us to rediscover at last the ...revolutionary moment: the radiance of the workers' councils as a life profoundly adored by those we love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men mar...ried them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the struggle against sexism demands the destruction of the American state, and ... the immediate personal nature of sexism req...uires struggle against men who enforce that oppression as well as its institutions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Co...ngress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »