If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to r...eason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now that our sexual experience is increasingly available to us as a subject for contemplation, we have to extend our language to e...xpress our new consciousness until we have as many words for sexuality as the Eskimo has for snow, that pervasive, beautiful, and mortal climate in which we all live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Class, race, sexuality, gender--and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other--need to be excavated from ...the inside.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Traditionally, marriage involved a kind of bartering, rather than mutual inter-dependence or role sharing. Husbands financially an...d economically supported wives, while wives emotionally, psychologically and socially supported husbands. He brought home the bacon, she cooked it. He fixed the plumbing, she the psyche.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American ideal ... of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and I...ndians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden--as an unpatriotic act--that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the tr...ansgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The advantage man enjoys, which makes itself felt from his childhood, is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter... to his destiny as a male. Through his identification of phallus and transcendence, it turns out that his social and spiritual successes endow him with a virile prestige. He is not divided. Whereas it is required of woman that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject. It is this conflict that especially marks the situation of the emancipated woman. She refuses to confine herself to her role as female, because she will not accept mutilation; but it would also be a mutilation to repudiate her sex. Man is a human being with sexuality; woman is a complete individual, equal to the male, only if she too is a human being with sexuality. To renounce her femininity is to renounce a part of her humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism.... Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women'...s sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental love...r differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »