I am that same willing girl and these two anklets... are the same two that went to men for sex. I am the one who's poor now among us womenfolk, our natural-born modesty being our wealth. So, when I straddled him, ashamed when my memory came back, I panicked and recognized my own slender body. First I gave up my masculine ways. Then I gave up on him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one mi...ght say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent,... on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observ...able fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hand...s, of her bosom, of her knees, of her hair, of her supple and floating clothes, ... has contracted from this contact a tender skin and a distinct accent, a kind of androgyny without which the harshest and most masculine genius remains, as far as perfection in art is concerned, an incomplete being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All I ask, is the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me.... If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom ... I la...y down my quill and you shall hear no more of me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You have no word for soldiers to enjoy The feel of, as an apple, and to chew... With masculine satisfaction. Not "good-by!" "Come back!"or "careful!" Look, and let him go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A requirement of femininity is that a woman devote her life to love--to mother love, to romantic love, to religious love, to amorp...hous, undifferentiated caring. The territory of the heart is admittedly a province that is open to all, but women alone are expected to make an obsessional career of its exploration, to find whatever adventure, power, fulfillment or tragedy life has to offer within its bounds. There is no question that a woman is apt to feel more feminine, more confident of her interior gender makeup, when she is reliably within some stage of love--even the girlish crush or the stage of unrequited love or a broken heart. Men have suffered for love, and men have accomplished great feats in the name of love, but what man has ever felt at the top of his masculine form when he is lovesick or suffering from heartache?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »