I have always laid it down as a maxim--and found it justified by experience--that a man and a woman make far better friendships th...an can exist between two of the same sex--but then with the condition that they never have made or are to make love to each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are intensely loyal to our parents. In spite of the pain we experienced at our parent's hands, we cling tenaciously to their vi...ews of life; and their examples of what it is to be a man or a woman follow us throughout life. Acknowledging the power of our loyalty to them, and especially our loyalty to our same-sex parent, is only the beginning of our journey to improve upon their model; but it is at least a first step.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The New Women! I could barely recognise them as being of the same sex as myself, their buttocks arrogant in tight jeans, openly in...viting, breasts falling free and shameless and feeling no apparent obligation to smile, look pleasant or keep their voices low. And how they live! Just look at them to know how! If a man doesn't bring them to orgasm, they look for another who does. If by mistake they fall pregnant, they abort by vacuum aspiration. If they don't like the food, they push the plate away. If the job doesn't suit them, they hand in their notice. They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me, because of the image they've made of me--and that I've made of myself--as a... sex symbol. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman's and I can't live up to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spo...ntaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation's sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration). Lovemaking cannot be totally classical unless it is also totally baroque, since you cannot abandon all restraints and so attain a classical intensity. In practice, however, most people are more inclined to one mode than to the other. A very classical person will be incompatible with a very baroque person unless each can bring out the other's latent opposite side. Two people who are very one-sided in the same direction can be extremely compatible but risk missing a whole dimension of experience unless they get so deeply into one mode that it becomes the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
In movies about women, all important historical and natural events are translated into the terms of a woman's daily life. World Wa...r I is not about the Allies versus the Kaiser. It's about how unmarried women become pregnant when they have sex. The Depression is not about an economic collapse. It's about runs in stockings, no money for carfare, and being forced out into the streets. Natural disasters like earthquakes and cholera epidemics are defined by miscarriages and dying children. Everything is couched in terms of what are presumed to be the major events of a woman's life: men, marriage, motherhood, and all the usual "feminine" things. At the same time that big events are made small, personal, small events are made huge.... Thus, the woman's film is a genre that generously empowers a sex that society has relegated to secondary status.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narr...owest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat.... It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit--a twenty-second best.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »