Contramasculinity: the apparent selflessness of the female, who allows every man who comes her way to shape her; her lack of resis...tance, her limitlessness, that softness and pliancy which basically never take seriously the shape the man gives her. She is always capable of being molded to new shapes: this is what a man describes as the harlot in her, a basic element of the female character that he can never fathom. One might also call it playacting. Playing at being somebody different, at dressing up. When a man wraps himself in a costume, is he not in fact taking a step in the direction of perversion, femininity, contramasculinity?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning.... Selfishness is like listening to good jazz With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did ...in the cut-throat, competitive world in which I spent my life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Physical love, so unjustly decried, forces everyone to manifest even the smallest bits of kindness he possesses, of selflessness, ...that they shine in the eyes of all who surround him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He prayed more deeply for simple selflessness than he had ever prayed before--and, feeling an uprush of grace in the very intentio...n, shed the night in his heart and called it light. And walking out of the little church he felt confirmed in not only the worth of his whispered prayer but in the realization, as well, that Christ had become man and not some bell-shaped Corinthian column with volutes for veins and a mandala of stone foliage for a heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By hero, we tend to mean a heightened man who, more than other men, possesses qualities of courage, loyalty, resourcefulness, char...isma, above all, selflessness. He is an example of right behavior; the sort of man who risks his life to protect his society's values, sacrificing his personal needs for those of the community. Virgil's Aeneas is a hero in this sense of the word. He devotes his warrior skills, his pleasures, and finally his life to the historical destiny of founding Rome. Dante climbing to heaven in the Divine Comedy is a hero. Sergeant York risking his life to "end all wars" is a hero.... There is, of course, another sort of heightened man who bulks large in the popular imagination.... He is not "loyal," not a model of right behavior. Quite the contrary, he fascinates because he undermines the expected order. He possesses the qualities of the "hero": skill, resourcefulness, courage, intelligence. But he is the opposite of selfless. He is hungry; "heightened," not as an example, but as a presence, a phenomenon of sheer energy. One thinks of certain sports heroes, who boast and indulge their whims; who cannot be relied on, not because they are treacherous, but because the order of their needs is purely idiosyncratic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »