The essence of pleasure is spontaneity |
The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee |
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood. |
The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn. |
The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk. |
The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grass blade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. |
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation. |
The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over. |
The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth |
The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion. |
The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. |
The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough. |
There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood ''what women want'' and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic. |
There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all |
There is no such thing as security. There never has been. |