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"When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar--who hands him the paper every morning."
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"Our basic relationship to sex mirrors our whole relationship to life."

"Philanderers and swingers can see nothing beyond the needs of their genitals. Sexual craving is a part of our biology, but it is not who we are."

"If you don't scare the neighbors while copulating, I'm afraid you're doing something terribly wrong."

"I thought masturbating was embarassing. I didn't even know why. It just was. It was like having sex with yourself. Having sex with yourself was really weird. Autoeroticism."

"It still strikes me as strange that anyone could have any moral objection to someone else's sexuality. It's like telling someone else how to clean their house."

"When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn't convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a "sick society," the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics."

"There is no such thing as "vaginal orgasm vs. "clitoral orgasm. The entire ring of tissues that surrounds the vaginal opening is connected to the clitoris by nerves and blood vessels. Ultimately all these tissues together are responsible for the female orgasm. This entire erogenous zone is often referred to as the "ring of fire."

"Sexuality is a private matter; some believe that broadcasting it destroys the very things that make it sacred."
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"We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred."

"What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her 'beauty' his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive."

"Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness."

"Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete."

"Only God, my dear, wrote Yeats blithely, 'Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair. This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines."

"Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - is innately disruptive of 'business as usual.' That is why it is effective."

"Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is 'done up' she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by 'beauty'--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him."

"Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty, women are allowed a mind or a body but not both."

"When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship."

"Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- 'fear societies' and 'free societies,' two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped.In contrast, the consciousness of freedom is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect."
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