blue

“And what is the value of this sexual object to men, since it is they who form her, use her, and give her what value she has? The pioneering male masochist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who spent most of his life bullying bewildered women into wearing furs and halfheartedly whipping him, candidly wrote in his diary that “my cruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which I terrorise myself.” The nature of the act does not change the nature of the act: the female is the instrument; the male is the center of sensibility and power. Roland Barthes, with himself as the lover, essentially endorses the same view of the object’s value and purpose: “Enough that, in a flash, I should see the other in the guise of an inert object, like a kind of stuffed doll, for me to shift my desire from this annulled object to my desire itself; it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“In the anorexic Young-Girl and in the ascetic ideal, there’s the same hatred of the flesh and the fantasy of reducing oneself to physical purity: the skeleton. The Young-Girl suffers from what we could call the "angel complex": She aspires to a perfection that would consist in having no body. Anorexia expresses, at the level of the commodity, the most incontinent disgust for them, and for the vulgarity of all wealth. In all of her bodily manifestations, the Young-Girl signifies an impatient rage to abolish matter and time. She is a body without soul dreaming she's a soul without a body.”
― Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl

“To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theater, with its appropriate costumes, decor, lighting, and stylized gestures. From early childhood on, girls are trained to care in a pathologically exaggerated way about their appearance and are profoundly mutilated (to the extent of being unfitted for first-class adulthood) by the extent of the stress put on presenting themselves as physically attractive objects.”
― Susan Sontag, On Women

“The contemporary radical feminist position is the direct descendant of the radical feminist line in the old movement. It sees feminist issues not only as women’s first priority, but as central to any larger revolutionary analysis. It refuses to accept the existing leftist analysis not because it is too radical, but because it is not radical enough: it sees the current leftist analysis as outdated and superficial, because this analysis does not relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system, the model for all other exploitative systems, and thus the tapeworm that must be eliminated first by any true revolution.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution