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We are expected to play down our power, a trait that is never prized in women: “competent” still means “masculine.”
A government that sets itself up as an all-powerful mother is a fascistic government. Citizens of a dictatorship revert to being babies: they are fed, changed, and kept in a crib by an ever-present power that knows everything, is capable of anything, and wields complete power over them for their own good. Individuals are stripped of their autonomy, of their right to make mistakes, to put themselves in harm’s way.
Rape is civil war, the political position by which one sex says to the other: I can take away all your rights, I can force you to feel inferior, guilty, and humiliated.
Society really has a thing for the woman in peril. Once they have labeled her, society makes sure that she pays a heavy price for straying from the straight and narrow, and for doing it in public.
It is not pornography itself that worries the elite, but the democratization of pornography.
Considered taboo, inconceivable until quite recently, the idea of the female orgasm did not appear in everyday language until the 1970s. It was quickly turned against women in two different ways. Firstly, by telling women that if they did not have an orgasm, they were failures. Frigidity became almost synonymous with barrenness. But a woman failing to have an orgasm is not like male impotence: a frigid woman is not sterile. Nor is she incapable of sensuality. But instead of being regarded as a possibility, the female orgasm quickly became an imperative. That’s the thing about women, we always
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In a man, not liking women is a pose. In a woman, not liking men is a pathology. Can
Little things. Dainty things. Feminine. But booze: masculine. Hanging with your crew: masculine. Playing the fool: masculine. Earning wads of cash: masculine. Having a flashy car: masculine. Behaving how you like: masculine. Smoking spliffs and sniggering: masculine. Being competitive: masculine. Being aggressive: masculine. Wanting to fuck loads of people: masculine. Reacting violently to a threat: masculine. Not taking the time to look your best in the morning: masculine. Wearing clothes because they’re practical: masculine. Everything fun is masculine, everything that makes it possible to
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Obviously, being a woman is difficult. Fears, constraints, required to be silent, expected to fall in with a system that has long since had its day—a panoply of idiotic, pointless limitations. We are still the aliens, the ones expected to do the dirty work and churn out the raw materials while keeping a low profile. But compared to being a man, it’s a walk in the park … Because in the end, we’re not the ones who are most terrorized, most helpless, most shackled. Ours has always been the gender of endurance, of courage, of resistance. Not that we had a choice.
