malina rusu

“She said my other photographs had a pervy feel, and she was almost impressed that such a young woman would come out with something this nasty. She said, based on both the work and my writing around it, I had a contemptuous attitude towards my models. I clearly saw them as interchangeable, disposable objects. She asked me if I hated men, or if I liked men and hated that I liked them so much.”
― Eliza Clark

“Domination, I have argued, is a twisting of the bonds of love. Domination does not repress the desire for recognition; rather, it enlists and transforms it. Beginning in the breakdown of the tension between self and other, domination proceeds through the alternate paths of identifying with or submitting to powerful others who personify the fantasy of omnipotence. For the person who takes this route to establishing his own power, there is an absence where the other should be. This void is filled with fantasy material in which the other appears so dangerous or so weak - or both - that he threatens the self and must be controlled. A vicious cycle begins: the more the other is subjugated, the less he is experienced as a human subject and the more distance or violence the self must deploy against him.”
― Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination

“In the most common fantasy of ideal love, [...], a woman can only unleash her desire in the hands of a man whom she imagines to be more powerful, who does not depend upon her for his strength. [...] The boundedness and limits within which one can surrender, and in which one can experience abandonment and creativity, are sought in the ideal lover. (p. 120)”
― Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination

“The transition from being hurt to hurting was natural. Even though I didn’t really know why he’d started crying – it felt like something I did. It felt like being a great big black widow and realizing that all the male spiders were tiny and weak and covered in soft vulnerable bits, whereas I had this hard, shiny thorax and great big teeth.”
― Eliza Clark