Lori

“Now, by all accounts, you have the perfect life: you have the high-earning husband, the rosy-cheeked children, and the Buick in the driveway. But something isn’t right. Household tasks don’t seem to hold your attention; you snarl at your children instead of blanketing them with smiles. You fret about how little you resemble those glossy women in the magazines, the ones who clean counters and bake cakes and radiate delight. (Looking at those ads, a housewife and freelance writer named Betty Friedan “thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor.”) Everything and everyone confirm that it’s just as you suspected: the problem is you. You’re oversexed, you’re undersexed, you’re overeducated, you’re unintelligent. You need to have your head shrunk; you need to take more sleeping pills. You ought to become a better cook—all those fancy new kitchen appliances!—and in the meantime be content and grateful with what you have. The cultural pressure of the 1950s was so intense that some women, in order to survive, killed off the parts of themselves that couldn’t conform.”
― Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s

“One paradox is that on matters of sex and family, working-class Americans tend to believe in traditional values even as they don’t necessarily adhere to them. Frustrated and overwhelmed by difficulties, they sometimes don’t show the discipline that they believe in. In contrast, educated liberals are less judgmental and say in polls that they accept premarital sex and various living arrangements, but they have relatively few lifetime sexual partners and are less likely to divorce. In short, while the educated don’t profess traditional values, they are more likely to live them and to try to get their children to live them. Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia who runs the National Marriage Project, calls this “talking left, walking right.” In contrast, young working-class conservatives disapprove of hookups even as they engage in them. Effectively, they talk right and walk left.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“If men knew how often women are filled with white-hot rage when we cry, they would be staggered, I remember someone saying the other day, through the groaning static of my house's ancient intercom system. We self-objectify and lose the ability to even recognize the physiological changes that indicate anger. Mainly, though, we get sick. And oh, how true that is: We sicken, we are consumed, laughing wild amidst severest woe. We flourish with illnesses that have no cure and a thousand different names. Hysteria, the lung, wandering womb syndrome. Our own immune systems turn against us, fight us as if we ourselves were diseases, infestations. We wither, we swell, miscarry, grow phantom pregnancies, ingest our babies and turn them to stone. Our wounds fester, turn inside-out. Our equipment rusts and degenerates from over-use or lack of use or potential for use alike, decays within us, sliming blackly over the rest of our pulsing, stuttering interiors. Things get lost inside us: penises, forceps, scalpels. No maps to the interior. And every once in a while, we simply flush our systems without adequate warning, drooling blood in clots from inconvenient areas, dropping squalling flesh-lumps everywhere—in trash-cans, in bathrooms, shoved under beds and swaddled in bloodied plastic, buried shallowly, immured behind walls that bulge with black mould-stains, pumping out flies.”
― Gemma Files, Hymns of Abomination

“Dykes, kikes, spics, micks, fags, drags, gooks, spooks . . . more of us are outsiders than aren’t; and that’s what the dear young ones too often fail to understand. They think they’ve learned it all by age fifteen. Perhaps they have. But they’re not the only ones who’ve learned it.”
― W.H. Pugmire, An Imp of Aether