A Passion for Friends Quotes

“The world is what women make of it. This point is crucial—we must make something of it. This presupposes some kind of location in the ordinary world of human affairs, much of which is male-created. Friendship provides a point of crystallization for living in the ordinary world, not the pretense for exiting from it. Friendship does not automatically convey the means of living in the world or of making women into world-builders, but it does provide a location in that world.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“The sadomasochistic mentality and movement assimilate women into a sexual liberation that is none other than the unrestrained expression of male-defined sexual behavior, where sexual liberation is tantamount to doing whatever one “feels” like doing. We confront again the tyranny of feelings, where feelings are portrayed almost as deterministic sexual drives that must be expressed at all costs. This is a very reactionary mentality which in one sense replicates the cultural conception of male sexuality. Men have always been portrayed as “needing” to express their “natural” sexual urges.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“An unmentored daughter is an unnurtured daughter, unnurtured in the strength she needs to Survive as an original woman in this world. Daughters, as compared to sons in a hetero-relational family, are more undernurtured in all ways by mothers and pressured prematurely to become nurturers of others—mostly of men. What also happens in this context, as Denice Yanni has pointed out, is “a silencing of woman’s own needs for nurturing by making her the primary nurturer.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“Like “the tyranny of structurelessness,” the tyranny of tolerance has promoted an ethic of value freedom that has been allowed to stand as an unexamined principle among certain groups of women. From an unexamined principle, it is a short distance to an unexamined life.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“That two women could mean a great deal to each other while they awaited men to lead them to marriage and the real business of life is negligible; that they could believe that the real business of life is in meaning a great deal to each other and that men are only incidental to their lives—is of course frightening.82”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“Andrea Dworkin has written, “Creative intelligence…demands its right to consequence…always it wants recognition, influence, or power; it is an accomplishing intelligence.”54 Women who work day by day in the world with worldly integrity are the living proof that feminist thought, feminist intelligence, has “consequences.” Their work may not be the kind that is explicitly devoted to the teaching of Women’s Studies, to the campaigns against rape or pornography, or to the writing of women’s literature. However, it is work that clearly shows that women can master physical tasks, ideas, culture, and the wider world. It is an accomplishing work that has its creative roots in the world as women imagine it could be because it breaks women out of the world in which men have constricted women’s power and work. It is work that is involved in the complexity of the world through direct experience of it. Worldly integrity meets the world on its own turf, but not on its own terms.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“Men have established the patterns of language and of meaning in which acceptance of the present state of affairs is known as “realistic” and efforts to create a more feminist or woman-defined world are pejoratively called “utopian.” Thus, women who emphasize the necessity of vision are vulnerable to charges of distracting other women’s attention away from the real problems of women’s oppression and to accusations of romantic simplification or sentimentalizing. Anyone who proposes to speak about vision, especially that of seeing beyond the ordinary faculty of sight, is temporarily daunted by the “vision,” or should I say the “specter,” of being labeled “soft-brained.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“Constant and one-dimensional focus on the sharing of pain can drive women away from strong female friendships by obscuring the historical reality that women have been and can be for women in other than sisterly suffering ways. The emphasis on victimism also bolsters the conviction that female friendship can arise only for negative reasons: that is, because men are so bad or in reaction to the atrocities promoted by a misogynist culture. Here female friendship seems spawned by the results of the oppression of women. Thus in a better world, presumably one in which men “behave,” female friendship might not be necessary.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“Friendship that is characterized by thoughtful passion ensures that a friend does not lose her Self in the heightened awareness of and attachment to another woman.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female

“There is no such thing as pure relativism. Anything is seen from the eye of the viewer, from one of many angles or frames of reference. The fact that truth may be relative should not lead to the judgment that all values are on the same scale.”
― Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female