The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer–the romantic–asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’) it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is ‘normal, ’ that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. . Adrienne Rich
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother. - Martha Gellhorn
  2. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."" Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes,... - Jane Austen
  3. There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. - Audre Lorde
  4. The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-, ’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to... - Mary Daly
  5. Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it. - George Carlin
More Quotes By Adrienne Rich
  1. No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
  2. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
  3. Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you..it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our...
  4. There is no 'the truth, ' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
  5. Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends in large part on their understanding of honor. Much of...
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