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bb981fe
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The truth is that the new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy with nothing to back it up. Or, as Susan Brownmiller put it when I asked her what she made of all this, "You think you're being brave, you think you're being sexy, you think you're transcending feminism. But that's bullshit." --
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Ariel Levy |
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3d98faa
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I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.
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have-it-all
wants
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Ariel Levy |
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fc9cda8
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Sex is one of the most interesting things we as humans have to play with, and we've reduced it to polyester underpants and implants. We are selling ourselves unbelievably short.
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Ariel Levy |
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176544f
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Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It's also a symptom of narcissism. --
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Ariel Levy |
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8a54bde
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There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It's like having a new lover--even the parts you aren't crazy about have the crackling fascination of the unfamiliar.
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Ariel Levy |
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b90f3ec
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But I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling,' Jong continued. 'Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love or having Sex and the City on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we're all Carrie on Sex and the City, well, the problem is: You're not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let's see..
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Ariel Levy |
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ac35715
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We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept 'sexy'.
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Ariel Levy |
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475926b
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Why is this the "new feminism" and not what it looks like: the old objectification?"
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Ariel Levy |
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4fb915b
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When I was young. When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth. --
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Ariel Levy |
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3357df6
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There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows.
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Ariel Levy |
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50f4343
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Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful turn to God.
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Ariel Levy |
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2903654
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I asked her if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality."
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Ariel Levy |
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cd08e68
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It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it's true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It's more like, 'Oh, right.' The man who has been staying over your whole life long is your mother's lover. The reason Lucy seems off sometimes is that she's still drinking. You have always known this. The only th..
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Ariel Levy |
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21e44e0
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These are not stories about girls getting what they want sexually, they are stories about girls gaining acclaim socially, for which their sexuality is a tool.
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Ariel Levy |
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0ed030d
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if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven't made any progress
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Ariel Levy |
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1673564
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You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one. You want more: more love, more sex, more attention, more fun. You want someone to look at you with lust - after years of laundry - transforming you into something radiant. You want it, you need it, you owe it yourself to get it. To live any other way is to be muffled and gray and marching meaninglessly toward death. You want what she gave you at the start (but..
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Ariel Levy |
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4d81073
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And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.
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tragedy
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Ariel Levy |
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f00e16a
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Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism--a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us.
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Ariel Levy |
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4805e8e
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Writing was the solution to every problem--financial, emotional, intellectual. It had kept me company when I was a lonely child. It gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise be unlikely to venture. It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: "You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man."
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Ariel Levy |
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5ca85d3
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People sometimes tells me that they're baffled by bisexuality. They are convinced that having sex with women is totally different from having sex with men. But it isn't. No more than having sex with anyone is totally different from having sex with anyone else.
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sexuality
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Ariel Levy |
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e9db0eb
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Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at freewheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety. What are we afraid of? Everything...which includes sexual freedom and real female power.
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Ariel Levy |
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b5d88d8
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Or maybe it was too late, and I had already chosen, inadvertently and incrementally, to be something else.
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Ariel Levy |
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51e0fd2
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Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive.
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Ariel Levy |
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c3c2fef
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You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.
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Ariel Levy |
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6431838
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There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it.
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Ariel Levy |
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dd499ab
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Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced. But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.
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Ariel Levy |
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28c93c0
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Passion isn't the point. The glossy, overheated thumping of sexuality in our culture is less about connection than consumption. Hotness has become our cultural currency, and a lot of people spend a lot of time and a lot of regular, green currency trying to acquire it. Hotness is not the same thing as beauty, which has been valued throughout history. Hot can mean popular. Hot can mean talked about. But when it pertains to women, hot means tw..
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Ariel Levy |
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5e6b92d
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I cried only once during the twenty-one-hour flight. I was looking out the window at the moon and thinking of the last long trip I took across the sky, and of the person who went with me and didn't come back. For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body. And it was again nature herself. Nature. Mother Nature. She ..
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Ariel Levy |
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a8179f7
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A tawdry, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a *kind* of sexual expression we now regard *as* sexuality.
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Ariel Levy |
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2df38af
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It was fun. Sort of. The reason it was only sort of fun was that my life had collapsed. Unlike the people at the party, with their homes full of spouses and children, I was as alone and unmoored as I'd been twenty years ago, in these same suburbs, hanging out with the same boys. In the intervening decades, I'd thought I was going somewhere. But I had just been driving around.
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Ariel Levy |
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915e5a7
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Even if one life is manifest and the other is mostly hypothetical, the inability to occupy your own reality is torment, is torture. It is sin and punishment all in one.
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Ariel Levy |
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0cfa001
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John Updike wrote that marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.
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Ariel Levy |
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874a1e1
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Instead of trying to reform other people's - or her own - perception of feminist, the FCP likes to position herself as something outside the normal bounds of womanhood.
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Ariel Levy |
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727f12f
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Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.
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Ariel Levy |
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e892092
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I wanted what she [her mother] had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safely and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.
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Ariel Levy |
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aec2ca4
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If half this country feels so threatened by two people of the same gender being in love and having sex (and, incidentally, enjoying equal protection under the law), that they turn their attention--during wartime--to blocking rights already denied to homosexuals, then all the cardio striptease classes in the world aren't going to render us sexually liberated.
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Ariel Levy |
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41f6a60
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Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.
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Ariel Levy |
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ce99d8a
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nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.
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Ariel Levy |
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68124ee
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Pregnancy--we were taught, if we were privileged--was something awful that went with sex, just as AIDS and genital warts went with sex, unless you used condoms (and even then, be really careful). It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of ..
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Ariel Levy |
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ea10d0e
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The whole point is that everybody gets to marry the person they love.
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Ariel Levy |
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d76198a
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The counselor says that we are "at the beginning of a long, uphill journey." She says, "Relapse is a part of recovery." I think, You have got to be fucking kidding me. I say, "Do I look like someone who's ready for a long, uphill journey?" Lucy snickers for a second, and I love her. I lover her much more than I want to. But I am worn down and out. The thought of another trip crushes me. I tell Lucy, You are my family. But I'm not coming wi..
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Ariel Levy |
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966ff11
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To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip.
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Ariel Levy |
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cac6a30
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A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide.
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Ariel Levy |
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a202347
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But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue
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motherhood
loss
love
miscarriage
parenthood
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Ariel Levy |