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3d610ce
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There was no justice, there was only life. And life she had.
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justice
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Marilyn French |
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92a0f3a
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It's strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman's appearance to her face.
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Marilyn French |
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a087162
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Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.
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Marilyn French |
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d584f34
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She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.
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Marilyn French |
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3721ac6
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Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way.
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Marilyn French |
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a9d6a82
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I have opened all the doors in my head. I have opened all the pores in my body. But only the tide rolls in.
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Marilyn French |
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53ee4f2
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What is a man, anyway? Everything I see around me in popular culture tells me a man is he who screws and kills. But everything I see around me in life tells me a man is he who makes money.
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Marilyn French |
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e5f14b9
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Male territorial insanity yields only to another male. What a difference the possession of a penis makes!
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Marilyn French |
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5a85040
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S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter.
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Marilyn French |
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16f1b83
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The breakdown of the neighborhoods also meant the end of what was essentially an extended family....With the breakdown of the extended family, too much pressure was put on the single family. Mom had no one to stay with Granny, who couldn't be depended on to set the house on fire while Mom was off grocery shopping. The people in the neighborhood weren't there to keep an idle eye out for the fourteen-year-old kid who was the local idiot, and ..
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Marilyn French |
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96fc393
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In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.
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Marilyn French |
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d6d2634
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You think I hate men. I guess I do, although some of my best friends...I don't like this position. I mistrust generalized hatred. I feel like one of those twelfth century monks raving on about how evil women are and how they must cover themselves up completely when they go out lest they lead men into evil thoughts. The assumption that the men are the ones who matter, and that the women exist only in relation to them, is so silent and underr..
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Marilyn French |
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85c96bf
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What I don't understand is where women suddenly get power. Because they do. The kids, who almost always turn out to be a pile of shit, are, we all know, Mommy's fault. Well, how did she manage that, this powerless creature? Where was all her power during the years she was doing five loads of laundry a week and worrying about mixing the whites with the colors? How was she able to offset Daddy's positive influence? How come she never knows sh..
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Marilyn French |
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8954155
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In the beginning was the Mother, the Word began a new era, one we have come to call Patriarchy.
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Marilyn French |
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63e5e8c
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But she continued to wonder what the fish tasted like, so brilliant and vivid pink. Would it taste pink?
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Marilyn French |
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b0124a0
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They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings..
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violence
war
sex
men
men-s-fears
men-suck
vulnerability
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Marilyn French |
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6df4ce2
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I've known for a long time that hypocrisy is the secret of sanity. You mustn't let them know you know.
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Marilyn French |
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161ad3e
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One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you'll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. Y..
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Marilyn French |
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14eed52
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It would be hard to get statistics on violent death -- what do you count as murder? When people starve to death because of policies of governments and corporations, is that murder? Nature does a fair amount of murdering itself, which is why this whole notion of dominating nature arose: it was one of those things that seemed a good idea at the time. No one ever believes a cure will prove worse than the disease. And maybe it isn't. An invasio..
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Marilyn French |
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b62c30b
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But communes are a good idea. People criticize communes because they don't last, but why in hell, will you tell me, should they last? Why does an order have to become a permanent order? Maybe we should live one way for some years, then try another.
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Marilyn French |
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c2d927c
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Men: they are what they are and women have to accept that and try to shift around them. Especially men with power. Money. The upper hand. The raised hand. Momma`s philosophy. Here`s to you, Momma. She raised the empty cup. What`s the use of fighting them. What`s the use. To struggle, to live in anger takes everything out of you, drains you, makes people hate you and what`s the use? You get nothing you want, all you get is tired.
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Marilyn French |
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7b3be2b
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She could envision Shakespeare's sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare's sister, whereas I know that isn't what happened. You see, it isn't necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm only saying that isn't what usually happens. It it were, we ..
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Marilyn French |
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e7954f3
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All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.
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rape
rapists
rape-culture
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Marilyn French |
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1b41fa8
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I see us as all sitting around naked, shivering, in a huge circle, looking up as the sky turns black and the stars flare out and somebody starts to tell a story, claims to see a pattern in the stars. And then someone else tells a story about the eye of the hurricane, the eye of the tiger. And the stories , the images, become the truth and we will kill each other rather than change one word of the story. But every once in a while, someone se..
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Marilyn French |
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d42d701
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When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That's what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth -- that men are only equal -- can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth.
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men
sexism
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Marilyn French |
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df28026
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Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven't yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It's be..
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Marilyn French |
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42552dc
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the words of Pyotr Stephanovich come into my mind: You must love God because He is the only one you can love for Eternity. That sounds very profound to me, and tears come into my eyes whenever I say it. I never heard anyone else say it. But I don't believe in God and if I did I couldn't love Him/Her/It. I couldn't love anyone I thought had created this world.
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Marilyn French |
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3a7a8b4
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That's sheer luck too: luck of the draw of birth: century, continent, nation, section, sex, color, socioeconomic sector.
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Marilyn French |
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6ea8457
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and I'd die of his emptiness even more than I'm dying of my own.
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Marilyn French |
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000de9f
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In Harlem the government pushes heroin to keep the blacks down and doctors by the thousands give barbiturates and tranquilizers to all the housewives: keep the natives quiet. when the drugs don't work anymore, they put the blacks in jail and us in here. Don't make noise. I read a poem once, it had a line, something like 'You keep stiller when every time you move something jangles'.
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Marilyn French |
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28e97f0
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She was dizzy with her own feelings, her own voice. She was flying around on a carnival machine that would not stop, she could not make it stop and she screamed and screamed.
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Marilyn French |
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46b0e43
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It does seem true that a young woman may sometimes behave in a way that can be called titillating, and that men take such behavior as being directed entirely at them. [...] I've often seen blushing young men with shining eyes behave in the same way, but no one says of them that they want to be raped. If, after taking a few steps forward, they then decide to retreat, no one accuses them of being cunt teasers. In fact, the disappointed woman ..
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rape
men
rape-culture
inequality
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Marilyn French |
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6bb2b26
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nineteenth-century feminism was defeated by men's adamant refusal to take responsibility for maintaining themselves and their children;
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Marilyn French |
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4cb0d8b
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In Russia they put you in insane asylums if you disagree with the state: it's not so different here. Keep the natives quiet.
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Marilyn French |
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8f6d318
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My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter.
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Marilyn French |
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876508d
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Pride. You have it where you can have it.
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pride
self-esteem
sexism
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Marilyn French |
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f3360e2
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She felt her wrists, her arms, rubbed her hand over her breasts, her belly, her thighs. She was warm and smooth and her heart beat calmly, fine pulsing energy was being driven through her, she could walk, she could talk, she could feel, she could think. And suddenly it was all right, the past, even if it was all wrong, because it had freed her, it had placed her here, still alive, more alive than she had been since the days long ago when sh..
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Marilyn French |
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d3f76e3
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But we all die, and all death is violent, the overthrowing of the state of life, so why did that year [1968]seem so terrible? Are King or Kennedy or some peasant folk in a village more important than the starved-out of Biafra, the names on the Detroit homicide list? Maybe I'm playing an intellectual game, marking out one year or two on a calendar as special in horror so I can add that they were also special in significance, and thus compens..
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Marilyn French |
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02c1826
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Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death.
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Marilyn French |
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2bd5e87
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Despues, mucho despues, recordaria aquellos anos y comprenderia asombrada que a los quince ya se habia decidido por la mayoria de los postulados que sostendria durante el resto de su vida: que las personas no eran esencialmente malas, que la perfeccion era la muerte, que la vida era mejor que el orden y que un poco de caos era bueno para el alma. Mas importante aun: esta vida lo era todo. Por desgracia, olvido esas cosas y tuvo que recordar..
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viața
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Marilyn French |
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fb64e39
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Six men control almost all the media in the United States--book publishing, magazines, television, movie studios, newspapers, and radio. They are not friendly toward feminism, which has almost disappeared from the surface of our society. You will almost never see a feminist column on an op-ed page, a feminist article in a magazine, or newspaper, actual (not satirized) feminist ideas on television or in the movies. Only magazines & radio con..
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human-rights
feminism
women-s-rights
television
women
politics
inequality
magazines
media
newspapers
preface
radio
movies
gender
sexism
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Marilyn French |
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d67b9e4
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men and women desperate enough to risk death to express their wishes.19
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Marilyn French |
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bd5ae2a
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They saw women in the public sphere as whores, thieves, she-men with the audacity to carry guns and wear pants.
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Marilyn French |
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e83bfe8
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Laws institutionalized men's unfounded superiority over women by defining marriage as ownership
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Marilyn French |