The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.

In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.

No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.

Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can use her body. They define precisely the dimension of her physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.

Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.