Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role.

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.

A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive"; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture - in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.

Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.

One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available.

Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized, made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire.

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.