Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

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.

Feminist art... will take the great human themes – love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself – and render them fully human.

The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.

Violation is a synonym for intercourse.

By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it.

Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power