Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?

What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist?

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.