Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.

Stopped as attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequaltiy between men and women.

The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.

To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status.

It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down.

If you want to know who is being hurt in this society, go see what is being done and to whom in pornography and then go look for them other places in the world.

An individual's treatment and alternatives in life may depend as much on the reputation of the group to which that person belongs as on their own merit.