To punish the individual for the sins of the system makes no sense. We're responsible for changing it, yes. But we can't actually invent another universe, so we have to start where we are.

Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion.

Women fear endangering men's approval so much, we don't even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves.

Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we've always wanted.

In short, pornography is not about sex. It's about an imbalance of male-female power that allows and even requires sex to be used as a form of aggression. ... But until we finally untangle sexuality and aggression, there will be more pornography and less erotica. There will be little murders in our beds - and very little love.