If you listen to the Catholic bishops you would think that Catholics are against contraception and legal abortion, but if you ask actual Catholics, you discover that more than 90% of Catholic women use contraception and Catholic women seem to need and choose legal abortion at about the same rate as everybody else. The problem is that the backlash occupies positions of power, not that it represents the majority of people.
Gloria SteinemAll biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.
Gloria SteinemFor much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.
Gloria SteinemI have always employed humor, and I think itโs absolutely crucial that we do because, among other things, humor is the only free emotion. I mean, you can compel fear, as we know. You can compel love, actually, if somebody is isolated and dependent โ itโs like the Stockholm syndrome. But you canโt compel laughter. It happens when two things come together and make a third unexpectedly. It happens when you learn something, too.
Gloria SteinemIn 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.
Gloria Steinem