The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped.

I would like you to rise each morning and know that you are heterosexual and that you choose to be heterosexual - that you are and choose to be a member of a privileged and dominant class, one of your privileges being not to notice.

What is it about separation, in any or all of its many forms and degrees, that makes it so basic and so sinister, so exciting and so repellent?

I wish you would grow to the understanding that you choose heterosexuality.

Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual women's erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices... Those definitions... are about the oppression and exploitation of women by men.

I wish you would notice that you are heterosexual.

Differences of power are always manifested in asymmetrical access. The President of the United States has access to almost everybody for almost anything he might want of them, and almost nobody has access to him. The super-rich have access to almost everybody; almost nobody has access to them. ... The creation and manipulation of power is constituted of the manipulation and control of access.