Man ... put himself in a tight corner when he decided that woman was innately passive.
Nawal El SaadawiHere the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture.
Nawal El Saadawimoral codes and standards in our societies very rarely apply to all people equally. This is the most damning proof of how immoral such codes and standards really are.
Nawal El SaadawiDemocracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned.
Nawal El Saadawi