in the United States ... given the cult of eternal youth, age is ignored unless it can be sentimentalized.

Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully - wild - generous, drastic in an unrationed profligacy of self.

... a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or bookscontaining lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles.

Metaphor is the energy charge that leaps between images, revealing their connections.

Clarity of language is the first casualty of authoritarianism.

The women's movement is a non-hierarchical one. It does things collectively and experimentally.

Although every organized religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity-an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.