Posts tagged "men"
Overexcitability
Consider the black widow spider. It’s a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight.
—Stranger in a Strange Land,
The Dust of the Ground
Before they’re plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as you meet them, and others wait for a little while. You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.
—Practicalities, Marguerite Duras
Thou Shall Not
What is dread? It is a feeling that you will experience some unknown and unnamed doom if you proceed.
But why would a person feel dread about saving some money, or securing private documents, or gathering information about a possible life change? The answer can be found in what these women all had in common. They were all acting, or about to act, on their own behalf without permission from a man …
An unwritten taboo that is still built into most cultures is about the subjugation of women.
The evil taboo: “You may not act without permission from a man.”
The fear: “Acting on your own behalf will bring you harm.”
— Victory Over Verbal Abuse, Patricia Evans
A Failure
The lengths to which lost love drove men and women never surprised them. They had seen women pull their dresses over their heads and howl like dogs for lost love. And men who sat in doorways with pennies in their mouths for lost love. “Thank God,” they whispered to themselves, “thank God I ain’t never had one of them graveyard loves.”
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon