Jonathan Coe Quotes

A lot of times being "completely objective" means seeing the world through a patriarchal eye.

You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.

Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.

Women exist in my imagination. So they are necessarily a type of abstraction. Many women criticise me for this vision, but I explain to them it's to be expected, because I am a man.

Because of the feminist perspective, we have gotten a view of the world that is distorted.

We think of feminism as an academic subject, but it's not. If you think feminism is academic, you think there's a right or wrong.

The psychology of women hitherto actually represents a deposit of the desires and disappointments of men.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

Like all sciences and all valuations, the psychology of women has hitherto been considered only from the point of view of men.

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don't see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

The assertion that men are objectively equal is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.

Women played no part in Athenian high culture. They could not vote, attend the theatre, or walk in the stoa talking philosophy. But the male orientation of Greek culture was inseparable of its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

Misogyny should be understood as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing ideology. Sexism wears a lab coat, misogyny goes on witch hunts.... Sexism is bookish; misogyny is combative. Sexism has a theory; misogyny wields a cudgel.

I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced and dissect and analyze them quite to pieces in a serious fashion. It is time that 'half the human race' had something to say about the nature of its existence.

The canon is dominated by books written by men, about men, and for men - the male voice is therefore not a particularly difficult one to impersonate.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

The baseline character in a lot of Western literature is a man. So we, as women, do a lot of suspending of our disbelief to experience a novel or a play or a movie through that male character.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as male objectification

Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex.

Much of the appeal of feminism is that it encourages women to do what they always felt like doing anyway: take everything personally. But to succeed at the highest level, you need some objectivity, which feminism hates. Feminists see objective reality as a conspiracy out to make them feel bad about themselves.

Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.