Audre Lorde Quotes

People are uncomfortable with sexuality that’s not for male consumption.

The first thing the male establishment wants to control is uterus and birth. You might call it womb envy. But even worse is the fact we are still using the male model of sexual response for women.

The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.

They say that women's sexual peaks are in their 30s or 40s, and I think that it happens because they're more comfortable. It's not some hormonal change that happens at that age. Of course, it would be nice to have more physiological insight on that.

God as 'He,' as a patriarchal thing, is offensive to me. It's standard fare for America, 'He, He, He.' Every time I hear that it's like another blow against females. It's very radical talk at this point for females to say this kind of stuff, but nationwide I still hear females referring to God as 'He.'

There will never be any really great women writers in the theatre, because women do not know as much as men.

I find it extraordinary that contemporary dramatists don't find women interesting. Women are rarely, if ever, the central dramatic engine; they're there as an adjunct, and that hasn't changed at all.

I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.

Women - why aren't you running the world yet? Frankly I'm disappointed in you. Men are still far too dominant for their own good, and consequently we've made a testosterone-sodden pig's ear of just about everything: politics, the economy, religion, the environment ... you name it, it's in a gigantic man-wrought mess.

Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.

The notion that Playboy exploited women, because we showed them in beautiful photographs, sexually oriented, strikes me as rather bizarre.

Romanticism is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their conditions.

Surely women's liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained.

Women who come to see me admit that they've never looked at their sex organ; they've never seen their clitoris. Now tell me if that isn't a form of being psychologically genitally mutilated? For them, the clitoris doesn't exist, but we're worried about women in Africa!

Truthfully speaking, women are dangerous, even those who aren't feminists, because there has always been a women's revolt. Only it has usually translated itself into solitary, individualist, disagreeable manifestations - the whole history of the taming of the shrew, the woman-shrew. They weren't shrews without cause.

The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.

Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin "helping' them. Such a world does not exist - never has.

The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided.

Female Chauvinist Pigs is smart, alarming, and extremely funny. With nuance and humor, Levy has written both a convincing expos of sex and desire in contemporary America and an important cultural history. I'm giving a copy to my mother. And my sons.

Women will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.

A half-century before Madonna, Gypsy [Rose Lee] understood how to make performance out of desire, how to exploit the very human and eternal instinct to always want most what we'll never have.

In the sex education process in schools, the one thing that they teach about is how to get pregnant and how to not get pregnant. But they don't really talk about sex as a point of pleasure for women.

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.