Patriarchal Critique Quotes

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body & flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms & clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.

By God, if women had written stories, As clerks had within here oratories, They would have written of men more wickedness Than all the mark of Adam may redress.

Men are monopolists of "stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles"- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness.

I don't need to convince men that feminism is important, that just isn't a goal of mine. I can't even have that conversation of whether or not it's important, because if someone asks me that... I don't want to have a conversation with them until they grow up.

Men should look at the world as if something is wrong when their voices predominate. They should feel it.

After the novel was published, I came to feel that I couldn't call myself Orthodox anymore. It's so patriarchal, anti-women, anti-gay. There was something about writing 'Disobedience'... it felt like I had put it all in the book. I had done my best by it, recorded what it meant for me. I felt I was done.

Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.